Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

For the second time in my teaching career yesterday, an unannounced peer evaluation visit in my class has caught me by surprise.

The first was in the in the mid nineties during a computer programming class. It was the meeting after an objective exam, and I was just planning to give the answers to the class. It was one of the rare classes that I allowed them to bring home the questionnaire after the test for their own perusal at their own leisure.

Immediately upon entering the room I had seated myself behind the teacher's desk and started to shout: "What is the answer to question number one?"

The students, after a brief period of disorientation, called out their own answers. I repeated the correct answer and moved on to the next question, without getting up from the seat. They started answering faster with each question.

It was around the fifth question that I saw the back door of the room opening was not a late student entering but the department chair and another faculty who taught the same subject, seating themselves in the back row.

Immediately I stood up and said to the class, "Why is that the answer to question number five? It's like this..."

And I started to elaborate the analysis of the lines of code that would give them the correct answer, and the same with the other questions in the rest of the exam, even after my co-teachers left.

Yesterday, in my trigonometry class, we had the combination graded recitation and board work and review for the upcoming exam.

Again, all I was planning to do was write the questions on the chalk board and call students to answer them while I looked on.

It was supposed to be one of those rare moments when I'm not standing in front of the class for the whole period, talking and writing.

I guess it wasn't to be the case for this meeting, because again, within the first fifteen minutes of the period, I noticed Ma'am Lissa entering from the back, even coming back bringing her own chair with her when she realized there were no more empty seats.

Fortunately for my evaluation (although it's not so good a reflection of my previous lectures) when I asked the students if there were any questions about the problems their classmates had solved on the board, there were still some students who asked how it was done, despite the fact that this was supposed to be a review of previous topics.

So it became necessary for me to repeat my explanation of the whole derivation process again, for the trigonometric functions of the special acute angles.

I was still lucky though. I can't imagine what other teachers would have done if they were caught by the evaluators in the middle of reporting or some other passive-facilitation activity.