My student teaching experience has involved personal and professional growth, along with a new-found understanding of the importance of community as a teacher.
I have previous teaching experience, with summer programs and in an ESL context, and so I went into student teaching with some idea of how I like to do things and with how I would run my classroom. I soon discovered, however, that teaching Algebra is very different from teaching ESL. The class needs to be more structured, and there are numerous practical difficulties with specific mathematical topics -- the details of how to apply a mathematical idea are not always apparent to students from a basic overview, and it can become necessary to go through large numbers of special cases if the original material is not taught thoroughly.
I found my master teacher to be a valuable resource, particularly for specifics of how to teach individual topics. She was able to provide me with effective mental tricks for the students to use and approaches to explain difficult ideas. I was also able to show her some fresh ideas from my own experience, and so together we formed a small learning community. The value of this community for me at least came mostly from its focus on the mechanics of teaching. In this way, it was largely the opposite of Palmer's ideal community, but it was useful to me nonetheless. I think that with more extended work in the field, I would probably place greater value on personal connection with my peers, but as a teacher just starting out, I found that a focus on technique was just what I needed.
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