Chris' Practicum Post #7

Hours this week-2.5 (1-Sunday School, 1.5-worship)

This week we had a pretty short lesson. Our class was meeting like usual but the teacher never showed up. It was nearly 9:50 when he finally showed up and our class started at 9:15. He was pretty late and you could tell he felt bad. 

In light of this event, we pulled one of the minister’s in to teach an impromptu lesson. It was interesting to see him scrambling around to get something together while sitting in front of the class. If there was one thing that I could say that this made me learn, it is that a teacher should always have a lesson that they can go back to without any preparation and teach it to just about any age group. If this had been the case with this replacement, who was asked at the last second, he would not have had to scramble to get a lesson together for us. 

Once he finally got going, it was interesting to see how nervous he was. It was like he had never taught a class in his life. He stumbled over a lot of words and seemed to be unsure of what he wanted to talk about. It made me think of someone in a dark room, who is just reaching out and grabbing whatever they can and giving it to someone else. It was probably very intimidating for the poor guy because he was not used to working with college age students and wasn’t really sure how a “typical” class would go. 

There was one good thing about this, it was a change of pace. It was nice to have someone different and someone who did things a little differently in comparison with our regular teacher. He did a decent job of making it interesting and keeping us all attentive to what was going on. Not an easy thing to do sometimes with a bunch of tired college students. Overall, it was a decent class for a pretty messed up morning in which a poor, unprepared teacher got thrown to the wolves. However, he succeeded and managed to pull off a decent lesson. 

Questions for this week:

If you are teaching a class and oversleep, should you rush around and try to get there a little late or should you accept that idea that someone else is probably already teaching your class? Changing teachers can keep things fresh. How often should a class have a different teacher?

How can a teacher always be prepared? Should one memorize a few of their lessons in order to be ready at a moments’ notice?