Confession time! As an educator, there are a lot of things I'm not good at. I don't always grade promptly or provide quick and meaningful feedback to my students. I tend to let papers and projects pile up, which means I eventually tackle them without the same attention to detail I would have if I graded more consistently. I'm not good at organizing and implementing long-term group projects. When my students work collaboratively, I'm not great at parsing out credit in a way that is fair to everybody. I haven't figured out the perfect system to deal with those situations when one or two students do the majority of the work and some are freeloaders. I'm still working out how to teach my students to take meaningful notes. I could get a lot better at incorporating technology in my classroom, especially in the hands of students. My list of inadequacies in the classroom would go on to such embarrassing lengths that you would begin to wonder why I could have possibly thought myself worthy of writing a book on teaching. Sixteen years into the game and I'm still a work in progress. |
I like when Burgess lists his downfalls and then trumps them all with one thing: enthusiasm. If we could each trump our deficiencies with one thing, we would each list a different strength. Enthusiasm is definitely a good one though, and one to strive for in my own daily walk.