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On Tuesday, I began the following rant:

I just had one of the worst teaching days ever! Yes, I know I said that only about a month ago, but this one was worse!

What made it worse was not so much the actual class, even though the students were woefully unprepared for class itself, but the fact that this was the day my supervisor was sitting in on class. It felt like I was pulling teeth to get them to talk (and I know someone who pulls teeth and he makes it sound easier than this was) Then there were the several times when I felt awkward, out of control, and like I was talking a different language - one the students themselves didn't speak.... which I suppose is what I was doing, since I was talking poetry language, and they hadn't even read the poems I was talking about!

I couldn't figure it out at first. I thought maybe I was more nervous than usual because my supervisor was there (even though I only felt marginally nervous by the time class started) and that's why class seemed to be limping along, but then at one point I just stopped and asked how many hadn't read the poems. Half the class admitted to it, which means that probably 3/4 of them didn't actually read.

We didn't even have anything due today. What are they going to be like on the day the paper's due?

I despair.

And today?

Today was better. Not stellar. But soooo much better than Tuesday. Either the students who hadn't read the material masked it better, or they actually had read it.

Maybe it was me. I was so disgusted with the class on Tuesday that when I walked into the classroom, all I could think about is how much I really didn't want to be there and how unfair it was that the students could skip class whenever they didn't want to go, but the teacher can't. And then the first thing I get from them is that some of them couldn't figure out how to find the online source. Hello?! We've been downloading stuff for weeks! Does this mean you haven't downloaded anything? Or that you've forgotten everything you know about downloading?

It's a good thing no one sits in the front row because otherwise they would've heard me grind my teeth when I turned to the board to write a few notes.

But then things changed. The students started talking. One particularly brilliant one gave such a concise and descriptive summary of the first reading, that all I said was 'great! that sums it up' and moved on.

I wonder if it was the humor of the situation? After all, the second poem we talked about was called "Souvenir de Monsieur Poop"... trying saying that to a class with a straight face!

They did think that Stevie Smith's poem reminded them of Shel Silverstein's, and many of them were fans of his... my kids are fans of his too, which makes me feel so much older than those students now...


On the other hand, I did also only have three quarters of the students there, which might account for why it went as well as it did - the slackers stayed home so they weren't dead weight in the classroom.