The stress I felt while in core 4

I graduated from college in May of 2025. I was a dual-credit major, teaching both middle school english and science to students fifth through eighth grade. During the last semester of my college years I was in core 4. I failed miserably during that time. The burnout I felt during that semester was intense. I was sort of mad to an extent because my grades for teaching were for 5-8, but during all of my core teaching I was given only 7th grade. Now I understand that getting teachers in the program to be mentors is hard. I was constantly going back and forth between my english and science classes, but if I had to go back I wouldn’t change my major for anything.

The struggle for me was like being stabbed in the brain. I really struggled with the mental toll of teaching. I struggled to adapt and understand the content I was to teach these 7th graders. I struggled to make my own teaching style. It probably didn’t help that I couldn’t make one single classroom my own. Getting to know the students was hard. I would get different students every hour and not in the way of a middle school of course the students are going to change. It was more of during my core 3 I bonded with those students on a big level. So when core 4 started there were new students I had to bond with and for me that was a challenge.

By the time it got close to doing evaluations to see how my teaching was going I was feeling the burnout. I wasn’t sleeping or eating very much. I was constantly having knots in my stomach due to the anxiety I felt to do the job done right. I hate to say this but my mental and physical load improved significantly once I withdrew from my core 4 classes. It felt like I could breathe. My mind became peaceful. I could think clearly and when that happened I could see where improvement needed to happen. Ideas came flooding to me one after the other on how I could have taught the units I was in charge of differently. When I graduated I told both my english and science professors that were in charge of our core teachings that I would get my sub-licenses to get more experience in a school setting. My mom even pestered me with sub openings for our local high schools, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Now that a year and a half have passed I finally feel free enough to want to start working on my teaching.

    I have a lot of work ahead of me to reach where my fellow classmates are and the hurdles I’ll have to hop are huge with having started a family. So my first step is writing this blog post and getting this off my chest. The next step is to start reading and basically re-teaching myself everything I learned through my college years. Thanks for reading.