My personal nightmare

So yesterday marked the first occasion I've taught the freshmen truly solo. I was up there, without a safety net and I'm telling them about personal narratives. And I tell them the story of how I found out my friend Amanda was killed and they are in silence. I think I really got to them. And so the lessons are going well, and the students are responding and it isn't like pulling teeth and I am fighting off side-comments and playing it as cool as I can right until I look at the clock. The clock that reads 1:50 -- 1:50 and class ends at 2:20... so I begin stalling. Dancing. Buying time. Trying to engage them. Trying to do or say anything that will be enough to make the class take the full 88 minutes.

This was the nightmare I've been having for the past two months: I stand in front of my students and find I have nothing to say. They just stare up at me, almost expectantly, and I have no notes, no prep, no homework and no words with which to address them. And so, I stand (often at a lectern, I dunno why) and raise my arms as if I am preparing to deliver something big, something as big as Charlton Heston as Moses carrying the Ten Commandments big, and then I just say "...so..." and find I cannot think of anything in the world.

Facing this down, I had a moment of pure and unadulterated panic, and for the briefest of seconds thought about running out of the room. Pure terrified flight.

Just for: One. Single. Second.

And I put my head down for a moment, took a long breath to compose and steady myself, and then dove right back into it. I jumped to to-morrow's lesson (which I didn't have planned out yet, just had a dot on the calendar) and began riffing. Just trying to create spontaneously and from whole cloth everything I needed and wanted and it almost worked.

The students knew I was stretching, because I told them. They began suggesting "fun" activities like Seven Up or Duck-Duck-Goose, but I told them "We're here for serious reasons; we're here to learn," and that seemed to stifle down playing games.

All of this felt rather bad, but felt much worse because my supervisor was there. He commented that, in fact, I'd done a really great job with it. I imagine a large part of things had been my nervousness and worry over performing well, both for him and as my first solo class with the freshmen.

He assured me I did well, in fact that given the circumstances I had done even better than well. He had wonderful things to say, particularly about the sensitivity I showed in encouraging students to write about high risk subjects, the tolerance I showed when taking care of disciplinary issues and the patience I showed in encouraging some of the more troublesome students. I felt like I was doing acrobatics without a net, and now I get to go and return to it.

I will post again today (hopefully) about my second experience, as well as a primarily student led debate style discussion I had in AP today (which went great, but the freshmen experience may colour the rest of my day). This will catch me back up. No posts on Thursday or Friday as those are days off.