A year in 55 minutes or less

Today was the last day of orientation at school. One part of my duties today was to teach a class teaching the parents of the students I have how to teach them at home in writing.

(Confused yet?) 

I have some neuroses when it comes to teaching that I need to get over, and every year that goes by I get better at this. A large one is the fact that most of these moms have been homeschooling their kids all along, and their kids are middle schoolers, so they have been schooling longer than I have been teaching. Many of these moms are also old enough to be MY mom. It has been so ingrained in me to respect my elders and be deferential that my first year teaching at ICS I found it difficult to tell these homeschool moms what to do with their kids. It's gotten better. I'm entering my 3rd year teaching at ICS and I only sometimes doubt myself as the "expert" in the classroom. I know I know the material, and I know I know how to teach, but occasionally I feel really young and inexperienced when I am talking to the parents... mostly because I am, in fact, young and inexperienced. 

So this class I taught today, geared at helping parents help their kids at home when doing my writing assignments, felt a little tricky. I was trying to equip them in 55 minutes or less with the tools they will need all year. I found myself frequently reminding the parents that everything I said was about where we are GOING to be eventually, not where I expect everyone to be on Day 1. It was hard to boil down the highlights of what I teach in a school year into one class. I was also a little worried about how the transitional families were going to take what I was saying. I kept praying this week that they would just be open to hearing me and not be stuck in the routine of what has been done all along. They were that and then some. The parents made it easy to talk to them. The only hiccup was that many parents wanted to take my class but had another one conflicting. I was going to record and podcast it, but I couldn't get the recorder turned on. Tomorrow I'm going to try to recreate what I said, based on the handout I gave, and post it for those families. 

After that I had 6th grade parent orientation with the parents and my co-teacher. Now, I have some neuroses, but I don't get nervous talking in front of people anymore. For some reason, when I got up in front of the parents, I was attacked by nerves. It has literally been years since I was nervous speaking in front of people. The families almost all know who I am because they had William last year. There were just a couple newbies, so I don't know what my problem was. I probably shouldn't worry about it but I came away feeling like I made a poor impression. 

Starting today, I was mostly concerned with my writing class and not at all worried about my orientation... my writing class went really smoothly and then I bombed. I'm sure this is one of those times where I'm supposed to be learning an important lesson about life, but I sure don't know what it is.