Shannanigan's Search for More...

The past few days I have been scouring the internet for websites for teachers, new teachers, beginning teachers, student teachers, and the like. I'm not starting teaching yet, or even student teaching for that matter, but I'm doing my usual obsessive practice of over-preparing waaayyyy ahead of time...

I'm finding a lot of helpful sites and people, and I even ordered a couple of books (insert heavenly angels singing here) that were written for "Rookie" teachers...but I keep thinking to myself, reading can only prepare a person so much for this kind of thing. It's like reading a book about surviving college...it can help, but really the experience is very situation-specific, and I don't think that any book or site I've found so far is situation-specific enough to replace experience in the public Caribbean schools I plan to teach at...

See, the whole culture is just different here. The island has a few large secondary public schools (two junior high and two high), but a HUGE number of private schools...so any parent that can afford private school sends their student to the nearest one, leaving the students of parents who can't afford private education in the public schools...where I plan to teach...

and, in general, these parents often don't care, or don't know, about what their children do Monday-Friday from 8-3. School is daycare to them so they can work without worry, which is sad because parental involvement is SO important to student's progress in school...

And besides that, the whole island laid-back attitude that goes along the lines of "I live in paradise already, what do I need school for?" is completely detrimental to the idea of self-betterment. A lot of students don't care, the 9th grade dropout rates here are appauling, and while all this serves to inspire me more in wanting to help, it also means that I'm going to need a whole different set of tools to build a platform of education for these students than most teachers in America need...

I've always loved a challenge Perhaps I'll volunteer at a public school this next semester since I have Fridays off...