I generally hope that things are going to go well in any given situation, but experience tells me that this won't always be the case. Sometimes, things turn out pretty poorly, and when they do, it's up to us to make the most out of a poor situation, so to speak. I'm in that situation now, for example--I was hired at the school I'm at to teach Spanish, an area of expertise in which I have a lot of experience and training, and in which I'm quite competent. We also have very good resources available to us for teaching Spanish, so I have plenty of materials for class. Unfortunately, though, it turns out that I'm teaching only one Spanish class and three other courses that I've never taught before, and for which I have no resources at all. In other words, I'm preparing every class from scratch, trying to scrape together materials and make a semester work for the students. This is an incredibly stressful and time-consuming situation, to say the least. So what do I have to do? I have to do the job, of course, or leave the school--which would leave a whole lot of students without a teacher. And when I do the job, I have to try to keep focused on the positive when I can find it. I have to try to remember always that what I do, I do for the students, not for the administrators who have put me into this awful situation. I have to try to find ways to make myself look forward to going to school rather than dreading it, and to look forward to preparing classes rather than hating the process. If I don't make this shift in perspective, I'm in for a miserable semester, and who wants that? How things turn out over the next few months really is up to me, and I'm not the only one affected--my students, also, will know if I'm miserable or if I'm enjoying the work that I'm doing. And they don't deserve to have me at my worst as a teacher.
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