I can’t recall a time when I have been more nervous than when I walked into classroom 212 on Monday morning. It was like being back in middle school, seeing those small kids, feeling the barely-formed social dynamics like humidity in the air. I was terrified. Our lesson, however, seemed to work out. Despite a few technical glitches that came out of miscommunication and our lack of ability to prepare our lesson in the actual classroom, by the end of thirty minutes we had reached the point we wanted to reach. Almost all the students had a working knowledge of Google Docs, and some were even able to form well thought out ideas about what its potential virtues and vices might be.

It occurred to me, about half-way through the lesson, that one of the key components of teaching is knowing how the classroom dynamic works. This is something that can only be understood through spending time with any given class. As a visiting teacher I had no idea what these kids knew or were capable of, and I felt I wasn’t really able to provide a quality lesson without this information. In a broader sense we weren’t quite sure exactly where our lesson fit into the continuity of the class content-wise. No amount of correspondence with the teacher (and believe me, there was no lack in that respect) would have provided enough context to yield a completely fulfilling and seamless lesson. We just had to do the best we could with the situation, which was a valuable experience. It also increased my awareness of the importance of telos in teaching pedagogy: a skilled teacher can move toward a distinct set of end-of-term goals with each lesson, while an unskilled teacher provides decontextualized lessons that don’t fit into a larger teleological model of learning. I thought our lesson fit well enough into the current of the class to be useful, but it didn’t feel unified with the rest of the curriculum.

-epn