training

I’ve reached the end of week four of training. Soon I’ll take my TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certification exam, and then in 9 days I take the long flight from LA to Munich and then connect on to Budapest. By my count I’ve done about 25 full lesson plans and countless partial ones over the course of the four weeks. Yet, as much as I’ve learned and practiced, there’s no doubt in my mind that nothing can prepare you to teach except simply doing it. For example, we learned a lot about classroom management in our lectures. We talked about the typical root causes of the problems, techniques for how to deal with them, and important ways to prevent problems before they start. But when time came and I was standing in front of a class that was misbehaving everything I had learned was gone. I don’t know if the fact that it was a class of my fellow teachers pretending to be deviant teenagers makes it better or worse. Nonetheless, I handled the situation pretty badly (though I did remember not to give them a good knock on the head), but when I face discipline problems next fall it’s not the lectures I’m going to remember. I’ll think of how I botched my peer class, and how to avoid repeating the same mistakes. I find this both frustrating (why did I sit through all those lectures?) and encouraging (I think I’ll only get better as a teacher). It’s a good thing God doesn’t call us to be perfect, or even successful, just faithful.