Confessions: Unedited

I have a confession to make:

I am a snob.

Let me paint last night's picture for you so you will better understand where this (shocking!) confession is coming from.

I left work yesterday afternoon just in time to drive the hour it takes me to get to Murfreesboro, where I am taking a night class in order to get my teaching certification. I fought the usual battle of trying to find a decent parking spot, (I lost) walked ten minutes in the FREEZING cold to get to my building, and arrived, flushed, to class.

Then I remembered-students would be teaching the class today. The assignment was to teach something from your content area (math, music, etc.) using either a debate or a method called jigsaw, which is basically where students are put into groups to learn something, then are re-shuffled into new groups where they teach each other what they learned in their first group.

So the first guy, a P.E. major, saunters up front to "teach" his lesson. Now I don't want to stereotype people, but in my past school experience, the coaches I had were not the best teachers. I recall a high school geography class taught by one of our football coaches where all we did was color pictures of the continents and students were wildly out of control. I remember shoes flying through the air and a girl screaming at her boyfriend, "I hate you John!" while John, obviously unphased by her angry display, reassured the rest of the class by repeating ever so nonchalantly, "She don't mean that. She don't mean that." So anyway, this P.E. major saunters up front to teach, and in typical coach fashion, he is clearly unprepared. He introduces his debate topic-something to do with football, and sets us loose. Well, we talked and talked about football. Why people get so passionate about this sport I'll never know. Finally we stated our points and that was that. Nice teaching job, eh?

The next girl, an art major, was more much prepared. She had a powerpoint presentation, art supplies for us to make a mini-project with, pictures, and handouts. And so the night continued. Over the course of the next three hours I had to get in groups twelve different times, often through embarrassing ways such as "make the sound of the animal on your card to find your group members," where I learned about things like instrument families, physical education teaching methods (snore) etc., until finally it was the last girls turn to go. And man was her topic a doozy-German. So I tweeted my way to my first group (Yep, the picture on my card was a bird. Hey at least I wasn't a sheep. Baaa!). And this is the part where my being a snob comes in. I looked down at my handout. "Congregate the following verbs," the instructions said.

Um...doesn't she mean conjugate? Surely if you are a language major you know the difference between conjugate and congregate, right? I mean how would one congregate verbs anyway? Write them down and put them in a pile so they can hang out together? Or should I put them down on a church pew somewhere so that they are part of the congregation? Teacher...I don't get it.

I smugly slashed through the word "congregate" and wrote "conjugate" above it-I get some sort of strange satisfaction from editing other people's work-before I noticed the next error. She had typed "backer" for baker. Oh dear. But you know what? Even then, I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. I know how it is when you are typing things in a rush and words get misspelled or overlooked. That is UNTIL another classmate pointed out her "backer" mistake and she said to her friend, "Why didn't you point that out when you proofread this for me?"

So not only did she read over it, but she had her friend, another aspiring teacher, read over it as well. And neither one picked up on either of those two mistakes?! If this is the future of America's teachers...well...I'm glad I don't have any children. It looks like homeschooling could be in my future someday...

So yes, I am somewhat of a snob when it comes to judging other people's teaching styles and editing their papers. But when it came time to comment on how each student did, I was very kind. After all, they will be judging me when I go to teach next week...eefs!

Oh and just in case you were wondering, these are the sentences my group came up with to share with the class:

"Ich mag ringsherum schlafen."
"Ich trinke Bier für das Geld."

Look it up if you really wanna know.