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Experience:
The Best Teacher

Experience might not necessarily be the "best" teacher, but it almost always results in the most enduring lessons. Recently, we asked members of the Education World Tech Team to tell us about their most unforgettable teaching -- and learning -- experiences. Included: An opportunity to share your best lessons.

The book Ooops, What We Learn When Our Teaching Fails, edited by Brenda Miller Power and Ruth Shagoury Hubbard, is a compilation of essays by teachers describing their worst teaching experience and what they learned from it. For this article, members of the Education World Tech Team have written their own essays, revealing the best, the worst, the funniest, and the most embarrassing experiences of their teaching careers.

"My worst teaching experience was with a third grade class in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia," Bernie Poole told Education World. "I'd been teaching for ten years in England and Nigeria, but this was my first contract as a teacher of English as a foreign language at The Riyadh Schools, a private school for (mostly) Saudi boys.

"I didn't know any Arabic when I arrived in Riyadh, which was the first problem. For the most part, the boys' English was rudimentary, and communication was very difficult indeed. Another problem was cultural. My teaching style and body language didn't get the response I expected from these students. They soon were all over me and very difficult to control (Although I never before had had a problem with classroom management.) Yet another problem was one that substitute teachers routinely deal with -- taking over someone else's class mid-year.