"I'm that guy on the boat pissing his pants"

You do not have to know much about me to know that I am a huge movie buff. In fact, the first thing anyone notices when they walk into my college house the 6 ft. book shelf full of dvd's. Now I like all kinds of movies. I can bro-down with Wedding Crashers seven nights a week or melt as Richard Gere wins back Julia Roberts and they embrace and all is right with the world. But one of my favorite genre of movies is war films. Just the other day I was scanning through Saving Private Ryan trying to find a particular seen that I knew related well to a lesson I was planning for my student teaching. Eventually I couldn't take it anymore so I just started from the beginning and watched the whole thing (I mean come on, its SO good). I realized something in that opening scene, there is always a guy in war movies who gets so scared before a battle that he pees his himself. A lot of times you see this character before or after and he always is confident and talking a big game but for that one moment, he's deathly afraid.

Well, I'll just say it. Tomorrow I start student teaching, and I am that guy with the wet pants. Just like in little league, I talk a big game in the dugout and in the field when a kid from the other team is on base, but when I step in the batters box, my knees wobble like a weeble. But here's the thing. I'm nervous about all kinds of stuff that honestly I don't really care about. My co-ops approval of my teaching style, my lesson plan format, rubric structure and how I am going to read 2 plays for my one on campus class and submit an allocation plan for my club and get my graduation form completed all by this weekend. Just like the wet GI standing next to Tom Hanks, I'm focused so much on the beach and all the explosions that I forget my training, and what's worse, I forget my cause.

Parker Palmer, in The Courage to Teach, describes teaching as being rooted in integrity and identity as well as being an act of the heart. In this way teaching is an act of love. Therefor the opposite of love, at least as I define love, is selfishness. When I examine my fears, I find that I am leaving out the most important part of the equation: my students. I care about my students. Regardless of the fact that I am only a student-teacher, I care about my students, because they are my students. Palmer, in another of his books Let Your Life Speak (FYI this is an awesome book about finding your calling and IS NOT specific to teaching),“We ourselves, driven by fear, too often betray true self to gain the approval of others." This is the reason for my wet pants. I allow fear to forget that at my core I am driven by a desire to serve and a heart of compassion.

The thing about that soldier who loses control of his bladder is that he only does so for a moment. Eventually he is brought back to reality and realizes what he has to do to preserve himself and save his comrades. Now obviously the explosions and bullets, or in my case rubrics and lesson plans, don't go away. It's important that I am conscious of these things because if I'm not they'll end up being my demise.

So I'm going to go in there tomorrow and I'm going to rock student teaching, just like I always said I would in the dugout (are you keeping all these metaphors straight?), and frankly I don't care if my pants are wet, because I know who I am and where I want to be, plus I usually spill coffee on myself by third period anyway....