Official Hiatus

I’d like to announce an official hiatus, effective immediately, to end when I return from vacation in mid-January.

This is my effort to truly take a break.  A teeny part of me feels guilty, I’ll admit it.  However, I really believe that it’s not only ok to stop working sometimes, but that having that break improves work quality and productivity in the long run.  So off I go!

Have a wonderful month!

On Keeping One’s Patience

It was a really good day.

It wasn’t perfect though. A couple of things happened that annoyed me. I was tempted to lose my patience both times.

But I made the decision to wait, breathe, and calmly just do what I had to do. In both cases, it paid off.

Sometimes good days are just lucky chance, but I feel like most of them are results of decisions we make.

Yay Co-Teaching!

Despite three teachers calling in sick or out of town this week for today’s evening classes, I had full class coverage!  One coworker subbed, I subbed, and one class was covered by the co-teacher who wasn’t sick.  Perfect!

Army Air Corps Pilots by Smithsonian Institution on Flickr

Setting up co-teachers is really, really nice for those sudden winter illnesses that happen.  Instead of having two hours to scramble for a sub, you just let the co-teacher know they’ll be flying solo that evening.  And in the event that they both come down with something, you can at least chalk it up to a decision made by fate and not your own poor planning.

Even though a solid handful of my teachers prefer teaching alone, I’m still working on them to either teach alternate weeks or have a “stunt double” who could come in for them, preferably even on short notice.

I’m just so pleased that we had enough teachers.  Even though it’s possible to combine levels if need be, it’s disruptive for the students.  Also, since it’s one answer to last-minute situations that arise, it’s rare to have enough time to write a fantastic multilevel lesson somehow relevant to both classes’ curricula.

So I think I should find a spare couple of hours to write a multi-level lesson or two to have on hand just in case.  And I think that I should keep at building up this co-teacher thing – I feel great about the quality it enabled us to give our students this evening.

Flickr Commons

Readers might have noticed that I’ve been into kind of vintage photos to go with my posts lately.

It’s because I’m newly obsessed with Flickr Commons.  Thanks to Susan and her lit/tech blog for getting me hooked!

"Colorodo" by LOC on Flickr

On Victories

I am a strong believer in the idea that if you never fail, you’re not branching out enough.  I am therefore theoretically ok with the idea that sometimes I will fail.  When the failure actually happens though, it looks a lot less like a step and a lot more like a black hole.

"NGC 4649" by Smithsonian Institution on Flickr

The short version of the story was that I wrote a day of curriculum for the Intermediate ESL class because through a complicated and uninteresting chain of events, we were short a day of curriculum.  Well, I thought that my experienced teacher would be the one teaching, and I thought it was clear what to skim over and what to go farther in-depth on, but neither of those items were the case.  The volunteer just ran into a wall with it and about a week later she actually quit.  Ouch.

So yes, there are a lot of things about the situation that I will most definitely be doing differently.  It’s a small comfort, though, to assure myself that I will squeak some lessons learned out of the wreckage.

I found that what actually made me feel better was a couple of recent victories.  Not just planning to do better, but actually doing better.

"Winner at the Delta County Fair, Colorodo" by LOC on Flickr

Victory #1

Through another complicated and uninteresting chain of events, we were short a week of curriculum in the advanced class.  And the curriculum that I with the help of a couple of my more experienced volunteers came up with was focused, well-paced, highly teachable, and overall successful.  Apparently I am capable of doing a good job on it.  Good to know.

Victory #2

I did not have a sub for the teacher gap in the Intermediate class, so I got to teach it.  Even without a lot of prep time, my lesson was focused, useful to the students, and engaged them for the whole class.  There were actually two writing activities, conversation, reading, student-generated vocab lists, review of the lesson during the lesson, getting up and moving around the room, and real-life objects pertinent to the lesson.  Earth-shattering?  Of course not.  I just now have confirmation that I do in fact know how to teach a good session.

So, while I am not yet the ultimate teacher or an expert curriculum writer, because of these victories I know for sure I have what it takes to continue to eke every scrap of learning there is out of my little volunteer support catastrophe and make sure it doesn’t happen again.  Confidence restored.