Your time at school will be essential to your teaching life. From my personal experience, I believe the most important part of your teaching program is to do well in your practicum placement.

To many in the field, a poor first year of teaching is the first step in an accepted, almost ritualistic career timeline. Perspectives on a teacher’s first year seem to have shifted, though, since my generation entered the workforce.

Most people tend to assume that my students are capable of less-than-stellar academic performances because they have complicated lives outside school.

Over the years, our ELL students have eagerly shared stories about an important festival that falls over spring break: Nowruz, the Persian New Year.

"Why read when you can watch the movie?" In my eight years as an educator, no other sentiment has been quite so crushing to hear from children.

Teaching is a great responsibility. I teach English and believe that the ability to communicate, at a personal and societal level, is what builds strong communities and ensures ownership over one’s future. Thus, it’s important that we teachers spend a lot of time on our craft—deliberating the best ways to teach and make lessons fun, interactive, and relatable to students. Professional development thrives on discipline pedagogy and school departments meet to align goals and assignments and to discuss data assessment.

When I first created the reading test, it was supposed to simply track student progress. But I quickly discovered that sharing the results of my personal tracking system with students has completely changed their engagement and motivation levels.

My students needed to experience success. And they needed to see that their writing could impact a broader audience than the one held captive each day in their classroom.

After my first week of being in a long-term occasional role, it became very clear to me that learning about being in the classroom is not the same as actually being in the classroom.