Morning. So as educators, we've all had teaching moments that w e will remember
forever. Really good ones and really bad ones. Now, when we have exhilarating
moments, we rarely critically analyze why things went well. We just assume, "Oh, I
did a good job of organizing. I was well prepared. I did good."
But when you have disastrous teaching moments, you really sit back and analyze
what went wrong, why things went wrong, and what would you do in the future to
prevent such problems, right? So I'm going to share with you one such disastrous
story that shaped my life as an educator and I tried very hard to find humorous
ways to make a disastrous story light and funny; did not succeed. So please,
laugh at the wrong times, laugh when- when I'm not laughing so I
can laugh with you. So this was my first very first tenure-track position and I
was asked to teach a class outside my specialty area, okay? So the class was
curriculum for students with emotional disturbances. My specialization is in
severe developmental and intellectual disabilities so there's still some
difference in content. Now in my field of special education, a lot of people come
into the field because they have a family member with a disability, they
want to know- want to know more about teaching techniques, and curricula, etc. So
this was like a test of credibility for an instructor, because there were many
students in this class who actually had severe emotional disturbances themselves
and were in the program to find solutions for problems in their lives. So
my very first class, okay? Actually, I have to tell you this: so many students in
that class were non-traditional students. Some of them worked in juvenile
detention centers, two of them were prison guards, and one actually was a
bouncer in a nightclub. He was six and a half
foot tall, burly, and actually slept a lot in class, and his name was angel, okay? So
one of those days, when I had to give an exam in class, this was at a time when we
didn't have online courses everything was on paper, and I had asked a staff
person in my department to make 38 copies of the exam. So the staff person
made copies, put it on my desk, and then when I was ready to go teach class I
picked up the packet and went. Mistake number one: if you ask somebody to make
copies for you, always count if you have the appropriate number of copies, okay?
And I did not. So while distributing the exams, I
realized that I was three copies short. My class was in a different building
than my office and so at that time we used to have copy-machine-specific copy
cards in that University. You could not use that card across any other
departments copy machines. So I'm lost. I'm thinking, "What do I do? How do I make
three copies? I need copies more." So I got one student to volunteer to be a proctor
in the class, keep an eye on the students so I could go make copies. Mistake number
two, right? You never leave the class if you're short of something, you want to
make copies, you stay in class send a student outside and say, "Go make copies."
Because they know where all the copy machines are and you can always pay them
later, right? So that was mistake number two, but when I returned 15 minutes later
the Proctor told me here are the names of six people in class who were cheating
while you were gone. So I said, "Okay, thank you." And then I let them three people
work on their exams. So then when those six students were done with the exam,
they came to hand in the paper I said, "Please stay back after class. I need to
talk with you, okay?" So everybody's gone and those six people stay and I asked
them, "So what happened when I was gone for 15
minutes from this class?" Mistake number three: you never have a pack of six
students with emotional disturbances all together as a group trying to talk to
them about what went wrong. When the problem was with the instructor, right? So
long story short: these six students tried to find all kinds of excuses but
then later they cornered the proctor in the parking lot,
threatened to hurt her, dented her car, and things went really wrong. So that
Proctor came and talked to me later on about what happened and so I had to go
talk to the department chair and said, "Well, we need to do something." So the
department chair brought all the six students in the
office and said, if they threatened to hurt anybody or even do anything that
was considered an act of violence, they would be expelled from the University.
Well, that was no comfort because the damage was already done. So mistake
number four: when students threatened an act of violence you have to involve the
campus police. You can't just, I mean, you have to talk to the department chair, but
you can't worry about, "Oh, departments name is going to be out there in the
university. People will know we didn't do a good job of, you know, classroom
management," stuff like that. But long story short, hindsight is 20/20, right?
This never happened ever again before and I'm telling you, over the years I've
become pretty good at teaching. This is an evidence of that. I wouldn't have
gotten a scarf from the University if I- if that was not the case, but think
about- think about all the wonderful lessons that I would not have learned if
I had made- if I had counted all the copies at the start of the, you know,
class. So sometimes we learn so many lessons when things go wrong, so just to
show all the those people who are kind of relatively new to teaching, or trying
to find your way back, or whatever, keep in
mind: no incident is actually a disastrous incident. Even when it is,
because there's something to learn for every single thing that happens wrong in
life. Thank you.