Stop talking about work!

I was convinced for most of the morning that my students were going to give me terrible evaluations.  Things kept going wrong in class today.  We had some technical problems I’d never encountered before, so even though I tried to handle it well, I felt like I came across like I didn’t know what I was doing, and then some students thought they followed my directions (they didn’t), and when they didn’t end up where I said they would, again, I’m afraid it looked like I steered them in the wrong direction.  And after THAT, they were all in the right place, the same place for once, and a button that has always appeared (and that they have to press to continue) wasn’t there. All before lunch.  But it was getting close to lunch, so I called it technical difficulties, said I’d check with my team to see if they were working on something, and sent them to eat early.  I sent a HELP email, found out there is a bug, got a workaround, and by the time they got back from lunch, we were ready to move past it.  I don’t think I fully recovered from that during the afternoon, but I peeked at the evaluations after they all left, and everyone said really nice things.  No mention of how incompetent how I felt or how frazzled I thought I looked.

What?  Don’t judge me.  Of COURSE I peeked.  Like you wouldn’t.

Yesterday, one of the guys in the class came up to me during a break to tell me how relieved he is about the system and how confident he feels about being able to use it.  He used an older version of it at another agency and hated it, so he wasn’t all that positive about having to use it here.  But he said the training was good, this version was much improved over the other one, and he liked my teaching.  He taught English in Kenya while he was in the Peace Corps, apparently.  Nice guy.  (Of course I think so.  He complimented me!  (I am that shallow.))

And I need to stop talking about work.  Let’s pretend I don’t have to work.  Gee, I have an awful lot of free time…