Newburgh Free Academy - My Fieldwork

Throughout the course of the semester I've been spending my Wednesdays before 3PM at Newburgh Free Academy with my mentor teacher. Although never really formally done, I learned quite a bit about working in a high school setting. It honestly solidified my ideas that when I go into teaching, secondary is the way to go for me. Not that I don't love the younger ones because believe me, I think they're adorable and more on the willing side of learning, but the older kids are WAY easier to relate to. I found that working with these students, I could be that middle person when students think of teachers. I was definitely an authority figure to these kids. They would all instantly stop cursing and talking when they weren't supposed to if I walked by which I would giggle to myself about after I had passed them. I was constantly treated with respect by 18 year-olds who were easily double my size. At firs tI found them intimidating and I was unsure of how I could establish an authoritative stance with them. I mean, I'm not that much older than most of them to be honest. The biggest age gap that existed between me and the students was maybe 8 years. Yea that was weird but I still look like them. I remember being in high school and thinking that whenever we had a visiting college student, or even  our student teachers for that matter, they looked so much older than me. These kids though, the oldest anyway, looked like they could be people that I would be friends with. I know that I have a few friends that I work with at my job who were still seniors in high school. Besides the fact that this alone blew my mind, I think it adds to how we can be easily integrated to these high school students' classrooms. I was that midpoint between authority figure and someone they could get along with. They treated me with respect but at the same time thought it was so cool that I knew about and listened to the same music or watched the same movies. Their faces were hilarious when I would make a comment about a movie that they were talking about. Even more so about how when we were having work days I would sometimes end up helping them while they worked and talking about music at the same time.
Overall, I felt like being in a high school was the place for me. I mean, the whole reason that i want to be an art teacher stems from my own high school experience. I had an amazing teacher who left quite an imprint on me in the field of art. He was the reason that I kept going with it throughout high school and the reason that I ended up being one of the 13 or 15 students in my entire high school that was allowed into AP Studio Art.