"Use the Force, Luke" or B is for Blindness

I was listening to a song I love and I suddenly remembered using it once with an advanced group of students. Lost in contemplation of my old memories I awoke with a bitter taste in my mouth: the lesson had been dreadful, nobody could actually understand what the song was about and I got myself thinking "How could it be so hard?”. Then I moved back to when I was planning the lesson and started to understand.

Mistake #1: it didn't take me a long time to decide which song to take to the class. I liked it, they would certainly love it, right?
Mistake #2: without any care for listening to the song while following the lyrics I simply took them from a website and randomly chose some words to take out and created a gap filling exercise with no purpose in mind.
Mistake #3: The very first time I played the song in class they already had the lyrics and their task was to fill the gaps.
Mistake #ZERO: I thought I was teaching a wonderful lesson!

The awful revelation of all of these mistakes is that they happened so often and for such a long time in my teaching career because I couldn't see them. I was completely unaware of the problems, though I suffered when seeing students struggling to survive my lessons. I was like Luke Skywalker at the end of "Star Wars - Episode IV: A new hope", knowing I had to hit the target, looking at the data at the computer screen but unable to shoot right into where I was supposed to.

Obi Wan's voice told young Luke: "Use the Force, Luke" and he turned off his computer screen, looked inside and took a shot! Bang! Death Star is destroyed and Darth Vader was sent away until the next instalment of the series! I can see now what Obi Wan's words meant: Looking at the data is crucial, but if you don't look inside at your beliefs when teaching, if you can't see what's wrong with your delivery and admit that things could work better, there is no way to hit the target.

If you are not willing to look at your own misunderstandings, you won't ever understand. It takes some courage to face the enemy inside and a lot of extra guts to overcome it. But one can only get somewhere beyond when one admits having done something wrong.