Videotapes and Sickness

I stepped with unwilling confidence into the classroom. Luckily, I thought, I’d have this lesson to practice before proceeding to my own class. The beauty of being the maths teacher is that I teach both classes of the bilingual programme the same lesson. It’s true that I was going to have about two dozen parents watching me teach, but they weren’t the parents of my class and so I allowed myself breathing space. Apparently that was my first mistake.

It dawned on me that I may have miscalculated the moment that one parent put a video camera to her eye; said moment being the second the bell rang for the lesson to begin. The camera ran the whole lesson.

While I must admit that I flawed them for most of the lesson, at the end I did begin to weaken. I usually prepare too much, but this time I had undercut my preparations. I was thumb-sucking eventually. That experience, combined with a quick chat in the break with my director, meant that the next lesson went much smoother.

That was yesterday. Today the students are being directed in writing short letters to one of the girls in the class. She has taken ill with inflammation of the lungs and has been admitted to hospital. It’s believed she’ll be there for a week.

This news has caused the realisation that my throat is a little sore and has been since I awoke this morning. I had brushed it off as a reaction to temperature change as the weather has finally begun catching up with the season. Perhaps there is more to it… (*begins scrounging for vitamins)