The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday

In The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer talks about how when teaching, sometimes things are “going so well that you knew you were born to teach” and then also during teaching, things go “so poorly that you wished you had never been born” (p.69). Like what the hells all that about??? That’s so accurate! I swear I can go from having the most amazing, rewarding experience in the classroom to then having the complete opposite end of the spectrum. How am I supposed to prepare for each day of class? I have learned very quickly that there is never a predictable day of teaching, and that the only way to survive as a teacher is to be prepared for anything, at all times. 

So one of the things that I learned during our crash course week of orientation was that the only thing you can really do to prepare for the next day of class is to do the lesson plans. You can figure out what you are wanting to do during the course of the class time and how you want to structure the lesson that day. You can decide between doing a lecture, class discussion, or planning some activities for the class to participate in. But the thing with that is, it’s only a plan! You don’t know how your students are going to react to any of things you actually have planned for them. You might get into class and start lecturing and realize that two slides in not a single soul is paying attention to you, or even if they are you can tell that they have no idea what you’re saying. Or the activity that you had worked so hard on getting together is a complete dud, and no one is remotely interested in it (I have to say that shit is soul crushing). The amount of times that I thought I had class handled, knew how to get their attention, how to keep them engaged and entertained, was almost always proven wrong the next day I had that class. This got really interesting when I started thinking about my back to back 1010 classes.

So for those who haven’t heard me rant about it in the space, I teach two 1010 classes on Monday and Wednesday, one at 9:00 and another at 11:00. I thought this would be sweet, knock out two classes back to back and get on to my own studies. I quickly was proven wrong. I would wake up and get to my 9:00 and have a great class. They found the lecture interesting, they liked the activity, the class engagement was genuine. I would leave siked, go find a quiet spot in WOOTEN and think about how excited I was to take this fun planned day of class to my next 1010 group. My excitement was then immediately taken away when the next class did not at all like what I had planned for that day. They would drift off during the lecture, they couldn’t give a shit about the activity, and keeping them engaged was like pulling teeth. 

So how do I solve this problem? How do I try to predict how class is going to go when no day of teaching is predictable. Well how about instead of trying to predict the future I work on trying to understand the past. How about I engage in the lovely concept of self-reflection emphasized by Fassett and Warren (2007), and look into myself and my teaching to understand how I can better prepare myself for the classes to come. Is it because I have more energy in my first class then I do my second class? No I always get to rest and have a coffee between classes to gain some spring in my step. It has to be my activities! But that doesn’t make sense either, if one class likes it then they should be alright activities. That’s it. It’s the classes, I’ve been looking at them all wrong. I have been looking at them as two identical 1010 classes and not as the different learning environments that they are. I think of Gorhman (1990) who talked about how in order to teach students we have to “be adaptable enough to recognize their needs and respond to their strengths” (p. 220). I have to understand that the different needs and strengths of the combination of all my students in my classes create completely different learning environments. In order to be better prepared for my two 1010 classes I have to start treating them as the different classes they are. 

It’s crazy how simple that is once you think about it. None of my students are the same, they are all different individuals, with their own unique personalities and learning styles. So if that’s the case, why the hell would my classes be the same as each other? Yea they are both intro to communication classes but that’s the only similarity between them. So in order to be better prepared for the unpredictable days of teaching I need to plan different lessons for each class, understand the environment of each and think about what will work best in either one. So I guess that’s the best i got. The trick to predicting the future in teaching is by learning to understand the past. To make sense of the experiences I have within the classroom and learning from those, giving myself the ability to get myself through all unpredictable situations, and giving my students the best learning environment that I can possibly give them.