Unedited

(Post-Student Teaching Perspective)

Teaching is like editing a movie. You start with tons of raw footage that will have to be edited to fit the two-hour timeframe. As a student teacher of English literature, you constantly deal with the three Ps of teaching—plan, prepare, and papers. The amount of time you spend doing these three activities will prove to be a good test of true friendship. After telling people that you’ll be working from dawn till dusk and still be broke for five months, wearing the same clothes and eating cheap food, acquaintances will start to feel sorry for you, good friends will take you out once in a while, and true friends will be delighted, or act like so, every time you gripe about your student teaching’s horrors or comedies, depending on how good of a storyteller you are.

In film editing, you lay down the visual track, first, before adding special effects. Similar to teaching, efficient teachers need to first lay down classroom rules. No matter how many times you hear this warning, nothing will make you stick to your rules until you are taught by your students. Things like late work, mounds of paper load, excessive requests to the bathroom, and constant chatting during lecture will soon begin to gnaw at your temper. And due to the present overwhelming lawsuits in the US, inexperienced teachers need to redirect their temper toward things that will lead to positive outcomes such as taking long walks or squeezing a stress ball until your hand turns blue.

A film editor is a storyteller; a certain amount of creativity is required. He or she uses a variety of techniques to tell a story. In teaching, the same material can either cause students’ eyes to droop or dance. Sometimes in order to make a dull activity dynamic is by sprinkling your classroom with pixie dust. During my student teaching, I had the privilege of working with a master teacher, Mrs. Angus, who never runs out of creative juice. We each taught a sophomore, honors English class. Upon teaching Frankenstein, I decided to put the mad scientist Victor Frankenstein on trial, and I chose the "most important" position to be-- the judge. Imagine the first time running a trial, things were just a bit chaotic. Mrs. Angus, however, decided to select a group of students to be judges, so they were forced to listen to the rest of the class who were arguing their little hearts out on a genetic engineering issue. Instead of having the teacher being responsible for so much of the process, it is a marvelous idea to let the students run the show instead of you. So I learned that pixie dust actually works in a real classroom.

The satisfaction of the editing process, after spending days or weeks in hibernation, is that you can sit back and be proud of your finished story. On a similar note, the satisfaction of teaching comes after weeks and months of solitarily motivating students to care about their education. Students are capable of achieving great things, but they often lack the motivation. I told my students that I did not get paid to student teach. My payment came in the form of watching them, through hard work, try over and again and then “Aha!” A whiner turned into a winner.

On the other hand, teaching may actually bare no similarities to film editing. Many things that go on in a classroom cannot be edited. It is just plain, raw footage. Sometimes you have raw, teenage emotions flying everywhere. Wrong words rub someone the wrong way, and feelings are hurt. Certain words coming out of an adolescent mouth are still unedited and inappropriate. Unlike an editor sitting behind a screen, teachers are more like actors. When the bell rings, we play the part until another bell rings, and the door is shut, and no one is left but you slumping in your chair after a long, tiring day, hoping to catch a moment of peace, only a moment to breathe.