Students Become the Teachers: U. of I. Students Discuss Teaching in CU
by Avery Patterson, The Daily Illini / Apr 21, 2026
For students majoring or minoring in education, their classroom experience begins many years before their senior year student teaching. The Daily Illini spoke with Illinois students about their experiences working in local schools and the skills they gain as they prepare for their future careers.
Every student attends classes. Whether giant lectures, grueling content at 8 a.m. or interesting discussion sections, we all have them. But some students are attending other classes — the ones they help teach.
Each year, numerous University students take their talents to student-teach at nearby elementary and middle schools across Champaign-Urbana. Along the way, they get a close look at the trials and triumphs of working in the education system.
In the College of Education, students often student-teach for multiple years but take on a more active role in their senior year. Olivia Lim, a senior in Education, student teaches in an eighth-grade math class at Franklin STEAM Academy in Champaign. This year, Lim is working full seven-hour days, five days a week.
“We’re working towards a one-month instructional takeover, so that basically means for a month, we’re going to be in charge of all the planning, all the teaching, all the responsibilities,” Lim said. “Up until that point, we start with observing (and) getting acclimated to the classroom.”
Lim said she’s known she wanted to teach middle school math since she was in high school, and this experience has confirmed she’s on the right track.
Student teaching isn’t just limited to education majors, though. Vis-A-Vis, an RSO on campus, provides another pathway to working in C-U schools. The organization places volunteers into elementary schools and a few high schools in the C-U area.
Minh Nguyen, membership director for Vis-A-Vis and a sophomore in LAS, said volunteers can be placed as classroom aides or one-on-one tutors for underperforming students. Currently, Nguyen is not volunteering in a school, but she has worked with second graders, kindergarteners, and sixth graders since she joined the organization her freshman year.
“Because kindergarten is so riled up, the teacher doesn’t really have the time to be cutting a bunch of things for an hour or refilling snacks,” Nguyen said. “So that was really great to know that I was saving her that time.”
Nguyen said the need for help is so high that, despite having over 45 members in Vis-A-Vis, it frequently can’t provide volunteers for each teacher who requests one.
Lim said the eighth graders she teaches are allowed to have their phones in class, which has proven to be distracting.
“It’s definitely hard to keep students engaged in that sense or even get them to participate sometimes because it feels like they just want instant gratification, or they just want to
be told how to do things,” Lim said.
Nguyen, however, said technology use is limited in the classrooms she’s worked in.
“I think teachers are planning in a very meticulous way where students don’t have to be looking at screens too often,” Nguyen said. “But when I was working with middle school, especially with English learners … there were several days of lessons that they would have about internet safety, because they knew that (technology) was a lot more accessible to them now.”
It’s clear this job comes with challenges — working long hours while being a student, wrangling rooms of rowdy kids, and maintaining attention in the age of AI. But for these student teachers, the experience makes it all well worth it.
“With teaching, it’s one thing to just read a bunch of things or sit in lectures and learn about it, but it’s completely another thing to actually be with the kids and (do) it,” Lim said.
This article was originally published in The Daily Illini. Read the full article here.