So as you may know substitute teaching has been pretty difficult and I was looking for a new role for about a year.  I was interviewing for several tech roles but nothing came through.  I pivoted and thought I might try adult education and was immediately offered an adult education training role. I have only been in the role for about a week.  It is extremely technical and there is a long script which I have been adhering to.

At any rate I've been practicing with the trainers and other employees.  One of the trainers came in to see my final run before we go out in the field.  When I did it with my co workers they seemed to think I was doing well. But when I did it with her I could tell by the look on her face she absolutely hated it.  The main thing was that I was reading from the script and that it was not memorized.  There is a lot of technical information which I have not encountered before.  I know from having taught English for 20 years that basically I read from a script for quite a while (one that I wrote) and then as time went on I let that go, but that takes time.  You just basically have to do it.  I would be training small groups of people. For my career I have trained large groups of maybe classes of 40 people at a time.  Anyway you could just see the total disgust on her face during this time.  it is a different animal than teaching English, different topic, new to me.

This morning I go to work and the main supervisor calls me in. She reads from this paper that the feedback is terrible and that if it isn't better by tomorrow than forget it. To be honest I'm kind of surprised. It has been only about a week and I did read the feedback. Some of it I do see their point of view, but my God the whole thing was massively overwhelimingly negative.  I was just astounded at the sheer negativity of the entire thing-not one positive thing throughout. Just paragraphs and paragraphs of slamming me, one thing after the other. that I 'had no classroom management' Yet-there was no class there-it was just me and her.  And that I was reading in a monotone. This actually is kind of typical at the beginning and changes over time. And that one day I was "observed to be laminating", and the weird thing about that is that everyone works on clerical projects throughout the day so I'm not sure what this is about.

All I know is that in the lunchroom I suddenly felt a very bad energy, so much so that I didn't go back the following week. Also someone had over heard a conversation that I was having with my medical office and when I returned to my desk they were gossiping about me and didn't know I was there-talking about the conversation that they overheard me having with my physician. I had thought it was private.

I know not everything I was doing was awesome, but I was focusing on learning the training. They had said in the review that I was not.

The one thing that struck me as odd was at the beginning of the training I was sitting next to this one woman who I thought was a peer, but it turned out later it turned out was a supervisor. We were comisserating on having been teachers prior and I thought it was a pretty good discussion.  I noticed later she was severely avoiding me and very negative toward me. It turned out later she was a supervisor. The only thing I can determine is that maybe she got the wrong impression from comisserating about former teaching life. If I realized she was a supervisor I never would have done that.

I realize there is a common thread. I got written up last fall on my sub job for lack of classroom management because of the students' negative behavior.  This is adult education however so I didn't anticipate misbhehavior from adults.  I haven't even taught a class yet. I'm not sure if they are going to put in me in one. My true feeling on it is that you really can't determine how it goes until you just teach a class. I never got dry runs when I taught school-you just went and did it. And my prinicpals were never quite this negative. 

My master's degree was in something completely different and this was not my long term goal. Still I obviously didn't plan to fail at this. I thought the work of working in elections was interesting and I was enjoying it. I am very disappointed to see what is happening. We will see what will happen tomorrow but I truly do not want to be there anymore. I feel very attacked. I told my co worker who watched my demo what happened and showed me the write up and he said he thought that it was bogus. I know there are a few things I could work on but he shook his head. He had worked in a different state and said he felt it was different here, and got bad feels off of the people and unfortunately I had to agree. It's unfortunate because I had made some friends here. I'm not sure what my next move is, I feel like either I'm working in the wrong environments or I have some blind spots.