Learning something new?

Not the best of starts to a course by being late but in my defence I had been off work and figured that as most courses here began at 9am, this course must also. Thankfully I still wasn't the last to arrive. I had tried not to think too much about the course beforehand, wanting to do this with as an open a mind as possible though this was made somewhat more difficult seeing the pressure that the previous group had gone through.


The course started well as Jean is very amiable and laid back. So I was soon to feel at ease and able to make contributions to what was going on. I don't always like being on the receiving end of training or teaching but because I knew everyone else in the room, I thought this may well make a difference. It did.

My concerns are more outside of the classroom. Doing the work and having it ready on time. I am not exactly the worlds best time keeper and I lead a strangely busy life which I wont go into here and that is outside of my singing. I am still a little confused by the mountain of paperwork that we have been given and here I am adding to that with my thoughts and feelings and yet another 500 words have to be written on Health and Safety and the rest on top of that. I wonder when I will find the time but find the time I must.

It helped today being teamed up with Manjit and Debbie. Their thinking and training styles are complimentary to mine and I think we worked well together. I suspect on future days I may be teamed up with others and that may well be different. Certainly this will be no problem with Sanj and Ian as we have often worked together and do so very well but Andrew is very quiet even by my standards and that may be tough on both of us. This remains to be seen.

Back to my concerns. It has been a very long time since I had to do something like this looking for some sort of award from it. The last thing was three or four years ago when I did my CCTV Legislation training and got my B-Tech in that to qualify me to train in it. I had been planning to go back to school as such this Autumn to brush up on either my French or Spanish which are pretty poor these days but because of PTLLS I have decided to defer that until afterwards. I had also been tempted to do a couple of singing classes but they were for fun and will also have to wait.

I am very apprehensive about this course and haven't really shared that with the others in the group or the last group that did this. I am worried that my more solitary nature will mean that while the others will ask for help when they need it, I will quietly plough on and make huge mistakes in what I am doing. It is very difficult to go against ones own nature even if to your own detriment. Once I have finished this then I need to start on the other essays but in the back of my mind I hear the niggling words "are you sure you are up to this task??" To be honest I am just not sure where to start. Do I need to use the format in the information I have been given or can I use my own? What font should I use? Does that matter?

The thing is I can sort of see the long term benefit of doing this course in that I will have a qualification to teach but not having one has never held me back. I can see that other benefits would be that I could teach other things outside of my normal work but would I ever want to? Others have said to me that I might learn new things, new ways to train, I might learn things about myself even. Remains to be seen. I know this all sounds very negative, even to myself it does but until I get myself over the hump of writing the first few things I know this is how I will feel or at least appear to feel.