On Teaching: FLEXIBILITY

Because I managed to cover very little of my planned lesson in one of the 9th grade sections today, I grew discouraged for a while. “Yo, Salsich!” I shouted to myself. “How about sticking to your lesson plan! Even a beginning teacher can do that!” I beat myself up for an hour or so after school, thinking that my curriculum was irreparably damaged and that I was a perfectly awful teacher. Fortunately, however, I soon came around to thinking about the wonderful value, and power, of flexibility. The word “flexible” means, according to one dictionary, “capable of being bent repeatedly without injury or damage.” Think of a slim, supple tree limb. Countless storms blow past it in its long life, yet it stays as strong as ever, and always produces its lovely blossoms in the spring. In the wildest storms, the tall pine trees on the sides of mountains simply sway back and forth and patiently await the return of calmness and sunshine. In fact, don’t our arms and legs actually grow stronger when they are “flexed” – when they are “bent repeatedly” in various kinds of exercise? Not only do they not suffer “injury or damage”, but because of their limberness, they actually prosper when faced (as in a gym) with stress and resistance. When I ride my bike, pedaling faster and climbing steeper hills only makes my flexible legs become stronger. The more I thought about this, the clearer it became that my 9th grade class today, the one in which I “failed” to complete my lesson, might have actually been a gift to me. My thorough and detailed lesson plan ran into resistance, similar to the strong winds a tree limb faces, but I didn’t allow myself to suffer “injury or damage”. I remained flexible. I simply swayed with the distractions and interruptions, and soon enough we got back to our usual calm working mode and accomplished a few important things. Later, looking back on it, I realized that I was just as strong a teacher as I was that morning, and the students were just as brilliant, and my curriculum was as focused and well-planned as ever. The “winds” of today’s distractions and interruptions had had no ill effects, and, in fact, may have made me a wiser and better teacher. Like the flexible tree limb, I’m still here, still strong, still ready to blossom in my classroom tomorrow.