Interview

I enjoyed conducting an interview with my sponsor of this internship. Over this whole experience her and I have become close, however this helped me know her on an even more personal level. Not only did we discuss her struggles with the job but also how it plays into her personal life.
First, she loves her job more than anything. She teaches fifth grade, with most all subjects. However, her passion is teaching social studies. She is lucky enough to be able to teach all of the fifth graders this subject. She finds that teaching fifth grade students is the perfect fit for her. She started as being a teacher’s assistant to disabled children in the same school where she is a teacher now. For a personal reason, she decided to go back to school and get her teaching certificate. She has now been a teacher for the past eleven years and she has loved almost every minute of it. The fifth grade students are the perfect age for her. She explained how they are young, are still at the age where they enjoy their teacher and yet are on their way to being adults.
Some of the difficult parts of her job are things that I had sort of assumed. One main one is the pay. She says it is often a struggle, especially at times now when the economy is poor. She is working more, doing more extracurricular activities for the district, but with no extra pay. Also, the pay has always been something that she struggles with. Although, it is worth it to her. Also, what it hard is having to take pounds of grading home every night and every weekend. She says often, people do not realize how much work a teacher does outside of the class room. Another thing she struggles with are aggressive parents. My sponsor is such a sweet, soft spoken person. While she gets the job done beautifully, being soft spoken people often believe that they can take advantage of her. She says that gets difficult. Another struggle is attempting to reach out and make a difference to all the kids, and having some not reciprocate that back to her. It is hard for her when she tries and she sees that what she is doing is just not working for a kid. One of her favorite things about the job is that she makes a difference in their lives and they remember her always as their fifth grade teacher. Yet it is difficult if by the end of the year she hasn’t made that impact on a child. There are three teachers in the fifth grade. She says that one difficulty is that there is not enough students this year to have four teachers, but the classrooms are pretty full with three of them. She has thirty two in her homeroom class, and the others have twenty eight and thirty. This is the first year that one of her colleagues is at the school, teaching fifth grade. My sponsor told me that the transition has been an easy one and that all three of them get along better than she ever expected. One challenge that may arise is they may bring on another teacher, having four fifth grade teachers next year, due to the size in the fourth grade. My teacher worries that she may lose being able to teach all the students social studies, which is her passion. But, she will see when the time comes.