Hey, I lack self-esteem in English, too

Whew. The first hypothesis testing lecture is over, and no one (i.e, not me) died or cried. I'm not at all sure that anyone learned anything. But, if we were to remake Maslow's hierarchy of needs as it relates to teaching a hardish boring class in a language you don't speak very well, the students actually learning anything would be somewhere in the middle I think, maybe even up towards self-esteem and respect by others. The food and excretion equivalents are not pulling the fire alarm, or quitting, or having an actual nervous breakdown. There are still five lectures left, and the material is getting more complicated and harder to explain, but it's starting to look like I might actually pull this off. There's still the very-real-feeling possibility that my students will all fail the final exam because I've failed to teach them anything. But even if they do, by that point I will be so ecstatic to have survived the semester I probably won't care. And, in the grand scheme of this particular misadventure, the foreign-language-teaching equivalent of lacking self-esteem is probably a good problem to have.