Saturday, December 31, 2011

Bad Teacher

My most frequent stress dreams are those in which I am a terrible teacher.  I had a few of these over the Christmas holiday, likely because I was thinking of lessons I ought to be planning.  One went as follows:

I was substituting for a teacher that I had in high school by the name of Tammy. She is a language arts teacher and she had great confidence in me.  In my first lesson I collected exercises that the students had done.  They had created literacy and ESL activities for the schools library to use.  I spent way to much time going through the assignment, and felt guilty because I knew that I was just eating up class time rather than making the most profitable use of the time.

Frustrated and disappointed in myself, I decided to change the format and organization for the next class.  We did some different activities including going through some scripts and doing theatre exercises.  All in all, the lessons seemed a terrible mish-mash of lame attempts to fill time and kind of meet objectives.  My guilt was compounded by the fact that I didn't think Tammy would believe me when I told her how terrible the lesson went; she just has too much confidence in me.

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