I was teaching my 6:30am class this morning and partway through, realized I totally forgot the floor series of belly back bends. I teach a Baptiste Vinyasa style class, and the belly back bends come right after triangle serie (triangle, pyramid, reversed triangle).
For some reason, I took the class straight from downward dog to the top of their mats and right onto their backs, preparing for bridge pose! I realized right before I moved the class into bridge that I was totally missing something.
For a moment, I thought about just moving forward anyway. This would have been the easy thing to do, but not the correct thing. I then realized that recovering from this mistake could be an easy thing, and given that it was an early morning class, most folks probably wouldn’t even notice 
So I had everyone “rock and roll” three times, tapping their feet on the floor each time before shooting back into low-plank, up dog and down dog. Now I could pick up where I left off!
At the end of the day, recovering from a little flub in class is easy if you make it easy. You don’t need to admit any “mistake” out loud, just carry forward and do so with composure and your class with never miss a beat.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
shiny 10.30.08 at 12:44 am
hehe well I think that these little ‘flubs’ must happen quite often, definitely I’ve done a few and in fact, last night I did one whilst teaching. You just pull yourself up, make them move and I think when you just keep going on and keep smiling, the students sharing your practice don’t mind at all : )
Hey, everyone is human : ) x
Ravi 10.30.08 at 2:24 am
Absolutely, at minimum I think students a good laugh out of it….