A Teacher's Patience (and Lament)

      I dunno, I think now that teaching pupils is like ... 

           .. like sowing seeds and not knowing if the RAIN will come at all ... 

             the next day, the crops may sprout or they may not ...

             and as gardener, you don't have the hose/any water system, except maybe for your ability to generate good motivation, which could be like rain for the crop (= the given piece of knowledge in the student). 

  

Look, I think the patience a teacher needs is not patience - it is, I think, rather a kind of blissful ignorance- just not giving too much of a damn about what the students will know / remember / be willing to admit they remember / be willing to admit they don't remember ...  

It's like getting a new dog - you never know when the day will come when the dog will know how to "sit" and how to obey your call to "come". The pleasant surprise thus comes unexpected :) Sure, I shouldn't equate people to dogs, but then again, I'm a dog too - I've just come to realize something :) 

I think us teachers should be, in some cases, only part-time teachers, because otherwise, we can get too often obsessed with results in a certain time-frame, and this doubtless ends in frustration, because you'll never have a homogeneous classroom and the blissful ignorance isn't too compatible with the ŠVP (school's educational plans) that you have to follow. 

I don't have a best-practice teaching recipe, far from it. That's one thing I'm seeking and might be seeking until the end of time. Just a few things: 1) Textbooks - detested, abhorred, sought as last refuge, ... can be like coffins or like jailhouses. 2)  But so can the fanatical drive for digital innovation (and perfect lesson preparation). Sometimes a good old verbal explanation of the issue is the best option. And that can be easily improvised on the spot. Sometimes your students can be fed up with ppt, www, Wordwall, Kahoot, quizzes and the lot and they appreciate a normal human speaking to them about the problem.  3) Going on a walk and talking about it might be even better, but now the options lie more in the field of "meet me on Teams and let's talk this through", so breathe deeply in your chair and walk in the hall/your apartment in between classes ;)

Anyhow. Please comment.  Good luck to ye all :)