Under Stress: Mine for Joy

As if teaching weren’t challenging enough under normal conditions, 2020 adds several more layers of stress for everyone. That just makes the habit of mining for joy that much more important than usual. When I am bombarded with stressors in my social media feed and news cycles well as daily life, I need to mine for joy by attentively digging into my own life and treasuring the nuggets I find. Here are a few I found at school this week:

2020 has transformed the mundane into reasons to celebrate. I get to go to school and teach students face-to-face in a physical classroom every day. I am thankful for that every day in a way I never was before because I’ve now had to do online teaching, because many of my colleagues in the US are still doing it, and because tomorrow is not a given—if the coronavirus visits our community we could be online again. Even though we’re all wearing masks, taking our temperature every morning, washing our hands like the wife of a certain Scottish thane, skipping school year markers like camp and the school festival, and adapting lots of instructional strategies to be more pandemic-safe—we are here, together, healthy, learning, one more day.

Geeky English teacher moments reading the novel Wonder with 6th and 7th graders. (See these posts for our journals, embedded grammar, and the back planning.) One student returned after leaving class at the end of the period and whispered to me gleefully, “Mrs. Essenburg, I was reading ahead on the bus on the way to school this morning, and the main character is reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe just like I did!” So fun to see them discovering the delight of getting literary connections. Another student volunteered in class, “The style the author uses for Miranda has a lot of colons!” This reading-like-writers stuff might actually be working!

The pre-assessment on irregular noun plurals (foot, feet; mouse, mice) where one student's answer to half was whole. I laughed so hard. I love seeing students’ minds at work—even when the answer reveals some level of misunderstanding. And that answer shows a lot more creative brainwork than just memorizing a list of words!

High schoolers started Cry, the Beloved Country—one of my favorite novels. Students brainstormed and discussed their ideal world—the measuring stick they use when they say something isn’t right or fair. It was a fascinating discussion.  

Friday fun with irregular verb past participles. Every Friday, one student walks in and says, “Are we going to play THE GAME?” And when I answer, “Yes,” the whole class is energized, even though they know we have 25 minutes of business to get through first. And they’re getting better at the verbs! We’ve been doing modals, so they have to say the whole phrase, “I might have ___,” for the verb they land on. A couple of students warranted a reminder yesterday that if they listened to the other players, they’d be more likely to get forms right when they land on the same square. But that’s all it took—one reminder—and they were all focused and attentive again.

I’m really excited about some learning activities I’m planning for next week: a hexagonal thinking activity to prepare for a one-pager in which 6th and 7th graders can demonstrate their understanding of the novel Wonder. Tune in next week for how it turned out. In the meantime, I'm actually looking forward to Monday! 

Here's wishing you nuggets of joy to mine and treasure among all the 2020 chaos.