In 12th grade, my English teacher was too busy trying to be our friends than be our teacher. After a hellish quarter - a quarter of her passing notes to my friends, asking us to go to movies and dinner with her, not bothering to teach us, being offended when she found out people were saying her class was a blow-off class, trying to punish us by giving us quizzes, talking with us online, and trying to convince us that she was fired from her past job because of the administration not liking her - I gave up and dropped her class. Her response was to get online, confront me, demand to know why I would do this to her, threaten me, and then, the next day, go to the high school, look at my file, and drive to my house and apologize in person.

Needless to say, she was a teacher who I've kept in mind for the past eight years. Whenever I see teachers becoming too unprofessional or emotional in class, I think of this teacher. I keep her in mind as I go to my classes, and teach lessons in the middle schools. She's the epitome of what I don't want to be as a teacher - the epitome of what students don't deserve.

So imagine my surprise and disappointment when, as a graduate student, I have a class with a professor who reminds me of this teacher. Only, this professor is older, and has a PhD, and is in charge of training teachers.

This professor is going through a divorce, which she talks about in every class. She talks about being lonely, and how her life is completely unbalanced right now. She forgets to give us materials she was going to, or doesn't grade assignments, because she needed to take a weekend to get away from technology and just be with herself and find herself. She cancels meetings more than once because she's emotional and needs some time for herself. Her class has no structure, it took her weeks to actually show us how to make a lesson plan (the course is entitled "curriculum and instruction"), and she takes an hour of our hour and a half class to "check in" and "see where we are." We once had to think of a noise that best described how we were feeling, and make it to try and release some tension. And now, in the final two weeks, she's backpedaling and asking us what else we want to cover before the end of the quarter. We told her instructional strategies. Turns out there's a book that the other section of the course is reading that is entitled, shockingly enough, "Instructional Strategies." I commented on wanting a different type of course evaluation, and apparently she got choked up and emotional.

Seriously? I understand that life is hard. I cannot begin to imagine how difficult a divorce is. But if you really, truly cannot teach, then you should be taking time to yourself. You should not be teaching. This program is only four quarters long: ruining one quarter of it is vastly detrimental to us. And when 15 of your 20 students are clearly expressing discontent and frustration, that isn't us being mean, that's you dropping the ball.

Of all courses, this is the one that should be most intentionally designed. It should continually be modeling teaching styles. Instead, the lessons we're all learning from this class is how not to be emotional and unprofessional. Sheesh.