Do I Really Want To Be a Teacher?! (prompt 7)

For the past two months I have spent 2-3 times a week attending a volunteer tutoring session at the Dr. Martin Luther King Elementary school on Camp St. in Providence.  I have worked with a group of 7 very diverse first graders.  There has never been a time that I have attended a session that the children were calm and wanted to sit down and do their homework.  Each time I walked to the group's table there were kids running around, hitting each other and even crying that they had to stay and weren't able to go home.  As soon as we all went into the classroom it never failed the children would all look at you and say "I don't have any homework tonight!"  The open your backpack and show me trick never seized to fail as every child looked at  me with sad eyes and got their homework out.  Even though it was a short experience, I learned a lot about myself and the future that I am thinking about having. 

Not once throughout this experience did I decide that I do not want to be a teacher, but I did decide that I will not be a first grade or kindergarten teacher.  I cannot imagine myself working with the children in this age group.  They are still at the point where they are learning the basics of each subject and there is not much in depth activities that you can do in order to "spice" up the classroom.  When I walked into the group's area on my first day of tutoring I found myself very overwhelmed at how crazy and all over the place the children were.  Even though by the end of the session I had them all playing the quiet game and doing their work I still felt like it wasn't what I wanted.  I want to be able to teach children without having to focus mostly on getting them to sit still and not hit each other and this is what I found myself doing a lot while teaching the first graders. 

I have also now experienced how diverse my future classroom could possibly get.  Each child in the group was different in every way imaginable.  I helped kids who could understand and retain what they had learned during their school day to children who couldn't be bothered with anything they learned or had to complete that night for homework.  I also had students who liked to bully others rather than being friends with the children around them, but there were a few children who rather be friends and help everybody around them.  The biggest eye opener was how culturally diverse the group was.  I had mulatto, Spanish, Indian and Caucasian children.  Before entering this experience I had never realized or been made aware of how diverse certain schools and schooling areas can be.  I feel as if I am more prepared and more educated on what I can expect when I need to enter the teaching world and I am trying to find a job.

I know that I want to be a teacher, but I now know what age groups that I am interested in teaching.  On the last day of my tutoring the first graders asked me if I would be coming back to watch them take place for their after school program. This moment made my whole experience with the VIPS well worth my time.