W19D95 (Tuesday) So today is a little nervous making. Let me explain. Yesterday I had a less than successful elective class and I let it color the whole day. It made me feel as though everything before that moment in time was a failure. An all or nothing feeling. Changing that is something I have been working very hard to eliminate from my language, my vocabulary, my thinking, my persona. There are weeks when I really feel like I've done it; I am now a confident teacher with practices which are worthy of praise.
And then a little snag in the road comes along, and I go, yes, everything I do is crap, pardon my language. But upon retrospect, as I look on yesterday, it's merely a little hiccup on the on the path. So today, it was important for me to simply go forward, learning from that a little snag. With more preparedness, a little less flexibility, and a lot more confidence that what I will do will not just succeed, but it will be worthy of the practice I have created. I'm beginning call elective my own. Today I created station; setup is always challenging for me, since I'm not an art teacher. Oftentimes, when I do stations, it becomes unwieldy, it becomes hard to manage, it becomes self fulfilling, oh, it's going to be a mess, and it is a mess.
But today, I had a different attitude about that. Today, I had four stations, (if you count the interviews) and I have set everything up so that when students come in, I'll give them a brief overview, and then I'll have them work. We don't have another event for a bit, so that helps me use our time setting up for Winnie the Pooh tomorrow.
I also discovered that perhaps we can beef up some of our backdrops by using some of the materials that I'm actually going to use for the peace flags, the prayer flags, the wish flags that we're going to do an art club on the 7th of February. I have a lot on my plate, yet the only pressure I am feeling is what I am bringing on myself. I need to let it go a little bit and be more optimistic in the moment, even when things go wrong as they did yesterday.