I think no matter how much you like your job, there are going to be days when you’d rather stay home and sleep off yesterday’s chardonnay and jelly beans. And remember that when I say “you”, I actually mean “me”. Today was one of those days. April vacation is next week, and I feel like this week is the last leg of a marathon. And I mean that in a slow and painful way, not an exhilarated triumph kind of way.
On my way in to work, there was an accident on the MassPike, which made me a little jittery, and also half an hour late. Being a half hour late to class is worse than being late to most other jobs. It messes up the rhythm of the class, it puts me behind in the material I planned to cover (fortunately I am so bad at timing lessons that it’s not a major setback), it makes me look really bad and it’s annoying.
When I finally got there, my students were half antsy because they thought I wouldn’t show and they could go home, and half apathetic because we only have 5 1/2 classroom hours until April vacation.
I started a round of No Yes No to try to end the monosyllabic answers. It’s usually a pretty fun game, as students start to understand the game and trick each other, but today even that was only somewhat successful. It was just an all-around boring class. Things are really bad when even the teacher’s looking at the clock and wishing it would hurry up.
I also tried to send my students on two short breaks instead of one long break, thinking that would split the class time up into smaller and more manageable sections, but that flopped because everyone wanted to visit their friends in other classes during break.
I think the worst part is that even after thinking it over (and by “thinking it over” I actually mean “dwelling on how lame my class was”), I still don’t really know what I could have done differently to make my class not so lame.
