On the first day of the teaching course, we were shown a sample lesson plan. I stared at in disbelief. I don’t know what I thought teachers actually did, but I think I fondly assumed that they just strolled in to the classroom and played things by ear. WRONG, WRONG, oh so very WRONG!
According to the lesson plan, every minute was accounted for. You had to note your aims and the procedures you would use to achieve them, you wrote down who was going to do what to whom, when and why. TTT? T-SS? S-S? Or SS-SS? What the … In addition, you were required to foresee problems, think up solutions, itemise exercises and write down verbatim everything you planned to say! It was four pages long. I put it down and felt a sense of rising panic similar to the one I’d felt as a child as I looked through the crack in the bedroom door watching my mother getting dressed and thinking I’d never be able to remember how to put everything on in the right order (although those were the days of girdles, stockings, longline bras and full-length underskirts).
Who knew that teaching was so complicated? Who knew that you needed a degree in cryptology even to read a lesson plan? I very nearlyran right out the door. Instead I stayed and learned to decode the lesson plan. T was Teacher and S was Student and the various code combinations were indicative of their varied intercourse.
After two days, we were ready (apparently) to give our first lesson to the classes, composed of volunteers. Unused to speaking in public, I felt fear in its purest form. Clammy palms? Check. Cold sweats? Check. Heart racing? Check. Stomach in an uproar? Double check. The pharmaceutical industry has yet to develop a laxative more effective than a rrainee teacher’s first lesson. When I survived it without collapse or making a total ass of myself, I felt euphoric and heroic in equal measure.
Although we only had to give one 40-minute lesson a week, the entire rest of the week was devoted to preparing that one lesson. So many skills were required! Besides the cryptology, a trainee teacher needed skills of creativity and imagination, logic and analysis, clairvoyance and psychology, speechwriting and presentation. And that’s without even mentioning the language skills needed to teach English! Teaching, I was discovering, was a lot more difficult than I had ever imagined. Worse, I wasn’t as good at it as I had expected to be.
It didn’t get easier either. The Lesson has to be one of the most stressful things known to man. No matter how well-prepared you and your plan were, guaranteed – immediately you stood up in front of the class, you’d neglect your aims, mess up your procedures, write words incorrectly on the board, botch your instructions, mumble your instructions, and utterly confuse all your T and S combinations.
Stressful as The Lesson was in itself, it was made infinitely more so by the sight of Jack at the back of the class, frowning and grimacing and taking copious notes that you knew were far from complimentary. As a tutor, he was as gentle as the largest variety of steamroller. After your lesson came an excruciating feedback ession, during which your peers would fall over themselves trying to say nice things about it – and then Jack would come in and say that basically, it was crap. He would give you a sheet, divided into two columns. On one side, he noted what you were doing at various times throughout the lesson; on the other, he’d note the ideal way of proceeding. The two never matched.
At one feedback session, Jack did an impersonation of me. He came flouncing in all airy fairy and said “OK, eh, right, let’s do Exercise 2 now, but you know I’m really not that bothered whether you do it or not, so, you know, if you prefer to sit and do your own thing, well, hey – cool! That’s fine with me. Absolutely no problem”. THAT, he told me, was how I came across. I laughed as hard as anyone, but it was a devastating indictment of my skills in the classroom.
That same afternoon, we had our first tutorials.
Jack: “What do you think your strengths are in teaching?”
Me: “I don’t think I have any”.
Jack: “Well, how do you think you’re progressing?”
Me: “I don’t think I AM progressing.”
We were already halfway through the course.
To be continued.