tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7363356760450940988.post3910104325842024086..comments2021-06-17T08:21:48.215-04:00Comments on Re-Learning To Teach: Day 118: Remembered AngerJustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13309915942161862912noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7363356760450940988.post-90292513052466358542014-03-12T17:14:46.487-04:002014-03-12T17:14:46.487-04:00Okay. A few things that have been in the back of m...Okay. A few things that have been in the back of my mind that I&#39;m gonna spill onto your blog now. Apologies for the rambling in advance.<br />1) Your style is probably radically different from half the people in your building. At the least, it&#39;s different from you a year ago. Students don&#39;t always know what to do with that. Maybe some of them (like your late additions) haven&#39;t been able to adjust. Maybe YOU&#39;RE still adjusting. Is this the time of year when you&#39;d normally be cracking down? Old habits don&#39;t Die Hard, they linger around, hoping Bruce Willis is game for another sequel. I don&#39;t really have any useful places to take this observation, it&#39;s just something I&#39;ve been wondering about.<br />2) There&#39;s this thing called &quot;negativity bias&quot;, where our brain is wired for bad news. An article I read uses the carrot and stick analogy as in &#39;If you miss seeing a carrot today, you might get one tomorrow, but if you miss seeing a stick today, BAM, no tomorrow&#39;. I&#39;m gonna stop short of saying find &quot;One Good Thing&quot; (that blog just isn&#39;t my style) but on days when you go off on 2 kids, remind yourself there were other times when you wanted to and DIDN&#39;T.<br />3) To find enjoyment, define &quot;enjoyment&quot;, and don&#39;t limit it to student interactions in the classroom. You just spoke about a productive chat you had with a colleague. Who else are you talking to during the day? Maybe you should sit in on a band practice or sports game, to see students outside the class, might that be enjoyable? What if you wore a silly hat to class every Friday, can that provide enjoyment? Note I&#39;m not saying it&#39;s impossible to derive happiness from the teaching itself, just that you probably need a fallback position for days when, let&#39;s face it, it just ain&#39;t happening.<br />4) At the risk of sounding like a horrible person, there probably are some students we can&#39;t engage with, for the same reason that you can&#39;t please everyone. But by the same measure, don&#39;t kid yourself into thinking that the ones who are engaged would be that way for anyone. Or that they&#39;ll necessarily be as (dis)engaged by the next unit as they are now. Humans are terribly fickle beasts.<br /><br />As to &quot;If a lawyer loses 90% of his cases&quot;, if he&#39;s a defence lawyer trying to keep assassins from going to prison, yeah, I&#39;d hope he loses 90% of his cases. Nice thing about being a lawyer is (as far as I know), you can choose your cases such that more than 10% of your clients are innocent... and that analogy just went to a disturbing place, I&#39;m not trying to cast aspersions on your students. I should wrap this up.<br /><br />To conclude, I might suggest you stop throwing down tombstones and lockers as pictures. They seem to upset you. Also, great or not, at least you don&#39;t suck, and sometimes we do at least need that reminder.Gregory Taylorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06547180132612659893noreply@blogger.com