Thursday February 9, 9:34 p.m.
I'm glad that I'm making this blog entry now instead of 24 hours earlier. If I had done it then, I would've given a far depressed and broody detail, and possibly given some hints about retiring from teaching, period (BTW, the Past Conditional was one of my lessons today).
Yesterday, I subbed for a second teacher at my new school; had three lessons in which the first one was kinda so-so, the second one absolutely sucked eggs, and the third was my lone saving grace. Man, I'm still not sure what made that middle class a crash n' burn....having 11 students of various nationalities, not quite knowing how to handle the lesson material, or just having the bad-day virus. I mean, it was a long time since I had students openly snickering away at me. If it hadn't been for that final class, I may have ended up handing in my resignation right then and there. It was simply not a great day for me. Usually, when I end up doing something I regret, I get some sort of physical distress as a premonition. The night before that trio, I couldn't sleep for hours. So, certainly last night, I was wondering if I'd had make a mistake by accepting employment at this school.
I'd even thought of just calling in sick today, but my moral backbone decided to start aching and basically forced me to head into work and just suck it up. For one thing, my bosses wouldn't have been too thrilled to scramble for another sub teacher in the wee hours of the morning, and for the other, I'm past the age of running away. So, I got in, having gone over the material the night before, and did the old college try. It was almost like night & day. I had the same three classes in the same order. I won over the first class, and with my second one, I started off by teaching them about the various nicknames of the Canadian coinage which was useful for them...after that, the respect, if not fully earned, did come back to a large degree. And of course, the third lesson remained good. It all ended up being a happy ending to a 2-day drama.
I'll be taking a week off from the school, which my bosses seemed to be OK about; after all, I'm a sub teacher...if I'm not available, I'm not available. I have Cozy's translations to do which will take time. Plus, it'll give me time to take a little breather to contemplate the past couple of days.
