It occurs to me that if a teacher knows what they’re doing, or if they are confident in an upcoming lesson, they may not be the best teacher.  Not to say that a good teacher doesn’t prepare – almost the complete opposite.  For example, if that confident teacher goes into a lesson and 2 minutes after the start is met with a room full of blank stares, not only should their confidence be shot, their lesson needs to be adapted.

A good teacher needs to be flexible; be ready for the unexpected.  If students are not understanding something, it’s the teacher’s job to back up and make sure that everyone is on the same page.  If there’s a snow day during Regents week at the end of the marking period, and you are being observed, and have a training in your room, and a new student, and an RTIC meeting – there’s no way to fully prepare for all of these things at once.  A teacher must be flexible.

I think that might be one of the best things about my job – besides getting to help kids learn – it’s never the same thing every day.  Yes, at times, it can be overwhelming and I am a person who likes to be able to plan for things.  However, over the years, I’ve learned the value of being flexible and rolling with the punches.

My very first experience with this was when I was in China.  We went with a group called ELIC for a summer, and were told that we would have the same kids for 4 weeks, have our own classroom, and teach conversational English to middle school and high school aged kids.  The group I went with to a small town north of Beijing was twice the size as some of the others, because they expected twice as many students.  When we got there, we discovered the importance of flexibility, and the inevitability of miscommunication.  The school we were housed in had advertised to their students 4 individual weeks, so we did not develop the strong relationships that we were looking forward to.  We did not have the oodles of students that they thought, so many of us had to share a classroom with 2 or 3 others from our team.  And since our school was scraping to get ANY students into our classes, we taught in an age range from 7 to 17 years old.  We needed to be very flexible.  Given all of these unexpected conditions, I would not change ANYTHING about my experience.  It was one of the best summers of my life.  I could still develop relationships with my students, and we taught each other a lot that summer.  Having smaller classes and co-teachers only made me yearn more for that style of teaching.  It was hard, and frustrating at times, but I loved every minute of it.

I guess a good teacher can be confident – confident in their ability to be flexible and knowledgeable enough in the subject matter to take a step back and think about how to better explain things to their students.