So How's it Going So Far?

"Kids don't remember what you try to teach them.  They remember what you are." --Jim Henson

Kids designing their heroes.

You dream about finding kids like this in your class.  You hope that someday you’ll have one.  You convince yourself they exist.  Kids who like to read and can contentedly lose themselves in a good story.  Kids who want to write to express themselves and who understand what a thesis statement is as a twelve year old.  And when you find one, you cultivate the rich treasure that it is and hope they will continue on in the pathway of English greatness. 

I have found such a student.  Not just one, in fact.  Fourteen of them.   In the same class.  At the same time. 

They aren’t perfect.  But as pre-adolescents entering the world of adolescences, they are better than I could possibly have imagined. 

I’ve had these students for two weeks now, and we’re together from 9am to 4:15pm five days a week, which is plenty of time to come out of their shells and start rebelling.  At least in my experience.  But instead, they continue to work together well, offer each other good feedback, and manage to sit and read quietly for an hour, write a thoughtful response about what they’ve read and get ready to discuss whenever they’ve all finished.  When I announce that it’s break time, half of them appear to be jolted out of another world and it takes them about five minutes to pull themselves into a line for what is basically recess.   In two weeks we’ve read a young adult novel, studied Greek Mythology and basically finished Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  Not a simplified, childish version—the real deal. It’s almost unbelievable.

Sure, they’re still kids—at one point one of my three boys said, “Being emo leads to be a homosexual,” which lead to a discussion that involved me advocating thinking before speaking.  To which he responded, “That would take a long time.” Another one is an English language learner who has impressive reading and writing skills, but isn’t as confident with speaking and listening.  He tends to wander away during lunchtime (when we all have to sit together).  So much so that we assigned “lunch buddies”—one other person who always knows where you are and what you’ve gotten up to do.  This student’s secondary language ability hasn’t stopped him though from asking where my lunch buddy—my TA Andi—has gone when she goes to get fruit.  I could barely speak literally in a second language, let alone make a joke. 

Even though they’re still kids, there are a few things that leave me slightly unsettled.  These kids do not follow rabbit trails.  Ever.  No matter how much one of their classmates sets them up with a comment about birth control or if I hang up blank posters all over the walls.  They simply don’t ask unrelated questions, which is eerie after seven years of students following every rabbit trail they could find.

And then there are the sweet moments—during our discussion of the Trojan War, one wasn’t sure about accepting the most beautiful woman in the world—“Are we talking about external or internal beauty?” he asked, before following it up with, “If I could spend about a month with Helen and find out what kind of person she is, then I might want to marry her.”

I don’t know that I could teach kids like this for a full year— it would be an amazing amount of things to prep considering how fast they get through material.  But I also think I would spend the whole time waiting for the other shoe to drop—and I just don’t know that it ever will.  But, I have to say, for three weeks during the summer, it’s a bit of a treat to teach kids who are extremely interested and focused, with a TA who is fantastic and knowledgeable. 

How’s it going so far? I’m pretty spoiled.  Spoiled enough to want to do this again next year.