Anyone who assumes that teachers must get bored doing the same thing hour after hour, year after year has obviously never taught. I spent hours crafting each lesson plan and activity for my students, and they never go as planned. A student in one hour will ask an awe-inspiring question that demands a well thought out answer, and students in another class will create semi-relevant tangents that put you 10 minutes off your plan. Still in other cases activities will take twice, or even three times as long as anticipated, and the same activity may take no time at all in your next class. I have taught now for 6.5 days and I have already experienced each of these scenarios.
Students are masters at getting teachers off task. I am naive enough to assume that all students are interested in learning and that is why they are asking me semi-relevant questions that get me to blather on for 5 or 10 minutes. I make the mistake of addressing every question every student has thinking about the old teaching adage that if one person asks a question, most likely someone else has the same one. I am here to tell you that this is not always the case. It takes a special student with a certain level of cockiness to ask you to repeat all of the directions you just gave because they were not listening. This has happened to me. Twice.
From all of this, I am learning. I am learning that I need to be more patient. Not every issue that has come up over the course of this unit has been due to student error. Most of it is my error actually, which is hard to admit. I just keep reminding myself that flexibility and patience are key and this whole newbie gig is perfect practice for those virtues.
Like a saying reads that I recently came across, "Keep calm, and pretend this is in the lesson plan."
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