A Student Teacher's Take

Kennedy Pobanz does not mince words.

“I hated elementary school,” she says. “To be honest, I didn’t really love high school either.”

An athletic child, Pobanz struggled in traditional classrooms. “I found it hard to sit at my desk and be lectured to all day,” she explains. “I was a kid who needed a more active learning environment.”

Because of her experience, she in no way wanted to be a teacher. “I never thought it was a profession I would even consider,” Pobanz says. But something clicked in her senior year of high school. “I knew I wanted to make a difference,” she says. “I thought, ‘I’ll become a teacher and give my students what I needed more of — an active, engaging classroom experience.’”

Pobanz is one semester shy of graduating with her degree in elementary education. She happily reports that everything she’s learned in WSU’s teacher education program has supported her desire to be an active teacher. “All of supervising teachers I’ve had have been engaged and very involved with their students,” she says, “and that, to me, is so wonderful.”

Pobanz started student teaching January of 2017 but was already immersed in the classroom through a six-week practicum experience, or what she calls “miniature student teaching.” She was assigned to a sixth-grade classroom at New Bridge School, a newly opened elementary school in the heart of Ogden, that focuses on science, technology, engineering and math.

“I was a little nervous,” Pobanz says, recalling her first day. “We’re required to write lesson plans, implement those plans and collaborate with supervising teachers. I clicked with the students, but the hardest part honestly was the content. It’s been a while since I’ve done sixth-grade math, so I had to review some of the pre-algebra concepts before teaching them, but that was fun, too, to relearn some things myself.”

Pobanz said her biggest challenge was that many of the students were English language learners. “The language barrier was hard, so I’ve put an English as a Second Language (ESL) endorsement on my to-do list,” she says. “But it was nice to learn how to handle those situations. For example, if the kids were speaking Spanish back and forth, I’d jokingly say, ‘Hey! If you’re speaking in Spanish the entire time, I’m going to worry that you’re making fun of me,’ and they would speak to me in English.”

Pobanz, who is the president of WSU’s chapter of the Future Educators Association, says Weber State has helped prepare her for her future as a teacher. When she graduates in the spring of 2017, she’ll have almost an entire school year’s worth of student teaching under her belt. She’s grateful for that time.

“The information we learn in class is important, but I’m glad that Weber State’s program has gotten me into the classroom often and in a meaningful way,” she says. “We don’t just quietly sit in a corner and watch; we get in there and make connections with kids. The more time you spend with them, the more you learn about them. Experience is a key factor.”

Pobanz isn’t blind to the challenges she’ll face as an educator. She just chooses to think positively. “There have been some people who, when I’ve told them I was majoring in education, asked, ‘Are you crazy?’ I just say, ‘Once you’re in it and you’re around the kids, you forget about all of the negatives. There are going to be problems — there are problems with any job you take — but to me, the kids are worth it. The intrinsic rewards are so much, the negatives don’t seem that big to me.”