This paper is a personal interpretation of how two half-year daily teaching assignments in grade 12 physics influenced the career of a science teacher educator at Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario, Canada). The teacher educator felt that this experience helped him speak to his preservice teachers more realistically and convincingly about the daily challenges that teachers face. The paper argues that students can best learn from their own experiences by having them take charge of their own professional development and that extensive teaching experience both before and after course work is needed. At Queen's University, a nontraditional approach to becoming a science teacher involves alternating paid work terms with academic terms. This approach, which creates a pattern of"experience-coursework-experience," is seen as appropriate in valuing and understanding the role of experience in learning to teach. Educational research focuses on the importance of personal experience in the learning process, but teacher education seems not to have taken this focus into its own programs by arranging for its students to have significant personal experience of teaching both before and after their education courses. (JDD)