2nd videotape

The icing on the cake of my awful week of team teaching was that my worst lesson of the week was caught on video. My overall performance for the week was, in my opinion, horrendous. I am not sure why, but my ability as a teacher decreased significantly when teaching in front of my peers as compared to the students at summer school. Tuesday’s lesson (the taped one) was a borderline painful experience. It was bad for a host of reasons that I won’t bother to discuss. So I anticipated that watching the actual video would be an even more painful it experience. Surprisingly it wasn’t. This leads me to two possible conclusions: either (1) the videotape didn’t catch all my inefficiencies as teacher, or (2) I am too hard on myself. I would be inclined to favor conclusion (2) because in general I have always been hard on myself, but this would contradict my experiences in summer school when I often thought I was doing “good” and others around me thought I was not doing “good enough.”

If I learned anything from the video and this week in general it is that nerves sometimes restrict my teaching ability. As I discussed with js at one point, it is ok to be nervous and sometimes nerves actually help you to perform better. I believe this to be true sometimes for me, but also my nerves sometimes get the better of me and act as a restricting force on my teaching.