First Week Reflections

Greetings. Well, as the title says, I had my first week of teaching a class. I'm still doing keyboarding--everyone does keyboarding--but, I got another class. This past week marked several significant points for me.

First, last Tuesday, August 1, I officially hit the 6 month mark since being at my new job. Which meant that I moved off the new employee/probation period, to a regular full time employee. That felt pretty good to go to work knowing that. However, as if that weren't enough, a class was starting for me to teach that day. That class was a nice layer of icing on my work status change.

So, the new class is: Windows, tada! The first day had me, oh, slightly nervous, :) But I got through it fine.

I must say though that it felt kind of weird to walk in the room with several disks and hard copy Braille outlines, and then realize that I was the only teacher there. This wasn't another class I would be observing, but rather one where I would be doing the teaching.

It also felt weird, but good, to hand out the disks and outlines to the students. After years and many hours of classes of getting outlines and other papers about those classes, I was the one to hand out the papers and go over the material for them for once. I was still nervous, to be sure, but as I went through the class, reviewing material from the keyboarding class and segwaying into the Windows material, I gradually relaxed and even started enjoying myself. This was what I came to Austin to do: to teach group classes. Even the thought of group classes would, and did, scare me when I started back in February, but I've come a long way since then. And here I was with my own class. Can we say pride?

Thursday and Friday went well and helped make things gradually easier for me. I still get a little nervous the day of a class, but as I said before, that will probably always happen. I would be worried if it didn't happen, especially at this point in my group class teaching. By the end of class on Friday though, I felt pretty good about things. I was able to inform my students, with confidence, that we would shoot for this coming Friday for our first test, which seems to fit with the material we're covering and what's ahead.

So, this is the satisfied and proud Wayne, signing off until next time.