Experience

It was a tough day for my student teacher, as days sometimes are for all of us. It's times like these that I feel inadequate and wish I had something better than run-of-the-mill advice to offer. You know, the stuff like, It'll all be better tomorrow or We all have bad days and we just have to leave them in the past. Yeah, whatever. As I thought about what I wanted to tell her, I realized that there are some lessons that have truly helped me make it through my years of teaching (and ironically enough, I was never taught any of this in college):

1. Never underestimate the value of a good snot joke. Snot helps you recover from the worst lesson. You either come off as funny or weird, but it completely deflects attention from a bad lesson.

2. Don't be afraid to be the butt of a joke (See #1). Many kids won't say a word, but will become regular orators if they are encouraged to make a joke about the teacher (or about the class).

3. If #1 and #2 aren't working, pull out your best Britney Spears or Paris Hilton material. They're always doing something crazy or unreal. We might laugh at them. We might practice some of our not so nice language when we talk about them. They give a chance to say things that we can't say to real people and sometimes that gets us on track.

4. Teenagers are resilient (and self-centered). There's a temptation to create the best lessons possible for them. While that's a laudable goal, we can fail sometimes. Because teenagers are resilient, they'll live through a bad lesson. Because they are self-centered, they are very likely to be thinking more about their own appearance or what they're eating for lunch than what they're learning in class. (Bad for learning, I know, but that's another post.)

5. Making up--and singing as badly as possible--dumb songs has gotten me out of many a tight spot. For those of you not familiar with my classroom singing (and that is probably all of you), they are tuneless, include a few lines about whatever we are studying and always include something like, "I love Spanish class because it is the most fun class."

6. As sad as it is to admit, teaching is more similar to improv comedy than it is to serious academic pursuits. You're going to get heckled a lot and you're going to have to think on your feet more than you ever though possible. With time, you get enough experience that you've seen it all and you're not always making new decisions. Often, how you react is about what you've done before.

But the most important lesson....

7. While the bad days are painful and they often seem like the only days I'll remember, the good days far outnumber them. And a few bad days can make the successes on the good days that much sweeter.