Twice now I've received divine counselling through podcasts of This American Life.
1. Two weeks ago I had a disastrous class with the tenth grade section I teach. There was singing. There were airplanes. There was no learning happening (actually that's false. I learned quite a bit). By the end of the class I was desperate for the students to leave so I could deflate and collapse into a chair. Having expected to have such classes, such experiences as a rookie teacher, doesn't make them much easier to digest.
That afternoon, a beautiful Ramallah autumn afternoon, I went for a walk around the track at the Boys School, one of the most beautiful sports facilities in the city. As I started out I wheeled through the TAL episodes loaded onto my iPod, looking for something that would distract me from my thoughts of the rough day.
There was an episode called "Fiasco!" complete with exclamation mark. Perfect, I thought. And so it was.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/61/fiasco
This alternately uproariously funny and thought-provoking episode chronicles situations that, like my class, disintegrate into fiascos. The episode explores what exactly constitutes a fiasco, and as I walked around listening to Ira and friends identify "a breakdown of social conventions" I nodded vigorously, imagining my class which didn't resemble a class by the time the bell rang. And indeed, a fiasco is achieved when the production underway no longer follows its own conventions-- when it is unrecognisable as what it ought to be. Since that day, I have set the bar low: "Was today's class a fiasco?" If I can answer no, it was a good day. So far I have been able to answer "no" everyday.
This week, despite the lack of full blown fiascos, discipline has continued to be a challenge in this class. It's exhausting to police these students as closely as I have to at this point. Yesterday I went to the gym looking, again, for some distraction from discipline worries and curriculum planning doldrums, and the podcast that came on was called "Is this working?"
http://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/special/538_bleeped.mp3
It turned out to be about discipline procedures in different kinds of schools in the United States, and featured other teachers talking about extreme discipline circumstances, and how much they learned from them, once they picked themselves up from being blindsided at first. I know I'm dealing with what first-time teachers everywhere deal with, but by golly it was good to hear it from the horse's mouth.
Speaking of horses I galloped on a horse today on the streets of Ramallah! I have never before galloped. Here is how my galloping lesson unfolded: "Hold the reins in one hand."
That was it, then we were off to the races. It's remarkable how much the horses head goes down and out in front of you when he is galloping.
1. Two weeks ago I had a disastrous class with the tenth grade section I teach. There was singing. There were airplanes. There was no learning happening (actually that's false. I learned quite a bit). By the end of the class I was desperate for the students to leave so I could deflate and collapse into a chair. Having expected to have such classes, such experiences as a rookie teacher, doesn't make them much easier to digest.
That afternoon, a beautiful Ramallah autumn afternoon, I went for a walk around the track at the Boys School, one of the most beautiful sports facilities in the city. As I started out I wheeled through the TAL episodes loaded onto my iPod, looking for something that would distract me from my thoughts of the rough day.
There was an episode called "Fiasco!" complete with exclamation mark. Perfect, I thought. And so it was.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/61/fiasco
This alternately uproariously funny and thought-provoking episode chronicles situations that, like my class, disintegrate into fiascos. The episode explores what exactly constitutes a fiasco, and as I walked around listening to Ira and friends identify "a breakdown of social conventions" I nodded vigorously, imagining my class which didn't resemble a class by the time the bell rang. And indeed, a fiasco is achieved when the production underway no longer follows its own conventions-- when it is unrecognisable as what it ought to be. Since that day, I have set the bar low: "Was today's class a fiasco?" If I can answer no, it was a good day. So far I have been able to answer "no" everyday.
This week, despite the lack of full blown fiascos, discipline has continued to be a challenge in this class. It's exhausting to police these students as closely as I have to at this point. Yesterday I went to the gym looking, again, for some distraction from discipline worries and curriculum planning doldrums, and the podcast that came on was called "Is this working?"
http://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/special/538_bleeped.mp3
It turned out to be about discipline procedures in different kinds of schools in the United States, and featured other teachers talking about extreme discipline circumstances, and how much they learned from them, once they picked themselves up from being blindsided at first. I know I'm dealing with what first-time teachers everywhere deal with, but by golly it was good to hear it from the horse's mouth.
Speaking of horses I galloped on a horse today on the streets of Ramallah! I have never before galloped. Here is how my galloping lesson unfolded: "Hold the reins in one hand."
That was it, then we were off to the races. It's remarkable how much the horses head goes down and out in front of you when he is galloping.
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