patience – discovery

Practicum Day 1

“Wait a minute! Ms. Chiang, what are you doing in here?! It’s Monday, not Thursday.” E exclaimed when I walked into the classroom. We usually visit our classrooms on Thursdays, but for the next two weeks we are on our short practicum which means that we will be there daily from 8am-4pm.

I got home and decided to plan a lesson in preparation for Remembrance Day that is coming up, but I did not expect to be stumped for so long. I just kept sitting there and trying to figure out how to make a lesson out of the materials I could find. It was particularly difficult because I had to process the dynamic and personality of the class, and balance that with the criteria and concepts we discuss in so much depth in our Teacher Ed program.

Two hours later, and it came to me. It’s lovely how mental blocks are sometimes followed by a beautiful waterfall of ideas. It just takes patience.

“Is it that you can’t, or that you don’t want to?”

I am reading LouAnne Johnson’s “Teaching Outside the Box”. In one chapter she refers to the question that her mentor once asked his student: “Is it that you can’t, or that you want to?” He challenged his student to replace all his “can’ts” with “don’t want to”. The statement, “I can’t solve this problem” becomes “I don’t want to solve this problem”, which is usually false for most students. They do want to. They just don’t have the confidence or assertiveness to attack the problem and solve it. It is must easier to go with “I can’t”.

Today my student told me he “can’t be a leader”, and that his homeroom teacher always tells him so. I asked him, do you really think you can’t, or do you simply not want to?

No one wants to fail at anything. I know he wants to be a leader, to be trusted with responsibility. He just always assumed he “couldn’t”. So, he took on an apathetic attitude towards everything he tries. He lets things he tries disappoint him because he expects to disappoint. He shows indifference to protect himself from “failing”, which he assumes he will do if he tries. I told him that he must not take what his homeroom teacher assumes, to be his own assumption.

Today he realized he could (do anything), as long as he acknowledged that he wanted to.