This has been a great year. These kids have given me joy in ways that I'll never be able to repay. I want to remember...
Explaining contractions - like didn't is did+not, and thinking it would somehow stick better if I told them about muscular contractions... I started down the path to contractions like a woman has in labor and quickly discarded it at their blanched expressions. Then I thought to pull up my sleeve and make a muscle.
"Hooo-eeee!" yelled Big Blue Eyes. We all laughed a little bit, and I continued on to explain how muscular contractions are caused by the shortening of muscle fibers just like we shorten a word - all the while flexing - but was upstaged by the eyelash-batting incredulity and one-man chorus of "Hooo-eee! Man!"
I'm afraid we abandoned contractions that day.
For two of my girls, it's a time of friendship that feels deeper and more secret than the mystery of conciousness. They meet at the couch in the morning to unload their backpacks and catch up on the hours of separation, link arms to walk through the halls - whispering and giggling all the way - accompany each other to the bathroom, together until they have to part ways - on separate buses to separate homes. They earnestly tell me that they never want to be apart.
It's a year of them discovering the links between them, their world, and entities that used to be separate. "I'm really getting into reading now." "I love these books."
It's a year of having to clear space on my cabinet for more autographed drawings of hearts and horses and triathlete teachers - and even one depicting the differences between the types of literary genre.
They break my heart. They are so good. Yet, sometimes I despair because they're what we in the business call a "low" class - overall low achievers who produce less-than-superb work. But man, their hearts are in it.
Right down to spelling. A little girl argued with her peer editor about the spelling of the word "activity" in her story (she wanted "activate"). I finally convinced her that while she can be creative and "own" her ideas, the spellings belong to the greater English-speaking collective.
But inside, I am exuberant that she cares so much. She is a lioness protecting her cubs, fiercely protective of her writing. She is a writer.
Fortune has smiled on me in the shape of a gaggle of 11 year-olds. The world is my oyster.
4 comments:
Very Cool TT. A greater call of passion one could not ask for.
To witness these young voyages of discovery; the eyes that are seeing the bigger world for the first time. The nature of that discovery has spread to you, the teacher, and you cause it to double and quadruple the intensity and gives them larger wings to expand. Pity the teachers who are jaded, who have lost it, miss it or suppress it; not only lose it for themselves but worse darken and shrivel it for the very one's that create it.
I can feel your glow. Thanks for sharing that.
BTW, you can steal my lines anytime. :-)
Marty
Sounds like a win-win. They are blessed by you and you are blessed by them.
Cool. Glad you have a passion for your occupation. Thanks.
This is such a more upbeat account than the one I got this weekend from my middle-school-teacher sister, who annually inherits the "low class" and doesn't always see the same gems under those hardened exteriors from growing up in poverty or as a professor's kid.
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