Fun note - assuming that each of these only take me an hour to listen to and write the response to (which they don't, typically speaking it takes me a lot longer than that to both listen, come up with a response, write the response, find pictures, and then finally publish it) I finally hit episode 40, which would mean 40 hours of work done, which is one whole week of work.
And I'm still listening to stuff produced in 1996.
This is going to be a long project.
Brutal honesty time - I'm going to be a professor at a certified university teaching students the basic principles of the English language and my only teaching experience (minus things religious related like my mission and teaching Sunday school) is teaching swimming lessons at Sunrise pool.
That feeling right there that you had for me. That feeling where you felt like you were on the top of a high dive and you were really wondering what in the world you had just gotten yourself into because there was no singular way that you were going to get off of that platform without hurting yourself, that is the feeling that I have every single day as the start of school starts. That feeling is why I can't go to sleep unless I am ragged tired and hardly able to hold my eyes open, because this is what I think about late at night if I'm given the opportunity to think.
Late at night when my brain is allowed to think on its own, I go to the classroom and start thinking up situations. I start thinking of testing, I start thinking of writing assignments, I start thinking about how I'm going to grade them, I start thinking about commuting to the school, I start to think about what I'm going to wear, I start thinking about how I'm going to look, I start to think about how the students are going to think about me, I start thinking about falling on my face and trying to make it look like I intended to do the entire mess of things, I start to think about telling my students that it's my first real teaching job, I start to think about everything BUT sleeping because up to this point the only lesson I've ever taught that hasn't been in a church has been swim lessons.
Remember how I just wrote that I haven't been afraid of something in a long while? This job, the potential wrecking of my mind that it could do to me, is something that I am afraid of. I'm excited about it, but also entirely fearful of it. It's both the golden goose that can make me exactly what I want and grant me my wish, and the giant that can crush my head between its finger and thumb like it's nothing. This job is everything that I want, but at the same time dreadful because when it comes to lessons, and teaching those lessons, I have no clue what I am doing.
The worst part about it is that as it draws closer and the university keeps telling me to not worry and how the class is a "class in a box" and everything is already made up for me, the more I realize that it's not. They keep telling me that, but the truth is, they came up with the rough idea of it, I'm still trying to figure out what half of it even means, let alone how to convey something that I'm still trying to grasp myself.
I'm supposed to be teaching hard grammar principles to students.
If you haven't noticed in my writing on here, grammar isn't exactly my strong point. I can write, I can communicate, but I play with the rules as much as I want to get what I want said. I don't know all of the technical terms behind things, I don't know what I'm doing, I just know how it works and how to make it do what I want, and somehow I have to convey that play of the English language and all of the cool things that you can do with it, but can't do with it at the same time, to ESL and poorly performing students.
And the best I can do is show them how to do a solid flip turn in the deep end of Sunrise pool.
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