FINAL BLOG POST!

Six years from now your dream will be within your reach. You will cross the stage as the first person in your family to attend college. Your mom won't be there, but your friends, classmates, teachers, and family will be. In six years you will have met countless people who have kindled what started as a small spark of interest. Every person you encounter, every assignment you complete, every obstacle you face will contribute to your growth as a teacher, examples both good and bad.
In the years before student teaching, you won't take all of your literature assignments terribly seriously. You should. How your professors interact with students, teach and discuss the literature, and format their classes will be so important to you when you teach poetry or Hamlet. You will struggle with what types of questions to ask that align with the curriculum. Pay attention to the creative assignments especially. Your students won't tell you, but they crave creative expression. These assignments will bring out the potential in students they didn't know they had, and they thank you for it.
You will seek the help and advice of your advisors, which is good. They are your biggest cheerleaders. You will wish you had them all along. During your first year at WSU you will make a choice that will impact the rest of your career as a student and your future employment. You will never be able to emphasize enough that your time as an intern earned you your first teaching job. You will grow tired of doing the same things every day for two years, but eventually you learn that this experience is unique and you can make it your own. The teachers you work with will give you materials, advice, and feedback on your performance; they will let you teach their class as many times as you want, all before your senior year. You will wish that every education student took this opportunity, and you will wish that you had the chance to tell everyone how important it is.
You won't realize how incredible WSU's school of education is until you get over the fact that you transferred schools. You won't realize that they are the only school in the area who requires a field placement for four semesters in a row. You won't realize what advantages this will give you.
During your last year of school, you will need a break, you will dread having to take a class, and you will get tired of being a student. The best thing you will have is this class. You will find that your experiences will be much different from those of your classmates. You will find that you will all have very different relationships with your CTs. Best of all, you will find support, camaraderie, and advice that will push you to pass your certification, push you to go to class, and push you to, in all things, do your best. You won't find competition. Your instructors will see your frustration and exhaustion, but they won't bog you down with homework. Everything will be more than manageable.
You won't realize the amount of modeling your own teachers do for you until you've completed the education program. You won't quite realize how to apply the plethora of information you have learned  until you begin student teaching, but it will come. Despite all of the literature classes you take, you won't feel prepared to teach it. You will use your notes, other people's notes, blogs, and anything else you can get your hands on to help you struggle through your first literature unit because you won't quite understand how you should be teaching. No one will ever instruct you directly; you will have to learn from observation from people who never went to school for education.
You will wish there was a class that taught grammar and you will wonder why you take six credit hours of Linguistics instead. You will wish creative writing classes were required because you will be afraid to assign your students something you yourself have never tried (Helpful Tip: Try EVERYTHING yourself before your give it to your students; if you can't do it, chances are they can't either). You won't get grammar and writing instructor instruction until you are student teaching.
You will learn to take advantage of all the programs and services WSU has to offer. You should do every mock interview, every resume workshop, and every interview day that you can. You won't be able to do everything, but try.
 Your teachers will set you up to succeed. Their efforts won't go unnoticed (although as a teacher yourself you may often think they do). You will use every calendar, syllabus, and assignment sheet that they give you, and you probably won't thank them for everything you use, but you will appreciate it.
You won't think that you can finish the semester, but you will.
You will need to meet friends lots of times at Mort's for half price martinis.
You will need to eat junk food once in a while to make yourself feel better.
But you will be okay.