By Ashley Lopez

Welcome back!

Today I entered my virtual classroom for my 4:30pm class. Most of the time the student(s) don’t enter right on the dot, so I surf the web while I wait for them to sign on. When a student enters, I hear a significant sound that indicates when it’s time for me to stop browsing and start teaching; during this time I have my microphone muted, but my camera on.

Today I had a class with six students and none of them entered at 4:30pm so there I was surfing, typing, scheming. Hmm. It’s already been about ten minutes. It’s uncommon for that many students to all be late. I quickly opened my classroom tab and saw that five students were already in the classroom waiting for me. Watching me. Wondering what the hell I was doing. They were chatting me. IT was chatting me. I didn’t realize any of this because my damn volume was on mute. What an idiot I am!

After I realized that I had five students waiting for me for ten minutes now, just watching my big head surf the web. I left (virtually). Instead of woman-ing up, unmuting myself right away, and apologizing—I exited the classroom and ran away like a scared little girl. I just stood there contemplating what to say to these students (which by the way, were all adults) to somehow makeup for ten minutes of wasted learning time. In the end, I couldn’t handle the heat. In fact, I didn’t even try. Gosh, I am so disappointed in myself.

My original intention of sharing this was to motivate you, but in the end I think it’s best to say that everyone gets scared and today I was pitiable, and that’s okay too—as long as I’m not this lame all the time.

Self-note: DON’T RUN. Don’t be afraid of a bad outcome just because of human error, Ashley.

Okay, time to go beat myself up about this idiotic mistake.

Thanks for reading, xo.