I have a great hairstylist. When I leave her chair, I feel beautiful. She always gives me a great cut. Then she uses products that makes my hair do things I couldn't have dreamed of. However . . . when I get home . . . with that same great cut . . . and use those same great products, the results are not the same!
Beautiful? No! I feel like a junior high girl standing alone at the dance.
Yesterday I had those feelings all over again but my hair had nothing to do with it.
When I am in the morning classes and watching our instructors engage in their expertise, I'm amazed. They elicit the words they want us to practice with simple stories or pictures. They drill us on pronunciation or concept check on the grammar structure or the methodology and we show definite signs of understanding. It's a beautiful thing. Truly.
Then with those very products in my hands, I make a mess -- the kind of mess that's painful to watch. I don't quite get the pronunciation correct myself. Then I let corrupted pronunciation get by and even say, "Good" when it wasn't. I forget to check if the students even have the meaning before I start them practicing the word. I talk too much. They talk too little. And grammar? Oh, please! Don't get me started!
Forty minutes of teaching doesn't sound like a long time. But ask the junior high girl at that dance who has a zit and whose hair is frizzed and going in directions even God didn't intend. Forty minutes can be an eternity!
At the end of teaching the class yesterday the best thing I could say was that I had gotten through it.
Fortunately, my instructor had another perspective. "If you had been teaching this since 1968 [at he has] rather than an hour an a half, and done what you did, you might have a reason to beat yourself up. Give yourselves a break!"
Ahh . . . hairdressers and instructors, they know all the right things to do and say.
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