Education/teacher

Taught My First Yoga Class


Jade, the owner of the yoga studio I frequent and my teacher, asked me if I would take her Wednesday drop-in class this week.

I hesitated not.

This coming weekend will be my final teacher training session. Tests, demo teaching, Sutra presentations – the works. Teaching for real was just the thing I needed to prepare.

Over the course of training weekends, we practice teach on each other. It’s not the same as having real students and reminds me of practicing on my fellow students back in university. During the run up to student teaching (I was an English major), we’d craft lessons that we’d present to each other as though we were actual kids in a classroom.

Yes, that’s just as empty of substance as it sounds.

In yoga training, practice teacher of other yoga teachers usually devolves into workshopping as we pull poses apart and share our perspectives with each other. Not that this isn’t valuable. It has value – just not as a way to gain teaching experience for the “real” world.

Yoga studios are so not the real world.

The drop-in class is 45 minutes of what is basically an abbreviated Ashtanga practice. Surya A and B, Standing, a wee bit of seated, maybe Bridge, possibly a twist or two and Savasana.

I started on time and ended on time. Forgot to start Surya B in Utkatasana the first time and got turned around on my left vs right a couple of times, but no one fell over, everyone sweated (people who come to Ashtanga expect sweat in an oddly Bikram sort of way) and at the end, some were smiling and everyone said “thank you”.

There was an older woman, who’d never been to the class before – and who only studied Hatha previously – who might not come back.

But otherwise?

Great success.

Why?

I was teaching. Like teaching for real. I didn’t hesitate. It felt homey and I slipped right into the role as though it was crafted just for me.

But I am a teacher and always have been and that’s a hard instinct to put aside. It was only a matter of time before I found my way back to it.

I don’t know that it prepared me in any way for this weekend’s testing. I feel over-full of yoga at the moment and am not certain I can access anything specifically or consciously, but I am not worried about whether or not I am a yoga teacher.

The photo is urdhva dhanurasana or wheel pose. I totally pulled my left levator muscle and irritated the hell out of my trapezoid at the same time coming up into that earlier in the week. I hurt as I demo’d in class despite having gotten there 40 mins early to warm up. Consequently, I won’t be doing the arm balance practice on Friday – which I could use because my arm balances suck (a very un-yoga but entirely accurate, in my case, term). But, I was psyched to get up into the pose on my own. I haven’t come up into a wheel since I was ten – at least.

Here and There Today


My trip to Dubuque inspired a soul-search about being adopted. Read it here.

And I’ve got a couple of good pieces about education – unions and tenure – over at Care2, which no one will read. They are more interested in posts about lesbian students being bullied about prom attendance and whether it is okay to bully bullies back than they are in the fact that the very foundation of public education in their country is being artfully chipped away by the Obama administration. Seriously, if this guy gets two terms, the great divide between the upper classes and everybody else will be defined by a Grand Canyon chasm that would make Dick Cheney proud. But oh well.

Yoga. Yoga. Yoga. And maybe scones. Then I will call it an afternoon.

Neglect


I know it probably seems that just when it appears I am posting daily again, I disappear. I am blogging nearly every day but much of it is for other sites. I wrote a post for Care2 late last week that was a monster hit. Over 450 comments. Of course it was about Wiccan students being discriminated against by Christian teachers. Colossal hit. Out of the park. I love it when the commenters take over and begin arguing points amongst themselves. Deeply satisfying.

A couple of mom posts on 50 Something have gone up recently as well. I know that is only of slight interest to most of you here, but I’ll throw it out as an option if you have been missing me terribly.

This week has been eaten up by the pursuit of blogging for almost no money and homework  for my upcoming yoga training weekend. I am crispy where training weekends are concerned. I attended a workshop or training every weekend in February and have only had one weekend off in between. French-fried would be the state of my mind and some things are still only as “clear as Mississippi mud” as my sadistic high school Algebra teacher used to say. The woman thought I was a step up from dangerously inbred. She used to look at me with a mix of puzzlement and determination that was demonic. She’s dead now. I always planned to dance on her grave but it’s not worth the effort to search around through a cemetery full of moldering nuns to find her.

Friday I have a treat for you only – Friday Flash. I have so neglected my puny attempts at fiction in the last months. I’ve been reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. It’s Henry VIIIth from Thomas Cromwell’s point of view.

Cromwell is normally vilified when he isn’t being portrayed as a toady or a Protestant zealot. He was a commoner who rose to uncommon heights in the service of King Henry. The mastermind behind the Reformation in some respects and probably more than a little responsible for the policies and law that would advance the idea of representative government.

Mantel hints at a romance between Cromwell and Mary Boleyn (The Other Boleyn Girl) and it’s fascinating speculation. Inspiring. So I ran with it a bit. Friday.

But now I am off to town. The older girls are coming out for supper and I need groceries, and I have to catch a quickie yoga class and sit a bit with my teacher, Jade, to see if she can make sense of the class sequencing I have to put together for my homework this month. The anatomy bites and I am still swimming around a drain where external and internal rotation goes. I also have an opportunity to teach a yoga class in the late afternoons after spring break and I need pricing and such advice.