Moving forward, the first day of practicum I was placed with a school associate (SA), Ron Dorland and met the grade 7 class I was going to be teaching. I experienced my first vulnerability hangover, I told my SA that I was really excited, but I am really bad at math and afraid of it. At the end of the day he gave me a few words of advice that I made sure to take note in my journal. His words of advice were; be confident and make a mistake in your first lesson and show your vulnerability. I replied, no I don’t think that will work for me that sounds scary. That night I thought to myself why did I share my biggest fear of math? The second day of my observation week I asked what we were going to be doing. The morning was going to be consisting of a math lesson. I decided to take a risk and ask if I could teach the math lesson. For a second, I thought in my head why did I speak up? I am a student teacher, I am supposed to stick to the guidelines and “observe” not teach. However, I knew deep down I needed to get rid of this fear of “I can’t” do math and learn to say to myself “I can” teach math. Minutes before the math lesson I was very nervous, but knew I had to overcome this fear.
Furthermore, while the children were silent reading I went over with my SA the questions I was going to be showing examples of to the class for my subtracting integer lesson, two of the questions were wrong. With only 5 minutes to go before going up to teach I was embarrassed that I couldn't even get my example questions correct. During the lesson I went into my teacher mode of being confident on the outside even if on the inside I was screaming “what am I doing?” It was time, the example questions came up and I was fully confident for this part of the lesson because the answers were corrected by my SA. However, my whole lesson turned around from here students were telling me that the answer was WRONG. Now I was really confused, the EA (educational assistant) checked it over with the small group she was working with and it turned out my original answer during silent reading was correct.
Although, at the time I thought my SA planted this mistake in my lesson because he did say the day before in his words of advice; to make a mistake in your first lesson. I will never know if he really planted the mistake or really made the mistake. However, I do know this math lesson turned out to be one of my favorite lessons from my whole practicum. I learned to say “I can” instead of “I can’t.” It turned out that the students really loved this mistake and we laughed together. I learned to be vulnerable. It was a learning experience for me and a lesson of its own to my class. A lesson that shows that teachers are human too and we all make mistakes. I would call this experience a vulnerability hangover because it involved risk taking and uncertainty.
I would love to hear from you: Do you have a fear in a certain subject area, if so how did you overcome your fear or how do you plan to?