They say that those who can’t do teach! Really? I don’t believe that I taught for a number of years and I feel I’m a fairly good hairdresser. But trust me I know there are some absolute rubbish teachers out there who are giving out a tonne of wrong information and there are people picking up the slack elsewhere.
As I have mentioned before I work in a natural therapy college so I am surrounded by teachers every day, I don’t get to see a lot of these guys in action as my job is more in administration. What I do here at the college is work with a team that supports people studying by distance education and my job is to help these guys through the clinic aspect. All our courses have modules where our students need to spend time in the environment that they are studying in and observe, perform consultations and do treatments. No for anyone who has studying by distance whether it is a theory bases course or a practical based one this is a very hard thing and you need to be completely motivated to do it. I take my hat off to these guys as I speak to them on a regular basis and 9 out of 10 of them are ploughing away to get there work done and rarely complain.
When I started here I was informed that I needed to organise a Intensive Clinic for students who have massage as part of their course to come and attend here for a 4 or 5 day Intensive so they could do some clinic time and get feedback from our supervisors. This wasn’t an easy task we had a few hurdles to get through to be able to make this happen and you always have the fear of what if people don’t show up or if they hate what we have organised for the clinic or what if they get in there and they and we blow their heads off with to much information! Now I always knew I had amazing massage therapists in the clinic upstairs and I have been lucky enough to have massages from then and they have made me feel a million dollars afterwards but I have never seen these guys in action until yesterday. I really wanted to get a feel of what these guys are teaching our students and how they handle these students remembering that some of these guys have never even touched someone and let alone perform a massage on a paying client. I sat up in the room yesterday and observed how they worked and taught, now I know nothing about massage and god help anyone who gets one off me as I’m more likely to do damage to someone then make them feel relaxed or even better. So here I am sitting in this class and taking notes on massage and watching on why you massage like this and how to look after a pregnant client (We have a pregnant student in our class and she was kind enough to be a guinea pig) I also came to the realisation of one of the things I miss about teaching is the moments when you watch a student make the connection and when everything starts to make sense. I saw this on nearly every student yesterday and it made me smile as this is the thing that make my job worth wild. I have students ring me on a daily basis that you sometimes to need to pull of the ledge and say that it’s all going to be ok and lets break this down into chunks. So to see these guys who have never been in a class room for this course drink up all the information that was provided.
So I want to say a really big thank you to the guys upstairs changing some of these students lives this week and a big thank you to Steve for working with me to get this done and writing such a amazing program for these students. I and they appreciate this so much.
Lol I love the picture of Mr Garrison!
ReplyDeleteAnd I don't agree at all with the whole 'those that can't do teach' at all either.
You know that I work in the education department, and on the whole, just about every teacher I have ever come into contact with is committed, compassionate and, like the teachers in your college, driven by the desire to impart knowledge to their students.
Keep up the blogging xxxx