This week was my first week teaching. It will be a week I remember for the rest of my career and in all likelihood I will look back and shake my head at how little I knew. However, I can say that tonight when I got home from work I felt more tired and more satisfied than I have possibly ever felt.
This week I went into a class and an Indian boy and his friends were making strange hand gestures at the back of the class. Being from Canada, I told them to stop doing obscene things and to focus on the class. They giggled and kept doing what they were doing. I soon discovered that what I thought were hand gestures resembling sex were magic tricks. The Indian boy smiled at me when I told him how good he was and told me he is "Black Magic" at which point I lost it laughing.
The hardest part of teaching for me are the gaps when you don't know what to do with your class. Usually this comes down to poor planning and this is the part when kids start acting up. Not having much of my teaching materials yet I spent a lot of this week putting my improv skills to the test and finding ways to engage and occupy my students while I tried to figure out what exactly I should be teaching them and as they say here "how".
The biggest thing though of course was our school's Founder's Day which was today. Monday I said goodbye to Ben on my lunch break, and took my broken heart back to class to pull myself together and carry on being a teen ranger. Tuesday through to Thursday I found myself at school until 7 or 8 pm working on rehearsing our performance that I wrote and spent the last month rehearsing with our drama students.
The most stressful part were the myriad of last minute changes suggested to our script by the head of aesthetics and our vice principal. However, I chose to have a positive attitude and with the changes the show became something really exciting and enjoyable.
I can proudly say that this day was a success. The drama students really took a lot away from the experience as they shared with me today afterwards and it shone through in their performance. Many people in the school approached me to say how impressed they were with the work that was done and I will tell you that I am incredibly proud.
It was an insane week, full of many setbacks and challenges, but it wouldn't be theatre if it was easy and at the end of the day I can sleep tonight knowing that I taught something this week. I accomplished what I set out to do. In this one day, I consolled a girl who was crying about her relationship with her mom and sent her home with strategies to talk to her about their issues, I figured out a million tech problems, I stretched students to challenge themselves and prove that they were up to the task at hand, I showed the leaders at my school that I can constructively use criticism and keep my eye on the purpose of being there (which is to teach our students something above all else) and I went through the agony of watching my kids perform knowing that once they were there it was up to them to save themselves if things went wrong and watched them do just that.
It could have been a terrible week, I could be depressed, heartbroken, worn out and lonely. But right now more than anything I can say I am proud. My student might call himself Black Magic, but goddamn it, I'm White Magic.
No comments:
Post a Comment