Friday



Me, sitting at my desk, struggling to finish my reading. 

I turn to my roommate:

"No matter how hard this is and how much I am struggling right now, this is still better than teaching. This is 'pain' that I'm willing to go through"

then my roommate says:

"Yes because as a student, if you don't know what you're doing, it's part of the process, but as a teacher, if you don't know what you're doing..."

Me:

"...then you feel like a failure! yeah..."

*Don't get me wrong, I love teaching and I love my students. It's just that I sometimes feel that I am not competent enough or experienced enough to teach. Also, the teaching environment that I was in was too much for me to handle, I felt lost most of the time. My self-efficacy as a teacher just went down. I needed to get out of that environment, and I did.

Comments

  1. ZAugust 23, 2013 at 11:08 PM

    i really agree with this. i miss learning full-time and/because/so i feel like a failure pretty much every day. i know there's always something new to learn from each lesson we have with the kids, but making mistakes just demotivates me wayy too easily.

    that said, yest i was teaching a girl grammar (she was doing some independent exercise i prepared) and she asked me stuff about past tense and what's the difference between did/was/had and why sometimes past tense verbs can be attached to another past tense verb, but not other times; eg. 'did gripped' is wrong, but 'had gripped' is okay. it's crossed my mind before, but i've never really considered it that thoroughly before, but the presence of the student forced me to think harder for a quick answer. and then i realised that 'had gripped' is past perfect, not simple past (and 'was/did' can never be attached to a past tense word/past participle).

    ok this might be mindless stuff for you two (TT__TT) but it was quite a revelation to me and i felt quite proud of myself when my student understood. just a bit je la. haha.

    ReplyDelete
  2. RKAAugust 24, 2013 at 7:03 AM

    Haha. Actually thank you for this. I've never thought about it before.

    For me, personally, grammar just makes sense, I can't explain (most of) it, but I sort of know if it's wrong by the way it sounds/looks? Not sure if I'm making any sense to you. But that's why I get nervous when students ask me, "Miss, why is it like this but not like that? and in this one you can use this but that one cannot?" And when I fail to explain and make them understand, I feel like a total failure.

    But there are also other reasons why I didn't want to be there (I think you know why).

    Postgraduate is super hard, Jo and I have not been out of our rooms for 3 days now? Loser gile life. Haha but Alhamdulillah, definitely grateful to be here.



    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ZAugust 24, 2013 at 6:05 PM

      yeah it's hard to try to make sense of grammar since we picked it up implicitly, so now i struggle gak la to make my students understand sometimes. so far they kinda get it (i think? haha) but i think i understand some concepts (eg. present/past perfect) better so i feel a bit more confident to explain those concepts.

      re: postgrad life, at leats you have each other, so you won't be too antisocial hahaha. <3

      p/s - one of the things i'm scared abt doing postgrad is actually doing it by myself. i know i'll be a total himono onna (jo knows what this means, lol)

      Delete

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