Is It Too Intense?

11.05.09 By Stephanie Wingfield

The first year of BTR is an intensive teacher training program.  Note the emphasis on the word “intensive.”  When used in reference to an activity, the Oxford English Dictionary defines intensive as “assiduously directed towards an object; highly concentrated.”  It is.  We spend the first summer reading and writing and talking and reflecting in classes, then planning and teaching lessons with our mentors in classrooms,  and then reading and writing and talking and reflecting in more classes the following fall. We repeat the entire cycle over the winter, spring and following summer. 

During July and August, my courses were Human Development, Becoming an Educator in Boston, Community Outreach, Foundations of Teaching, Intro to Teaching HS/MS Mathematics, Second Language Acquisition and Literacy and Learning.  As we got acquainted with our mentors and began teaching students in September, we started Intro to Teaching HS/MS Mathematics Part II on Wednesday evenings and Applied Linguistics and Foundations of Teaching Part II on Friday, with more classes and classroom responsibility to come.

It’s a lot of work and it is very intense.  So much so that some of my colleagues have questioned whether our learning and teaching are compromised when both are compressed within such a relatively short period of time.  For me, the answer is mostly no.  Sure, sometimes it is indeed difficult to get sufficient hours of sleep each night, but on the other hand, it is very gratifying to learn something useful in class one day and then have the opportunity to apply it in the classroom the very next day, without having to wait a semester or a year or longer to try it out.  This can’t be beat as a learning experience.