The other day I got to sit in on a Year 7/6th Grade Geography lesson to familiarize myself with the class before I have to start teaching them in the coming weeks. Yeah, my specialty is religion (and just barely), and yeah, I only really realized that Weather and Climate are two distinct concepts last week, but for some ridiculous reason I’m supposed to be teaching children about Geography.
During this first class the teacher made the foolish assumption that I can in any way be trusted to answer questions about maps as she announced to the class that “Miss X--- (me) is more than capable of helping you if I can’t get to you.” This invited an army of small children to wave their hands at me for help.
To complicate the matter of my inability to give meaningful analysis of a map, I also zoned out while the teacher was giving out instructions on what information to draw from the map and put into a table. So then I ended up with the lethal combination on my hands of having no fucking clue how to find any information nor any idea what to do with said information even if eventually and miraculously found. What compounded my embarrassment was this: after the teacher had finished giving the instructions and while I was sitting there thinking, “Oh Jesus, I’ve really fucked myself over again by daydreaming again, there’s no recovering from this one…,” the teacher asked some little dude with glasses in the front row to repeat the instructions for the rest of the class.
See, there was a glorious little moment where I thought, “Thank God, another chance!” and I heard the little nerd say as much as “Well…” before I caught a glance of the field outside the window and started thinking about what a heartbreakingly old country England is, and I started imagining Victorians ambling through the field being ashamed of their legs, and peasants in the Middle Ages walking through the field trying to catch the plague, and various blue pagan peoples running around centuries before that, and then I started thinking about dinosaurs. Specifically about cavemen riding dinosaurs through this field. Yes, I know cavemen never rode dinosaurs, but this is why I teach religion as opposed to science/history. Well, by the time I woke up from my mini coma all I heard was the teacher saying, “Yes, well done, thank you.” And then all you could hear in my head was a very loud “SHIT. ON. IT.”
I have to say, even after “helping” kids with this activity for a solid 40 minutes I still genuinely have no idea what they were supposed to be doing. However, I’m pretty proud of how well I managed to cover my complete ineptitude. The kids would ask me, “Miss, I’m having trouble finding things to put in my chart, can you help?” And I’d take their maps in my hand, stroke my chin very meaningfully, and silently shit my pants. The kids didn’t realize I was having a panic attack because I’d cover it with a very solemn “Ah, mmhhmm” and a bit of a nod. Then I’d hand them back their map and say in my most teacherly way, “Well, take a look at the map and why don’t you just describe to me what you see? Then I’ll come back in a few minutes and you can let me know how you’re getting on.”
The response of most of the children to my utter uselessness was to simply give me a suspicious look and get on with their work, but some little jerks who actually wanted to learn gave me some follow-up questions. One asked, “Is this a hill?” He pointed at a bunch of squiggles and dots that seemed to be completely indistinguishable from the thousands of other squiggles and dots on the damn thing. To my untrained eyes, if that one spot he pointed at was indeed a hill then clearly the rest of the map had to be just one massive hill. And, for that matter, ALL OF ENGLAND was a hill. So I once again took the map, pretended to give it a meaningful glance and intellectual frown, shat myself, and then calmly abandoned all responsibility: “That’s a great question. Why don’t you discuss it with your neighbor and then let me know what you guys decide, okay?”
I know that as a teacher you shouldn’t be ashamed to admit that you don’t know the answer to something. But surely there’s a limit to how many times you can say, “I have no idea” in any given lesson before the kids start to suspect (quite correctly) that you are a shit teacher.
Another child pointed at a line and asked, “I don’t know what this is. Is it a railway?” This child, too, was assured that he had asked a great question, and then told, “What do YOU think?” His response was to look at me as though I were completely drunk, because this is a Religious Education teacher question. “What do you think?” is my default question for getting kids to share their own thoughts and opinions about questions with no wrong answer. Well, I say that like it’s some kind of carefully crafted weapon in my pedagogical arsenal, but actually I usually only use it as a response when I in no way understood what the hell the student just asked me. The key thing though is that it invites an extremely open-ended response. However, in geography it either IS a fucking railway or it isn’t. You can’t sort of be a railway.
So, long story short, I’m so far proving to be an absolutely useless geography teacher.
Don’t get too worried though—it wasn’t all bad. To put it mildly, the kids think I am a certified badass. Not because any aspect of my personality is in any way actually badass, but rather because they think my accent is basically miraculous. To them, when I open my mouth a combination of gold and Katy Perry music streams out. When I spoke to a small group of kids for the first time this one kid actually looked like he was so overwhelmed by my awesomeness that (if he remains in such awe) he might just have to consider investing in Depends for my classes. Liberated by his certain loss of control over his bladder, he called out in a voice filled with reverent wonder, “HOW DID YOU GET THAT ACCENT?” Umm, well, 22 out of your 23 years lived in the US tends to do it, but I wish I had asked him to give me his own hypothesis. Maybe I’m really from Essex but this is the teacher voice I put on? Maybe I had a stroke?
Do you think I’m sad that I am loved solely for my accent? Bitch please, I am sooooo gonna milk this. While I may be a completely inept geography teacher, at least my ego remains as inflated as ever. Thank God for that.
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