9 Moments I'm Celebrating This Week

Last week of regular classes: tempers are as short as the time and patience as thin as the snow on the ground here in Okinawa. Elementary students weep in the hallway. High school students surge into my room spouting indignation and complaints. Schools are emotional places, and never more than at the pressure point of a year’s end. I can grit my teeth and hang on for 3.5 more days, or I can take a deep breath and hang out for a few minutes in the happy place in my head where the this-is-why-I-teach moments migrate until they fade away for lack of attention. 

Here’s what I found when I went looking for a few good things that happened this week:

1. The student who stopped by to show me the stack of summer reading books he’d just checked out from the library—with a shy flash of Emerson’s essays (we struggled through one of them in AP Lang this year) which he’s a little nervous about, but excited to challenge himself with.
2. The 2 students from the Service Club who offered to clean my room for me. So honored to watch these students’ growth toward a service-oriented maturity. Plus loving my squeaky clean floor, countertops, and whiteboard!
3. The variety of ways 11th grade AP students interacted with the text when, at the end of a year of trying different ways, I just said: 1/2 page journal entry on each chapter of The Great Gatsby—whatever helps you process, hold thinking, and be prepared to discuss it. (See above and below.) And we also had great discussions!
   
4. My first experiment with one-pagers to wrap up the post-AP test reading of The Great Gatsby (yeah, we are so done with writing essays…).  They aren’t stellar examples, and not even complete, because I limited the amount of time spent, but even at that, I’m excited about the way students really engaged and pulled together, in their own way, all their reading and journals. (For more about one-pagers, see this recent Cult of Pedagogy post for explanation, examples, and free templates. You won't regret it!)
5. Laughing and crying (literally) with 11th graders doing a read-through of A Raisin in the Sun. Today I was reading Mama about losing baby Claude and how her husband had loved his children, when I choked up and my voice got all squeaky. And the students were so quiet and respectful and just carried on with their parts. 
6. The colleague who shared her excitement with me about her students' performance on a project she created while attending a project-based learning book discussion with me this spring.
7. Another colleague who is reading Ender’s Game for the first time and excited about exploring the possibility of incorporating it into the curriculum.
8. 10th graders poring over portfolios, talking with classmates about what they read, wrote, thought, and discussed this semester. I love to see them rising to the challenge of explaining and supporting their growth this year as they prepare for the self-assessment part of the exam.
9. 10th graders gasping in surprise as they came to the last line of the opening paragraphs of The Secret Life of Bees. Another part of the 10th grade exam is annotating a close reading of the first page or two of a novel they haven’t read. This was our all-toegther practice piece. They competed to identify literary elements and they asked great questions. Some of the inferences got a little out of hand—I had to warn them than just in case they picked this for summer reading, it is not a super hero book—the female bee version of Antman. 

And I’m just getting started. It’s one of those things where the more you remember, the more you remember. But it’s time to get ready to go to graduation. More tears there, I’m sure, but I’m already feeling more relaxed, grounded in this teaching thing I do, and ready for the emotions to come.

How about you? Don't forget to stop this week to hang out for a few minutes in that happy place in your head where the good-teaching moments go.