Teaching, Living, and Learning

Saturday, February 02, 2008

ONE TEACHER'S ALPHABET

E is for Excitement

Yesterday morning, waiting for a group of 8^th grade students to arrive at my room, I realized that I felt totally keyed up and energized as I looked forward to the class. Odd as it might seem, in the darkest middle of winter and after 89 days of school, I was getting goose bumps as I thought about teaching English for the next 48 minutes. To understand better, imagine waiting to go on stage to receive a national prize, or waiting for someone to arrive to deliver your lottery winnings, or waiting at the front door to take possession of your newly-purchased mansion: honestly, that’s how excited I felt. Strange…they’re just a small group of teenagers, and I’m just an emergent and still-developing English teacher in a small school in a small town in Connecticut, but yesterday morning, as I heard the students coming down the hall, I felt like a king about to meet with princes and princesses.

Although I’m 66, is it any wonder I'm not thinking about retirement?

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I found this quote (below) in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. She's describing Fanny Price's home at Mansfield, but the words exactly remind me of the atmosphere I try to maintain in my classroom:
" ... no sounds of contention, no raised voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence, was ever heard; all proceeded in a regular course of cheerful orderliness; everybody had their due importance; everybody's feelings were consulted."

...........

The following quote is from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I would like my classroom to be like Dr. Strong's school:

"Dr. Strong's was an excellent school...It was very gravely and decorously ordered, and on a sound system; with an appeal, in everything, to the honor and good faith of the [students], and an avowed intention to rely on their possession of these qualities unless they proved themselves unworthy of it, which worked wonders. We all felt that we had a share in the management of the place, and in sustaining its character and dignity."

If I replaced "agent" with "teacher", this passage from a short story might, I hope, describe me in my classroom:
"The agent spent his days in following what seemed to many observers to be only a dull routine, but all his steadiness of purpose, all his simple intentness, all his gifts of strategy and powers of foresight, and of turning an interruption into an opportunity, were brought to bear upon this dull routine with a keen pleasure."
-- from "The Gray Mills of Farley" by Sarah Orne Jewett