Seven Teaching Mistakes

There has never been a professional - nay, a human being - whose life was free of mistakes. Indeed, it'd be a mistake to believe that one could or should never make mistakes, for they are essential (and inevitable) in learning and growing. In my teaching practice I've made any number of mistakes of varying degrees of seriousness, and in this essay I propose to describe them and the lessons that I learned (or should have learned!) from them.

1. allowing the pedagogical barriers between teacher and pupil to dissolve and getting too close to a pupil
2. preparing badly for a conference-demonstration
3. mis-communicating with three colleagues in a five-teacher workshop
4. giving a seminar for teachers in which I didn't set up enough of a context for the materials I was presenting, and in which I didn't earn the participants' accord to work with controversial materials, thereby creating much ill will
5. not being clear about money
6. pushing certain pupils too far, and others not far enough
7. a terrible mistake I haven't committed yet, but which is bound to happen sooner or later