Disaster is always at the door....

I was not affected by the chaos from Tuesday night. Our group is one of the good ones. We rarely have a participant or a WSU student missing. Tuesday was no different. So, I can't say that I have worked well with disaster at CAPES! but I have had several teaching situations that I would consider to be a disaster.

Typically when I have chaos around me- I just try to survive it. I check my watch every 15 seconds and just pray the bell will ring soon. I suppose this is the weaker thing to do, that I should challenge myself to still think skill development and getting my original plan to work despite the challenges in a disaster, but at this point in my teaching experiences I am having a difficult time thinking back to a time in which I have done that.

I feel way more accomplished as a teacher when I have a structured, well designed lesson plan and then the implementation goes off without a hitch. But then again, I can't say that I have an experience to compare it to in which I not only survived chaos, but I did it by coming up with a great lesson plan on the fly and being able to implement it, survive AND teach my students something. I think that when the time comes in my career where I can do that, I will really look at myself and think- I'm a darn good teacher!
As Dr. Z is well aware of, I tend to panic when my plan does not go accordingly and when I panic I get self conscious and I am unable to really think through to a solution. This is certainly something I am working on, and Dr. Z has taught me the coping mechanism to get through it: STOP, BREATHE, THINK!! Usually, when you can just stop yourself, breathe to clear your head and forget about the panic in your head, thoughts will follow. And good solutions will find their way to your brain.

From here on out instead of survival mode checking my watch constantly, I am going to Stop, Breathe and Think about how I can implement skill development instead of just surviving. I think that situation will be much more rewarding to me than those lessons that are well designed and go off without a hitch.