Earlier this afternoon we (my cohort) finished our first full day observing secondary classes in what is now the new normal: socially-distanced classrooms, face masks, and tons of hand sanitizer.

Around 7 a.m. this morning I would’ve been lying if I’d told you I wasn’t nervous about spending the day in a high school. After all, I haven’t set foot in one since…well, since graduating from high school myself. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a stranger to classrooms in and of themselves.

I spent most of the past three years teaching ESL (or EAL) in downtown Vancouver. I essentially lived in classrooms. It was the dynamic that was drastically different. In my ESL classes, I had students of every age from 12 to 65, though most fell somewhere between 20 and 30. Also, a lot of these students were professionals, many with much more career experience under their belts than I had (or have). It’s one thing to receive complete cooperation from a class that includes a 36-year-old electrical engineer from Korea and a 43-year-old operations manager from Brazil, but expecting the same from a room full of antsy, fidgety, distracted 15-year-olds is something else entirely. This line of thinking was what spawned my apprehensions about high school classrooms this morning.

Well, with day 1 of the seminar in the books, I think I can safely put those worries to rest. The students were, for the most part, fantastic. The group of Grade 9s I observed and interacted with in the morning classes were calm, cooperative, and largely open to discussion. The Grade 11s I was with in the afternoon were just as capable of staying on task, though clearly a little more aware of their higher status in the school hierarchy. One late student, in particular, tried to play mind games with the teacher, but she just wasn’t having it. What I’m getting at here is that these classroom observations were both inspiring and humorous, and they almost entirely banished any lingering doubts I had about being in a secondary school.

There really is no substitution for tangible, on-the-ground field experience. The things you learn in reality, in a “hands-on” setting, cannot be replaced solely with abstract knowledge. I’m grateful our program is getting us into schools in the first semester, as I can clearly see now why that’s an integral part of preparing us for the reality of teaching.