Friday, I was psyched about the playlist I was going to use as I subbed for Jay's indoor cycle class. It was as close as I would be subbing to Juneteenth, so I had constructed the class around Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Tina Turner, Otis Redding, Della Reese, Jon Batiste, Fantasia Barrino, even Della Reese and Bobby McFerrin. I always play some music at a low level while people are arriving, but I didn't know until a few minutes before the start of class that I couldn't make the volume go any higher. (Coincidentally, one of the pieces of feedback I got after last week's observation was that I should make the music louder, and here I was unable to do so.). I tried a few trouble shooting ideas, but none of them worked. I attempted to change to a portable speaker, but I didn't have the right cord to connect with my iPod (yes, I still use one). I started class and apologized for how quiet it would be. One of the directors came in a few minutes later to attempt to fix the system, but she couldn't make it work either. A person entered with a cord for the portable player. It did make it louder, but there was some kind of glitch in it that wouldn't allow it to play the vocal track. I kept going with the class while attempting to make things better with the music. Thankfully, the members of the class were very patient, and we all got a good workout (but I was bummed that my great playlist wasn't be heard - I'll definitely use it another time).
Throughout the class, I remembered several of the questions Julie had asked me when she interviewed me for the job. "What experience do you have with adapting to things when they don't go according to plan? How do you adapt?" As with most questions, my teaching experience had a lot to inform the answer. Things interrupt the plan all the time in the classroom. It turns out that students don't have the prerequisite knowledge they need to understand today's lesson. The fire alarm goes off while you are in the middle of a critical problem, or worse, mid-lab experiment. A spider crawls across someone's desk (if you aren't an educator, trust me, this VERY much interferes with whatever plan you have for the day). My answer to Julie when she asked was that I stayed focused on the goal, not the method for achieving it. That's definitely what I had to do on Friday, but it was not the first time, and I'm sure it won't be the last.
Students need to see that the goal is what matters. It's okay to get a little flummoxed while you figure out how to shift gears when the video won't play or internet is down when you had a great digital activity planned, but you shouldn't spend the whole period on it. You should ask yourself what the learning goal of that experience was. Can you accomplish it through direct instruction even if you didn't plan to? Can you teach tomorrow's lesson today and hope the internet will be back in strength tomorrow? Can students work on a project today so you have time to try to make the video work for tomorrow? Moving the learning forward is the main goal, not the ideal order or method you had planned.
In addition to students seeing that the goal matters, they will see that setbacks don't have to be fatal. In his new book, Uprise, Kevin Washburn talks about having A and B goals. The A goal is what you want to achieve if everything goes as planned, but the B goal should be your definition of success if conditions are not ideal. If you model this for students, they will benefit on something larger than the academic level. They will see resilience, a characteristic they will very much need "in real life," as they say. And people do notice. Young or old, students notice the teacher's response to things. On Friday, one of the senior gentlemen in the room came up to me afterward and said he liked that I maintained a good attitude and wanted to know when I would be teaching again. Teenagers will notice too.
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