There’s a scorecard you never agreed to keep, and it comes out the moment you lock up. A full room. A faultless hour. You never chose either, but they’re the ones quietly turning fine Thursdays into failures.
It came free with the training, and you’ve been paying for it ever since. Odds are you’ve never once put it into words, let alone agreed to it.
A rule you inherited can still be rewritten. Same standards, on ground you actually stand on.
When to use this
- Driving home flat from a class that was, by any fair reading, fine
- When tonight’s seven keeps getting compared with spring’s twelve
- When a quiet month starts to read as a verdict on your teaching
- End of term, before the next one gets planned on the old rules
The rule underneath the feeling
That flat feeling after a decent class is a rule doing its job. Somewhere early on, usually without clocking it, you wrote a private definition of success, and it’s been running in the background ever since. If your definition says a good class needs sixteen mats down, then eleven mats is a fail, whatever happened on them.
The inherited version tends to have fingerprints on it. A course that prized flawless sequencing. A feed full of heaving workshops. None of it chosen. Most of it never true of the teachers you actually admire.
Psychologists who study locus of control draw a useful line between what you can influence directly and what’s set mostly elsewhere. Attendance is mostly elsewhere, sitting with the weather and with other people’s diaries. Whether the room felt held for an hour sits with you. Build your definition of success out of the first column and you’ve guaranteed regular failure that has nothing to do with the teaching.
And the misses aren’t neutral. Work on self-efficacy, the working belief in your own capability that the psychologist Albert Bandura spent a career mapping, shows confidence is built mostly from mastery experiences: clear, repeated evidence of doing what you set out to do. It only counts when the goal was yours to meet. Mark yourself on attendance and you can teach beautifully for a decade and still starve the confidence that decade should have handed you.
Conditions that are yours to set
The rewrite moves the bar onto land you own. The height stays exactly where it was. If anything it’s the stricter deal, because conditions you control are harder to hide from. The weather makes a generous excuse, and you’re giving it up.
A workable condition clears two bars. You control it on the night. And it’s observable, in things done rather than things felt. ’I arrived settled and taught the class I planned’ clears both. So does ’every student was greeted by name and seen at least once during the hour.’ ’The room loved it’ fails on the second. ’Twelve people came’ fails on the first.
Two or three conditions, no more. Longer and it turns into admin. Write them as things done, because on the nights your mood lies to you, and there will be nights like that, the record of what you did stays readable when the feeling doesn’t.
Self-compassion research, much of it led by the psychologist Kristin Neff, adds one worth building in: people who weigh their own work the way they’d weigh a respected colleague’s stay steadier, and get less derailed by a bad night, than people who turn on themselves. So borrow the colleague test. Another teacher tells you seven came through the rain, and the shoulder stuck since Christmas finally let go. You wouldn’t call that a failure. You’d call it an evening well taught.
Action steps
- Today, on paper, finish the sentence honestly: ’a class counts as good when…’. Keep the clauses you’re not proud of in; they’re the ones doing the damage.
- Cross out every condition that’s set by the weather or by anyone who isn’t you.
- Write two or three replacements that are yours to meet and possible to observe.
- Put them at the top of your class plan and read them before teaching for a fortnight, without scoring yourself against them. The definition works by being in the room.
- At the end of term, review the rule the way you’d review a sequence: keep what served, rewrite what didn’t.
Related resources
- After the class that didn’t land
- The question you teach from
The profession already measures teaching careers in years taught and hours logged, never in how full the room was on one thin evening in February. That’s how YogaPros records a teacher’s standing too, and it’s a fairer mirror than the head-count.