Year 12 – Week 11: Feeling Inadequate

When you are teaching a group of students show to sing or play an instrument, sometimes your assessment of how they sound and are progressing can be distorted. 

Sometimes it's because you are listening for something in particular when you teach, so you miss the forest for the trees. Other times you aren't listening carefully, and you miss things because you are focusing on classroom management or the next part of the lesson.

This is why it's really helpful sometimes to get a guest teacher to come in and work with your students so you can sit back and really focus on listening and assess where your students are at, without worrying about being an active teacher.

Sometimes observing your students while someone else is teaching can be inspiring and affirming, and other times it can be distressing.

This week I brought in a colleague to work with my students. She is an educator and a professional singer. At this point in the unit, I felt that my students needed different energy in the music room, and I needed some ideas on how to get my students to move to the music and encourage them to sing with more confidence.

I'm sitting there behind the piano, hearing some really good things from some of my classes. Because I wasn't leading classes, I focused on each student, and it was interesting to see how they were singing. Most of the types were doing some really good work, and I felt that I saw signs of the work I was doing in the students' progress.

Then there was that one class. They didn't sound like how I thought they would. To be clear, this was more about my misperceptions than anything the students were doing wrong. They were singing softer than I thought they would and were very timid. Were they like this in previous classes, and I hadn't noticed? Most likely. Why didn't I see this?

At that moment, I felt inadequate as a teacher. This is a feeling that all teachers know well. Typically, it happens less and less as teachers get more experience. While this is true with me, teaching during the pandemic brought this feeling back in full force as I struggled to figure out how to teach in the worst of times.

Along with this feeling comes reflective questions—some less productive than others. I felt bad that I was letting my students down, that I should know better how to help the students be better singers, and doubted that I could move them along. I tried to push this aside with evidence from past performance that I was, in fact, a competent teacher. It's hard in that space when there is a tension between what is and what you thought was there. 

This experience reminded me that, in some ways, I'm a much more insecure teacher than I want to acknowledge and that I still have a lot to figure out.  There was plenty of good that I saw this week, and I will try to let that excite me as I take the time to figure out how to do better for my students.