Last day of Training – September 19, 2007

Even though every night has ended well, every morning does not start so. I think that every morning that we have started the training, Paola had lost her confidence from the night before. This morning, knowing that we had to teach four complete lessons, she doubted that she could do the job at all. I tried to reassure her, but I don’t think that it helped too much. I gave her a couple of pointers on how to plan each lesson, and write her notes, but I didn’t want to lecture or dictate to her, knowing that each person learns in their own way. It bothered me a lot to see her this way.

During the day, we did what we had to. I was not with Paola during every step, but our supervisors (there were two today, as opposed to one the previous days) gave the three of us trainees good support, and told us that we were doing a good job. This encouraged me, and I had hoped that it would make Paola feel better too, but I couldn’t be sure.

When we went out to lunch, we chose a restaurant at the end of the street. We ordered our food, but it took a long time for it to be prepared. We asked if we could get it to go so that we wouldn’t be late back to work. We were late anyway. The three of us were scared that it would look bad on us (certainly it must have had some negative effect on our supervisors), but they didn’t say anything. For my part, I merely avoided eye contact, but Paola actually apologized, and said that she is not regularly late (I am of the position that I don’t initiate conversations where I have to apologize, and since the supervisors didn’t bring it up, I felt no need to either).

By the end of the day, the supervisors seemed to give us nothing but praise. Of course, we were not perfect, but they let us know that they were happy with our performances today. Paola said that she felt much better, and felt a lot more confident about her abilities for this job. The supervisor that was with us over the last few days even commented that she no longer looked scared, but that she even appeared to be more confident. They even told us about some horror stories about training sessions that went much, much worse, and that we should have nothing to worry about. I figure that the reason that they make the training this way is so that by the time the training is over, we should be able to teach classes. Sometimes being throw into the pool is the best way to teach someone to swim.