I was dropped from my internship around a month ago now and I've taken time to look back on and process everything from it, but I still fail to see what more I could've done. For context, I was coming into this position already with a foot in the grave as I was apart of a program where you are an employee of the school while also working on your degree. My elementary principal didn't like that I was going to my internship and did a lot in her power to try and keep me with a very rough student no one else wanted to work with. This included dragging my name, lying about my performance reviews (I got all 4s on my last review and she was telling others I was getting 1s and 2s at best), and saying how I was a terrible employee (0 write ups, talking tos or anything really so this really caught me off guard).
When I was placed, I'd found out how rough all of this really was, as it had gotten to where I was placed in the middle school as well and was told a lot of this stuff directly, and when I showed proof otherwise, was told that I just need to 'prove people wrong' and 'do better'. This led to also finding out my mentors had been asked to mentor me and upon going in, my mentors told me straight out they didn't want to mentor period but did it because they were asked. This led to even in the beginning them being short with me, not giving me materials or curriculums to work through, and full on not helping me get used to the classes, very sink or swim. I began to try and swim and soon found what I thought was a footing and got my first observation planned.
It was an ELA lesson and that morning I checked in to make sure all the tech was working and everything was ready to go, which it was! Fast forward one hour and suddenly I walk into the room and my papers are disorganized and the document cam I was going to use suddenly isn't working and I don't have the time to fix it. Well shit. I pivot to doing everything on the board, doing my best to change my lesson around the broken doc cam but even I would say the lesson was not the best and a lot of what I had planned went down the drain with my tech going out. My supervisor was watching and seemed sad it was such a struggle...my mentor? On her phone the entire time, texting and scrolling. I took that failure of a lesson and focused on making sure future lessons had back ups for the back ups and tried to move on through.
This stuff continued for months like this, my one mentor sitting on her phone in the back most days, the other letting me teach but often completely disregarding the lessons I turned in (Even after saying they were great) in favor of demanding I do the lesson her way instead. I shrugged at this and said fine, whatever gets me through to the end. Every day kinda went this way, and I eventually asked for help from my college as I felt I wasn't getting the support needed from my mentors. I found out this was a mistake as pretty much immediately, we had a meeting about me and starting an improvement plan, which included talking about things like my timelyness, which was basically my mentors complaining I wasn't coming in an hour early with my main mentor, nor staying the 3-4 hours after school she did.
I was a little surprised as I was told to be in at 7:20 and thats when I was there, now they wanted me there closer to 6:30. This also included things like getting my lessons in earlier (I was two weeks ahead at this point on lessons) and doing weekly and bi-weekly checkins with people. I again just said fuck it, I gotta get through this and began to roll in at 6:30, this still wasn't good enough as two times due to weather I got stuck in traffic and rolled in closer to 6:45 and that was too late for them. My alt mentor would roll in around 7:25 most days and they'd chat about when I'd get in and immediately start emailing the college.
This again, went on for weeks, I was coming in early, getting lessons in early, doing everything I was supposed to, including doing my weekly meetings with my success advisor that were set up and reaching out to my supervisor and the college about my other weekly and biweekly meeting respectively. These other meetings never happened once. I kept trucking along, getting great feedback from my mentor to my face, then hearing 3rd or 4th hand things I was doing wrong and would attempt to fix the next day. I was growing tired of the game and then I suddenly got an email, we had a sudden meeting in an hour, no reasoning given, nothing said to me, the principal would be there, but not my mentors, along with people from my program and the college.
I show up and my fears were made manifest. They were cutting me, saying I was uncoachable and unwilling to learn. I asked for proof of this and to show me where this was happening, as I had proof of the exact opposite, being told something was wrong and fixing it the next class hour or even within the class. The principal looked at me and said they didn't need to show anything since the internship was done. He proceeded to lay into me, making assumptions about my character and tearing me down, telling me I wasn't made for teaching. I just stared at this guy I'd talked to a total of 4 times this semester. He then stood and told me good luck before we all were told it was time to go.
I looked at my success advisor who looked somehow more stunned than me and walked out. I never heard anything about this beyond that, nothing I could fix, nothing I could do to do better. I'm at a loss for all of this and keep mulling it in my head for a month now, looking for things I could do better, things I could've changed, but I keep feeling like I couldn't do any more than I was. Could someone else tell me what else I could've done? I'll also attach pictures of the notes I was getting from my mentor while I was teaching for an idea of what I was being told directly.