Mis-shapes and mistakes

Ten minutes into teaching a lesson today, a student raised their hand to tell me that they didn't know what I was talking about. I paused; glanced at the Smartboard behind me, and looked at the piece of paper in my hand, both of which confirmed to me that, yes, indeed, this was a brief review of what we had worked on last week (Paper 1, Question 4, if you must know), and re-stated what I had just been saying. Yet, everyone in the room looked at me with puzzled expressions. I even referred them to their notebooks, and asked them to read my feedback again from our last lesson.

After a few moments of self-doubt, the penny finally dropped: this was the wrong text extract, with the wrong class. Right question, yes, but the wrong context with wrong examples.

What had caused such a malfunction in my brain? At the beginning of the lesson, a new learner joined the class, who I was neither expecting nor had I met before, so that threw me off, as I had to apologise and go make them a copy of our extract (albeit the wrong extract, as it turned out). After settling them in, explaining that I'd have a folder and a book for them tomorrow, and then moments later welcoming an LSA and pairing them up with another learner, my mind was so full of distractions that I had failed to notice the major mix-up in the room.

I felt so silly that I could make such a big error, but tried to make a teaching moment of it: yes, you see everyone, teachers make mistakes too! And this did prove to them that I really do let each class choose their own extracts, handing over some control to them about the content of their own courses. In this instance, I had simply got mixed up. We lost twenty minutes of teaching time, but I can say with some confidence, that this was a memorable lesson.

Thankfully I did have the correct handouts ready, so it didn't take too long to get us back on track. Hopefully my mind will be less muddled tomorrow, and I'll feel even better after the half-term break. Roll on Friday...