What a hot mess Lauren and I got ourselves into yesterday! I’m still struggling to process what happened. In fact, I sat down to blog yesterday, trying to get everything down before I forgot, but I couldn’t even write intelligently, I was still so flustered!
So, Lauren first, I guess. I think stumbling at the beginning really threw her off. I’m not sure if she was mad at herself or embarrassed, but tripping really colored her performance for the rest of the lesson. Then, the errors kept building, and she was making mistakes because she’d already made mistakes, not because she didn’t know how to do what she was doing. I don’t know how to help a student really “start over” when they’re so frustrated.
It’s so hard to step back once they are good and lost. So, I think I gave Lauren too much information and not enough time to think things through on her own. I guess because I’d like to be guilty of giving her too much rather than not giving her some piece of information she needs. So, until I really nail down exactly what she (or any student) needs, I’m going to want to err on the side of giving too much information, but I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do. I feel a lot of responsibility as her teacher for her problems yesterday. I’m sure I could have done something differently that would have kept her from getting so frustrated. It was definitely a teaching fail on my part.
So, I was totally doubting my teaching when it was time for me to be under blindfold, so I wonder if all that self-doubt and guilt didn’t impact my performance at the start of my route. Like Lauren, I think that one thing in the beginning snowballed into a much bigger thing later in my lesson. I totally did not understand any of what happened along the sidewalk on the east side of Duval. Even though I did parts of it three times, I don’t understand how it all goes together. I really want to go back and do it right!
I couldn’t maintain a straight line of travel at all. There was so much crap in the way, and then, after I found those stairs, I was scared I’d miss the drop off and then go tumbling down. I was really frustrated with myself that I couldn’t do something as simple as walk a straight line. What Lauren was trying to tell me didn’t seem compatible with the reality I was encountering. She’d explain something, I’d think I understood, and then I’d go to move, and I’d run into something that I didn’t understand would be there. I almost wonder if it would be better to forgo the explanation and just let me try to figure it out on my own. There were even times when I’d try to cast out what was going on and just move with the traffic, but at that point, my anxiety was up, so I wasn’t getting a good beat on the traffic.
So, I FINALLY got through the space, recollected myself, and thought I had the route figured out, though I kept pingponging down between Duval and Bronough. It was way harder than I thought it would be find the truncator bumps down the middle to follow, so I was just wandering around like a crazy person.
Finally, I got it straightened out, and then I was working on walking faster. So much faster that I missed the truncator bumps at Macomb. I ‘m not sure why it took sooooo long for my distance awareness to kick in to realize that I’d walked out into the road. Even when I stopped, I wasn’t sure I was in the road. I just thought I’d maybe hit a driveway. Maybe it was because I was just “off” walking down College, between MLK and Macomb, and I stopped and started so many times that I didn’t have a good “start” in my head to base the distance on. But finally I realized something was wrong, and that something was of course, being in Macomb. Then, when I got out of the road, I went up a slope (that I now know was a driveway), so I thought I’d walked straight across Macomb in the crosswalk to the west side.
I was so, so frustrated that I’d done something as stupid as walking right into Macomb. Before, I’d thought that you couldn’t really do that because you’d know for sure that all the traffic right in front of you made you unsafe. Like, surely you’d know it if you walked into a street as busy as Macomb! I think, though, that I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t bring together all the information. Then, I couldn’t get my orientation down, and that just made me feel really silly and even more embarrassed. It’s like all the cues suddenly weren’t localized. I tried to feel for the sun, but it just felt like it was all around me. The traffic felt similar. It was just all around me in a swirl. I felt very defeated by the end, like I just couldn’t do it right. I was so incredibly lost and totally embarrassed because it’s just such a ridiculous mistake to make.
Traveling like that takes so much effort. I was mentally and physically wiped after the lesson. I was not ready to learn in AT class. I expended so much mental energy that there really wasn’t anything left. So here’s to better learning next time!
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