Categories: teaching
Tags: stress, tutorials, Romanian, teaching
Date: 24 October 2006 20:35:23
I do occasionally* have a tendency to be anxious about things that really don't merit me using up such a large amount of emotional energy. My teaching is one such thing - now that my teaching day is officially Tuesday, I found both last week (the first tutorials of the new academic year) and this week that on Monday evening and (especially) Tuesday morning I felt physically sick, anxious, and really wanted to be ill enough that I could phone in sick. Isn't that awful? It's the strangest thing - I never used to be like this, whereas I remember my sister at school often getting stomach aches on the first day of term, and one of my godsons sometimes experienced a similar thing on Sunday nights knowing that he had to go to school the next day. When I was young it didn't bother me at all, but now I'm a little bit older** it gets me every week. I know it's irrational, but today I felt so anxious on the bus in to uni, almost a sense of dread, it was horrible, and not helped by the fact that (probably due to the anxiety) I hardly slept at all last night. And it was all so pointless - the tutorials all went really well, much better than last year, and I felt much more like I had a handle on the topics (whereas last year I was totally winging it).
In other news, after all the tutorials I then met up with my Romanian teacher for my first proper Romanian lesson since I was away in Romania in the summer. It was great! I have been really aware that now that I'm no longer in an environment where I have to think and speak in a different language it would be really easy to lose all the language I learnt there, not to mention losing the confidence to speak, but we ended up talking pretty much solidly in Romanian for an hour and a half, and she couldn't believe the difference from last year, when she knew I understood lots but I simply wasn't confident enough to speak very much. I got such a buzz, and I'm so pleased that I can still do it, I haven't forgotten it all and I can even joke convincingly (I think she particularly enjoyed my confession of a mistake I made when I was staying in Cluj with the host family - I was trying to describe a strawberry pudding I'd eaten and liked, but temporarily forgot the word for strawberry, just remembering that it started with c, so I just used the first foodstuff beginning with c that came into my head hoping I'd guessed right. After the laughter had subsided I realised that onion dessert probably wasn't what I was intending to rhapsodize about).
* well, OK, maybe a bit more than that!
** well, OK, maybe a lot older!