Bethel University - Spire Yearbook (St Paul, MN)

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Making the transition from being a student to becoming a teacher during student teaching is a change that is not easy either to experience or describe. The most confusing element is that it involves a whole change of orientation. A student teacher must go from one world into another, without remaining a part of either. This often means breaking with the safe, often sterile, world of intellectual ideas to plunge into the harsh, real world where only action will affect or penetrate other action. Since education traditionally trains the mind only to absorb and be critical, the new demands of teaching are often unprepared for. Sometimes teaching means embarking from the freedom of negativism and criticism without responsibility, to attempt a position from which positive and constructive actions are called for. It also may mean taking the perilous jump from the non-commitment of a student to a commitment to something that may not necessarily be totally agreed with. Further, leaving educational philosophizing and the intellectual justification of theories behind, one soon finds himself working in an indefinable, intuitive world of personal interaction and reactions where the theories must give way to people. The differences in the demands on a student and a teacher is one of the main impressions of student teaching. Another impression is the heavy personal demands student teaching makes upon you. You begin to find yourself giving more and more of your interests and concerns to others as you begin to see the extent of the commitments of teaching.Your time often is not your own, a very hard thing to give up unselfishly. This facet often leads to the question of why you are involved in teaching in the first place — a question that is hard to answer but necessary. Maybe it is easier to answer once you have sensed the extent of the love of Jesus for others and his ability to answer the demand of being all things to all men. But what is student teaching like at Bethel? Trod-ding through a series of three credit classes which swing from the absurdly trivial to the practical to the intellectually heavy, you soon realize that more often than not you are only skimming the surface of what must be learned. You find that you are expected to give equal attention to such things as book reports, film projector techniques and the philosophical problems of how to reconcile concern and discipline as a teacher. You also realize that there may well be more effective and humane ways of teaching than those you have been taught by. But it is only as you begin teaching that you glimpse the profundity of the situation you so glibbly entered. You realize that it is not so much your subject that you must teach as that you must teach complex, growing people. And you learn that academic learning is only important as it helps you find meaning in yourself, in others and in life. Relating to students, supervising teachers. Bethel supervisors and other student teachers all at once is not easy, nor is trying to teach as you would wish in a given situation. But taken as a whole, student teaching may well involve both the highest demands as well as the highest returns of any part of a college career. Barbara Louise Johnson FdufAtion

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Student Teaching: you glimpse the profundity of the situation you so glibbly entered Education

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Hello. This is a special report in our special series Great Men in Great Places. And as 1 stand before the English department of Bethel College, I stand in great amazement. Not since that amazing day in Witch Lake, Michigan has history brought so many Great Men together in one place. No man can explain this quirk in the progress of mankind although there are a few people that are certain it could have been avoided. And now, alphabetically first on our list of Great Men, stands Mr. Jim Anderson, known affectionately by his students as Mr. Anderson. Yes friends, it was this very man that soon became dissatisfied with his safe and comfortable job as a disc-jockey in rural Iowa and bravely set out to join other dissatisfied intellectuals. Upon arriving at Bethel College he lost no time proclaiming the virtues of early Puritanism and the American dream to all that would listen. Facing student resistence, Mr. Anderson quickly learned that flat-tops were no longer in at Bethel College. Amid student cheers Mr. Anderson grew his hair longer, but conceded only to comb it in the late 1950 style. Never fear Silent Majority, Big Jim Anderson's heart is still pure! Lifting our eyes heavenward, looming high over the status quo, we focus on a man who has learned to rise above every situation; a teacher by profession, a Healy by name. Leaning not onto his own understanding, this man of all men has in only seven years of sporadic effort completed three gramati-cally perfect paragraphs in his first book, HOW TO SPEAK HIGHLY Or PEOPLE WHILE TALKING DOWN AT THEM, volume I. It is this same man that rises at four, while ordinary men sleep away precious hours, to cleverly assemble an assortment of wit and humor that he employs throughout the day to keep students and teachers from discovering his true genius as an educator. With years of practice this method has proven to be quite successful, perhaps too successful. Nevertheless, Mr. Healy's beloved students continue to look up to him. English