“Who thinks it’s got any relevance at all?…No one. Okay. Right. So. So we think it’s irrelevant, do we?…Ah. Interesting! So we don’t think it’s relevant…but we don’t think it’s irrelevant, either? It’s in the middle, sort of a gray area. Interesting…Right, so no one agrees with me, but did anyone find that helpful at all?”
This pains me physically to watch, not least because I have seen more than one teacher fall apart like this. Sprout some dignity, you worm.
Would it be an abuse of our grad student distribution email list to post this? Hmmmm.
Oh I’ve BEEN that teacher more than once.
I was that teacher today. I’m actually not a real teacher yet, and I won’t even do my student teaching for another year, but I accepted a substitute maternity leave position when it was offered to me, and now my life has become this sketch. I need to sprout some dignity, and also some better ideas, real fast. Preferably this weekend. Sucking this bad is not fun.
It gets a LOT better… but it’s an arduous process. Don’t let anyone tell you there are “natural” teachers. There are natural performers, but good teaching isn’t really a performance. The biggest paradox of my life is that I became a much better, like tenfold better, teacher once I threw my hands up and said “I give up, I’m just going to be myself.” My goofy self, who gets easily distracted and has no energy for developing and maintaining a system for classroom management, is apparently a much better teacher– at least a more authentic teacher– than the superstar I was trying to be.
(edited to clarify that I have NO energy for classroom management systems!)
As an ESL teacher this is my life on the regular, especially the first half of the sketch. “Who knows what ‘____’ means? Anyone? Anyone? We learned it yesterday!! I can see you wrote the answer correctly so why do you hate meeeee” (slow creep of desperation). Also, correcting students’ profanities: one of the worst/best parts of the job.