"The Blinking Light"

This is a pre video watching reflection. Yesterday I videoed 2 of my classes, one with the warm up I stated in the earlier blog and second being my older more advanced class for meth. I think that I will have a lot to reflect on from watching these recordings, but the process of making the videos has already given me so much to think about.
In my first blog I had written, "These days I feel that I'm an extremely good teacher, but lack the knowledge and insight to develop myself any farther". The lack of knowledge and insight was dead on, but I feel the extremely good teacher might be farthest from the true. 
Why do we feel nervous about filming our classes??? Is it because we are all shy in nature and it's like inviting a stranger into our bedroom while we change... Or is it because we all have insecurities about our self, our identity(identity-in-practice) that we have taken so much time constructing, and then to have somebody else tell us different would be unacceptable. 
For me it's the second! If I am not this amazing teacher that I think I am, then who am I? What have I been doing the last 5 years of my life?
It's an extremely scary thing, a feeling of being lost in the fog with no direction. But, to grow is to be able to let our guard down and take in the criticism, not as an attack to our self, to the person we believe ourselves to be, but as that blinking light in the fog that gives us that hope... that reassurance that we will make it out of the fog, to that blinking light... to our goals!!!

I say this because when thinking about which classes to film for homework. I felt that I was trying to give a false self (there is a psychological term for this that I can't remember). Like when you clean your house before people come over. This isn't normally how your house looks... But if your guest saw how it actually looked (the real you), they might judge you, see you in a different light than you want to be seen. I feel that I was doing the same thing for my recordings. 

The reason I titled this "Am I really even a teacher???" was because I felt that I should be able to film any one of my classes. But for me at this point, that is not the case. To be able to do this, to film any of my classes at anytime and not have that feeling of shame is my blinking light in the fog!!!

After reading through what I wrote, I decided to change the title to "The Blinking Light". For some reason this title seems to resonate with me. Turning a negative into a positive!