I've come across another stumper in my quest to understand my own psychology.
I was at a Japanese club meeting on Saturday helping the members study for an upcoming quiz (I'm not actually in the class, but I have much more experience with the language than what they're teaching there right now), and trying to determine where everyone was at in their learning, and how well they had learned. So I realized the best way for me to do that was call on the members one by one and ask them random questions. Only there was a problem --
I found I couldn't do it.
Standing up in front of everybody was pretty nerve-wracking in itself, even though it was a perfectly informal situation and I knew more-or-less all of them well enough that I shouldn't have been nervous, but it also seemed like there was some sort of mental block, some kind of fear, that kept me from picking on them one by one. It's a necessary teaching tool, and though I'll freely admit I try to avoid teaching situations because I have little in the way of teaching skills, this bothers me a bit.
What could I have been afraid of? I couldn't put my finger on it. Was it a sort of empathy, that I sometimes don't like to be put on the spot, so I didn't want to put others on the spot? Or maybe it was the fact that I'm far less skilled at coming up with random questions on the spot than answering them. I suppose the closest guess I have is that I unconsciously place myself lower than most others, so a situation where I'm the "boss" is quite unpremeditated and overwhelming.
Now, I realize that this is my mind - and so I'm the one here who best understands me - but I figure if I bounce it off you guys and see if anyone has similar experiences, that might lead me in the right direction to find out why this happened.
03 Feb 2011, 3:41 am
