So one of the things about how happy you are in life is how you perceive situations. If you focus on the negative, then the situation will suck, and you'll feel like everything sucks, and then everything actually will suck. If you focus on the positive, a.k.a. look on the bright side, then even if there are negatives, you won't feel as suck or even you'll feel better even if it did suck. At least, I feel like perception functions this way for me.
Anyways, what I'm trying to say is that I'm normally a cheerful person, but I will gossip and bash things and actions so quickly. If I start even looking at one negative thing, then the rest of the conversation goes to shit, and it becomes a "misery loves company" gab fest.
This is what I mean.
I was planning a lesson with a teacher, and the thing is, our students have finished the textbook, and the last grammar point in the textbook was past tense, both regular and irregular. We've been doing activities to practice the past tense for like three weeks now. So I asked my teacher if maybe we could change it up a bit and review some other topic or just not make past tense the focus of the entire class time. She agreed that past tense was getting old (ha ha). Then I asked her what we should do, and she seemed to be at a loss and kept passing the idea ball back to me.
I suggested that maybe one activity we could do is listen to a piece of a popular American song and have students fill in the blanks for words they should know in the song.
Ah, that's too difficult for them. (In Japanese)
My teacher training kicked in. Then I suggested how to scaffold the activity- how we could modify the activity to still address the same listening objective but put the task to the ability level of the students, "Okay, how about instead of blanks, I'll give them two or three words to choose from and they have to circle the word they hear?"
Hmmm, but that sounds not fun.
And I started to get a little frustrated with the teacher who had no ideas of her own but shot down any of mine that didn't seem fun or interesting enough.... I was thinking, hey, we're the teachers. We can try to make class fun, but at the end of the day, the point is to learn something.
Anyways, then she was like, How about they just learn the song?
"Wait, do you mean like, I read and sing to them, and they repeat??"
"Yeah!"
"That's it?"
"Hmmm, maybe we can play the telephone game with words from the song."
"Uh, what do you mean?"
And so basically, our lesson was to take small portions of lyrics from the chorus and have the students use it as their message to send down the rows for a game of telephone, and then we would review, pronounce, and translate the lyrics and show them how they're actually the lyrics of the song we would sing.
I felt really frustrated because I felt like there was no strong objective or purpose to the lesson other than to have fun in an English context, and I ended up ranting to a few friends about how I felt like we were wasting time and that I felt like my potential was being wasted, yadayadaya....
Anyways, just as I started to divulge this story to you, I already felt an emotional rise in me, and I want to rant. I want to be upset. I want to be dramatic and focus on all the negatives and find reasons to discredit this situation and stay unhappy about it. But, wtf. Really? Is this how I want to enter the classroom, with these feelings and expectations of the lesson being a bust? Do I want to resent my coworker and my job and feel useless and unappreciated?
No, no, no, no, no, no. This is all wrong, and I know it. As soon as I open my mouth to say something negative, I feel myself already turn into a Debbie Downer or whatever, and I feel bad. Why do I do this?
This is when I try to remember some advice I've heard over the years:
1. If you have nothing nice to say, then don't say anything at all.
2. For every negative, try to find three positives.
And so even though I keep making the mistake of violating rule 1, I try to then at least follow up with rule 2. However, I kinda didn't do rule 2 this time because I was being dumb, and it wasn't until I had fun doing the lesson two times in a row yesterday that I realized that there are positives to every situation and that I have to stop blinding myself to them.
The lesson, although still weak in the purpose department in my opinion, was a success in many other aspects. The kids were totally into it, and we sang for the majority of class, and my coteacher was super happy and delighted with the lesson. It didn't make sense for me to not celebrate the good outcomes, too.
So here we go:
Negative: Weak lesson purpose. I feel like my teacher training is being wasted.
Positives: I have to remember that in addition to teaching the English language formally, my job description also includes the tasks of trying to improve and increase English language learning MOTIVATION and teaching students about my CULTURE. Both of these other job tasks were definitely achieved 100%.
- I got to do a little presentation on pop music so the kids learned about Taylor Swift and One Direction, a little bit about their biographies, and what music of theirs is popular in America right now.
- I even showed them two study tools for using music to learn and practice English: lyricstraining.com and lyrics.com. A girl even came up after class and was like, can I get that URL, and I was like, yeah guuuuurl.
- The kids had fun singing, and I had fun singing with them, and they performed really well. Half or more could keep up with the natural speed of the song. This definitely boosts their confidence and was just fun.
- At the end of the day, even if I don't get to practice or teach a grammar point or vocabulary with the students, if I still help any of them feel good about English, even if it's one kid getting a URL or having a 30 second conversation with another, I am doing my job successfully. You can't win them all all the time as a teacher, and that's part of being a teacher. It's being flexible and just doing the best you can.
Look at that! Four positives! And I know there are more like me just feeling good after the lesson, and some other ones I mentioned above before this list, and just so many other things I achieved in this situation.
I really do love teaching and being in the classroom, but I have to remember to make the best of every situation and stop being a Negative Nancy because all these situations make the foundation for future situations and opportunities. If I look at all the good, stay flexible, and just try my best to improve on the bad, then I'll feel better and better and do my job better and better every day.
I know a lot people in similar work positions feel under-appreciated and purposeless and even upset or bored with their situation, but we have to remember the job we signed up for and we have to remember the role we're given and just fill it to the best of our abilities and then just focus on us and how to make the now good so that the future can be good. I know this job I have is temporary and that I'll be looking for better and more challenging (and better paying, ha ha) work after this, but for now, why not enjoy and make the best of what I've got now?
Thanks for reading all this blabbering if you've made it this far. I reflect a lot, and I try to be a better person, and I guess, this post was more for me, but I hope if you've got this far, you were entertained or even learned something from my own derpiness.
See you next time! I'll try to post more often!
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