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Teacher Academy Helps Grow Next Educators
For Kalamazoo Central High School students Lucy Castro and Cooper Betke there is no downside to participating in the Teacher Academy or any Career & Technical Education class.
If you love it, then you have a head start on what you want to do for the rest of your life. If you hate it, you’ve learned a valuable lesson about where not to put your energy.
Betke said, “Either it’s a ‘Yes, I love this’ or ‘I know I don’t want to do it.’”
“It’s only beneficial,” Castro said. “There’s no way that it will impact you negatively.”
Of course, for teacher April Rocco the goal of the academy is to make students fall in love with teaching and inspire them to go into education.
The Kalamazoo RESA Teacher Academy is offered at Loy Norrix High School, where it serves Norrix and Kalamazoo Central students. Rocco writes the curriculum for that program and academy sites in Portage and Gull Lake.
Students participate in inperson and online classes, and four days a week they spend one to two hours a day in internships in classrooms. Students choose a subject area and grade level — kindergarten through eighth grade — for their internships. They also participate in career development and complete requirements for a child development associate’s program, which is the credential necessary to work in a preschool.
All CTE programs aspire to help students earn credentials that can help them qualify for in-demand jobs upon graduation.
Rocco said the biggest challenge of the program is simply making sure that students and families are aware of the CTE options within the school district. She actively recruits students for the program, often targeting students who are involved in sports and other extracurriculars because she knows they usually have positive feelings about their school experiences.
She said the hands-on nature of career and technical education programs ensures that the classes are highly engaging and give students a real sense of the work in many careers.
The biggest challenge for Teacher Academy students is to not underestimate just how challenging the job can be.
“There’s just a sense of, ‘Oh it won’t be hard for me. The kids will like me, so they’ll do what I want,’” she chuckled. “Usually that is how it is when they start their internships, because the younger kids are so excited they’re there, but once they’ve been there for a while and they become a part of the classroom like everyone else, then we start to see behaviors between the little ones and their interns. It’s like being a parent and learning how to manage kids.”
Castro said that has certainly been the case for her. She chose to work with a seventh-grade class at Linden Grove Middle School.
“Seventh graders, they have an attitude,” she said. “They come back and come back quickly. You have to be on your toes.”
Betke is working with a kindergarten class, and for him the biggest surprise has been seeing how much the students change from the beginning of the year. While the students may not talk back as much as seventh graders, they definitely demand your complete attention, he said.
“You need to be light on your feet and be able to adjust to situations very quickly,” Betke said.
Castro and Betke both said their lives have been positively impacted by teachers. Betke pointed to teacher William Santilli, who made an extra effort to connect with Betke when he was struggling during his freshman year, telling Betke, “You are an amazing student. You can do this.
“He put in extra effort to say you have potential,” Betke said.
Castro said she was moved by the work teachers did during virtual learning last year.
“They were faced with a whole new system that they were not 100 percent comfortable with,” she said. “I had teachers give it their all, and teachers who broke down and were actually real with students. That is one of the most human things you can do, to truthfully say ‘I’m not doing OK, but I’m doing my best.’”
Betke is a senior, who is heading to Adrian College in the fall. He hopes to major in education and follow in the steps of several aunts and uncles who are educators.
Castro is a junior and has a little more time to explore, but she is considering attending Western Michigan University to study education.
In her case, she hopes to blaze a trail so others can follow her footsteps.
“I come from a family where we’ve been thrown into so many difficult situations, none of us have been able to achieve like we wanted. That pushes me and makes me want to do it. And I have some Hispanic students in class, who talk to me about things they know I can relate to. It’s nice that they can see someone like me doing this thing that they might be interested in. It makes me feel pretty proud.”