Teaching, Living, and Learning

Friday, May 15, 2009

Teaching Journal

Day 145, Friday, May 15, 2009

As I was scanning a favorite teacher blog this morning, I came across a post about how useful YouTube can be to an English teacher – and very quickly I understood why. In no more than ten minutes, I found at least a dozen excellent videos about everything from paragraph development to the poems of Rilke to the functions of participles. They were short, organized, informative, and entertaining – and, of course, completely free. I gave a little shout and a clap of the hands as I sat on the couch at home and discovered one helpful video after another. It was just a small discovery, I guess, this YouTube gold mine, but to me it felt like a huge door had just swung open. Luckily, a lot of those doors seem to be opening for me lately. Perhaps I’m simply turning the doorknobs more often.

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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