rolling with the punches.
Teaching is all about rolling with the punches - we know that.
But have you ever tried to accomplish a task with stuff flying at you from every which direction? I saw a great post by We Are Teachers on twitter today. It was a video of a newscaster trying to deliver her news story in the middle of a hurricane, and there’s debris constantly hitting her. That’s what teaching is like…I would say most days. You walk into your room, an hour early, your music is blasting on the speakers in your class to pump you up. You write or review your day plans, set up your projector, get your lessons ready to deliver, and you got your so-called script for the day ready to go.
The bell goes, kids filter in, you welcome them at the door and they’re seated. The land acknowledgment and national anthem play on the announcements and - ready set go - the day has begun and all will go according to plan, right? WRONG. That NEVER happens. If you’re lucky, you’ll get 5 minutes of your lesson in before the office calls to ask you to send a student to the down to pick something up. Or a neighbouring teacher calls you mid sentence to ask to borrow your speakers. Or a student randomly walks into the room with no regard for your lesson to ask a question. Or there’s a fire drill and we all gotta go - and now the lesson is squashed. All the momentum you had gathered to deliver this amazing lesson - is gone.
Sometimes it takes 3 times as long to complete the lesson you planned to deliver in 40 minutes. And that’s really unfortunate because it breaks the flow. With some tricky lessons - let’s say in math for example - you need to be in the groove. The kids are following, and they’re with you, and you’re doing your thing and they’re listening and they’re with you - which is already such a rarity - and then bam, you’re hit with a barrage of calls, announcements, then the projector stops working, or a kid cuts himself with a sheet of paper and you have to tend to surgery for 20 minutes to stop the bleeding and then you also have to clean up all the blood after because well…who else is going to do it. And you’d be surprised at the number of times in a day I’m interrupted to provide someone with a bandaid. By the time you get back to teaching prime factorization the kids have already forgotten what we were doing and you have to start again.
I once had to deal with a serious issue in the class, and started a raging lecture to my class. I was angry at them for something stupid they likely had done, and I couldn’t even get through my lecture to them. Interruption after interruption - and it just took the steam right out of my words to them. By the end of it we were all laughing at the fact that Ms. Wander was trying to be really mad at the class, but she failed miserably because no one would let her finish her rant. It was a win for them, but an epic fail for me trying to establish authority in my room.
I know I said it last time, and I’ll say it again in this chat- teaching is really hard. You have to love it, or you start to hate it real fast. Going with the flow and understanding that the interruptions are part of the game, that all comes with the territory. You gotta get used to getting through that lesson with debris flying at you from every direction. Remember that teachers are rarely just teachers. They play just about every role you can think of to these kids, and just like mom at home, you have to be able to multi-task to take care of every need, all the time.
Answer the calls, deal with the pages from the office, tolerate the students coming in to ask countless questions about seemingly inconsequential things, reset the passwords for random kids that walk into your room, provide extra paper for the teacher next door, jump on one foot while blindfolded, cook a 5 course meal with your hands tied behind your back, you get the idea. We’re expected to do it all - and you know what…most of us do and we handle it quite well. As long as you don’t get too hung up on the idea of getting through the curriculum with those buffer 3 weeks in June…you know that this is the way it’ll always be. And we really don’t complain much about it, unless your sitting together chatting in the Staffroom.
