This past week of teaching was one of the most successful I’ve had yet. Teaching English (and I imagine teaching in general) can be a fickle trade, and I’ve observed two general ways to immerse oneself in it.

Some teachers simply check out mentally and emotionally, content to mime the teaching motions with a thick layer of apathy. I actually can’t do that…teaching for me is emotionally submitting myself to whatever storms break in the classroom.

On days when teaching is stale – in fact, so slow that I can feel the classroom time itself slowly going stale – or when yelling at my rowdy 7th graders wears thin my voice and patience or when my banking students stare at me with blank frustrated faces – when those days hit, I’m a wreck. I feel awful, and it can ruin my evening. I feel as though I’ve wasted their time and I’ve wasted mine.

However, on days when teaching has gone well, my spirits soar. This past Friday was one such day. With my morning students, we discussed the future of Vietnam as I guided them through Superstruct, a massive Alternate Reality Game about life in 2019. My hope is that it at least immerses them in issues of far more importance than when to use “might” v. when to us “could.” I played music with my 9th graders, which had the obvious boon of exciting everyone. But I had them complete lyric sheets, which was actually extremely difficult for many of them, but it was a challenge that deeply engaged them. After playing it a couple times, I went through the song phrase by phrase, telling them what words they should be listening to. I could see the excitement in their eyes when the jumble of sounds they once heard suddenly coalesced into something coherent. The only downside was that I had to listen to 3 hours of angsty teen music – and why the hell are 9th graders listening to these true love and break up songs?!? And am I really old enough to be complaining about those angsty teenagers?!?

Anyway, with my banking students, I facilitated an lively conversation about the merits of marriage, a conversation which had many winding tangents. I think the most interesting was discussing the differences between sex and gender…

All in all, I ended my longest day teaching elated. I still feel like a farce of a teacher, but on Friday, I felt that I had accomplished something useful. And everyone had fun, which is always a plus.