Always Remember Murphy's Law

PC's mantra is "be flexible" and for the most part, I try to be.

The problem for myself always arises in teaching.

I have been looking forward to showing my class a movie for weeks. I had asked about getting a tv and vcr, had my coordinator ask all the right people and he got the right room assigned to me for that day. It was all going to be taken care of.

So, today I was surprised to see that I was assigned a different classroom, but didn't really fret...I thought that everything would be okay.

I ran into my coordinator who was on his way to get to the tv and vcr. Another colleague asked if her students could sit in on the film. I said "sure" so probably had something like 50 students sitting in there as my coordinator tried to figure out why the tv was not working (power problem). To get things rolling, I had some students do their assignment: to tell some current event news about the United States. Finally when they were done, the tv/vcr was working and we started to watch the film.

We maybe got a half hour into the film and the next thing you know, there is no electricity. Actually, a man came into my room and said that there would be no electricity in five minutes, but I thought that it was a joke, since he clearly saw that I was showing a movie.

So, there I have a group of 50 students with no electricity.

I ask them to tell me about what they just saw, and after that is over, there is still no electricity. I go into the office and ask how long it will be off. The office secretary responds maybe till 2pm. "Till 2pm!" I was very furious at this point in time. I had not made any other lesson plans and I have these students for 160 minutes and we had only been in class for 45 minutes. What was I supposed to do for 2 hours? "Talk about the movie?" was her suggestion.

Sadly, it's always times like this when the American in me just can't help herself. Of course if there is going to be a planned power outage, they let you know. Obviously, I would not have planned to watch a film on this day, you know?

So I marched back into the classroom, looked at all the students, including about 25 that were not mine and said, "well, I guess we will move onto the next topic." They looked at me sadly and said, "but we haven't done that reading yet, it's due next week." "Ah, well..." I trailed off and picked up a piece of chalk ready to go into a improv of the American Government. Thankfully, spending two semesters as a TA for an Intro to American Government course in graduate school completely paid off. For a good 10 minutes that is. Because then the lights came back on and viola! We were back in business.

During the break between classes (I have two 80 minute pairs), my coordinator told me that someone would be coming into my room to make an announcement about student credit cards. "Okay," I said. I still would have time to show the rest of my movie and assign them homework.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. 20 minutes later they are still talking about credit cards and percentages and in general making me extremely angry and puzzled. Again, the American teacher in me is just shaking her head thinking, "can't they just sit outside in the student lobby area by where they sell lunch and get people there? Why do they have to interupt classes for this? Soliciting students' business?

As such, I did not have enough time to show all of my film and I am sure that the homework that I've assigned them will not be done because they will say that they did not understand it, since we did not have adequate time to go with it.

In my heart of hearts, I knew when I was lesson planning this week that I should have provided a backup plan, but I simply did not. It just teaches me that sometimes the unexpected will happen, and instead of having a fit about it, which I did today, I should simply just breath deeply and relax. все будет хорошо.