Pro-D kinda sounds like a vitamin, doesn’t it? And it is like a vitamin… take your pro-D to stay healthy and learning as a teacher!

Today I attended my very first professional development (Pro-D) conference as a student teacher =D

This is way more exciting than it sounds because suddenly I feel even more like a professional! For those of you who know me well, I’m somewhat shy, especially in a roomful of professionals who have had years of experience in multiple fields and industries. Golly. But something about being in a roomful of professional teachers makes everything better.

I guess I haven’t talked much about being in the teaching program lately, have I?

First off, the education program has been great. I would recommend this whole thing in a heartbeat. The profs all have personal experience teaching, they all make what they teach relevant to the secondary classroom and the content actually interests me to no end. Ridiculous. I never thought I could enjoy post-secondary this much. I enjoyed my undergraduate degree to be sure, and my English program in particular offered some great moments of bliss, but this… there are times where it feels like I’ve found a home, if that makes sense. Teaching makes sense. And I’m so thankful for the opportunity to be here.

Of course, there are the times where I’m really unsure of myself or my teaching style, or even how I’ll develop as an educator. In times like those I’m thankful for my classmates. Almost all of the students I regularly communicate with are born educators interested in students for the students’ sake. I’m also just loving the fact that once again I’m back in a high school-esque environment, where everyone has at least two courses in common and where large groups of us just enjoy chilling together. To some extent it feels like band, because we all hung out together and had at least one major interest in common that joined all of us together. There is so much joy in community.

Just this past Thursday, in fact, a classmate organized a massive potluck which was absolutely fantastic. At the start of the potluck there were about ten dishes or so on the table, which we thought was pretty okay, considering that so many people were busy with work. Then all of a sudden a mass rush of people stormed in with their own dishes and hastily bought goods (Timbits and bags of chips are always great fallbacks) and the tables were suddenly groaning in excess of food. The purpose of the potluck was for us to chill with people outside of our cohorts, especially because this would be the last day of classes before we all began practicum. Indeed, chill we did.

Even after our last class, a large bunch of us were walking towards the bus loop to go home and I realized how blissful, how utterly serene, and how absolutely lovely it was to be walking with friends of my age with similar goals and all with some anticipatory feeling towards the upcoming practicum. It’s a similar feeling to the one I got when I was able to sit down with other educators, albeit more experienced and unfamiliar, at the Pro-D conference because we were all business educators, and we were all coming together to think together, to learn together and to speak together.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again:

There is real joy in community.