Teaching High School

Every once in awhile one of the other teachers at my school will say something about the high school in an ever-so-slightly negative tone of voice. You know, like they're being tolerated as a necessary evil, since that's what happens to their adorable students after the passage of years.

Well, blah. I happen to prefer them that way!

They will make little comments about not wanting to ever deal with them, and about how younger kids are so much better to teach, and how you can keep your high school students.

WELL THANK YOU, I WILL!

I am tempted to retort that I don't want to be caught babysitting all blooming day long - cutting out paper dolls and reading "The Dog Who Liked Lollipops." I want to actually travel the golden realms of ideas - discussing the human condition and the possibilities of transcendence, reading the masters, teaching students how to THINK. That is where satisfaction in the teaching world lies!

Of course, I never tell my fellow teachers this. I just think "good! I'm glad you like teaching pipsqueaks so that I can have the real students!" And then I come and vent in blog-land.

Now this is not to belittle all of you with young children that need educating, of course. That is where it all begins, and has moments of great excitement as well! I'm just reacting against countless barbed comments and therefore (as is my wont) jumping rapidly into the opposite ditch:)

I Know I'm Kind of Tooting my own Horn Here, but...

I'm SO excited to be

27!

It just seems like such an established age, you know? Like I've arrived! And what's more, 27 is three cubed, the trinity of trinities. That's got to be significant! :)

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone! May the amazing love of our Savior be real to you as you celebrate. This Christmas season I have repeatedly noticed the line from “O Holy Night” that says: “He appeared, and the soul felt its worth.” Jesus loved us enough that the salvation of our souls was worth all of the suffering of the human life. He was willing to take on mortality so that we could take part in His immortality. We were worth it to Him! That is love, indeed. And I am thankful for it, and return it with all of my heart!

Happy celebration of His Love to all of you!

I'm on Christmas Break!!!

Hurrah for Christmas!!!

My last day of school was great fun - I got to put on a Christmas party for 7-12 grade. I taught them the game Mafia! Definitely very Christmas-y. They enjoyed it, although the dead people kept on talking and voting. Silly kids. But still fun!

Linds, we played your bow-on-the-head game, too! They thought it was fabulous, and begged me to play a round during chapel. I opted out of that one, even though they said they'd all defend me if the headmaster tried to fire me over it. Thanks, guys.

I was overwhelmed with gifts: some of them even gave me birthday presents! Good grief, I was never that nice to MY teachers!

And they liked their gifts too - one of my high schoolers (11th grade) said he'd keep his Hamlet bookmark forever! He was really pleased with it. Hurrah!

And now I'm on break, and basically my only responsibilites are to read books to see if they'd be good to teach, and finish Christmas shopping. I can handle that! Last night Gretchen started reading "The Count of Monte Cristo" to KJ and me. I needed to read it for school, but the thought of turning to page 1 of a 650 page book was daunting. So she turned to page one for me! And now I'm totally hooked, and am not at all daunted at the prospect of turning to page 30. Thanks, sis!

Merry almost Christmas everyone!

Christmas Presents!

Last year I made gift bags for my students for Christmas. Ahhhh! Excessive! And totally non-repeatable. I knew that I needed to find something small and cheap that I could do this year and every year in the future. But what? And then Aunt Laura and/or Melissa suggested bookmarks. PERFECT! I am, after all, a teacher of BOOKS.

So last night and today I've been working on them. They are individualized by class, and each have a picture and quotes relevant (for the most part) to the book we've been reading. I'm so happy with them! I'm going to print them off, and take them to Staples for laminating tomorrow.

Hurrah for cheap, repeatable, and yet meaningful! I'm especially happy with the Hamlet ones. Ooooh - and the Hobbit ones. Oh, and the Jane Eyre ones. Right. I like them all.

I'm especially pleased with the twist I put on the Hobbit ones, though, so I'll elaborate. There's a picture of Bilbo and Gandalf at the top (thanks, google images) and then there is part of one of Bilbo's traveling songs about wandering and coming home. And then there is the verse from Isaiah that talks about God leading the blind on paths they know not of, and making the darkness light before them. Yay!

Grading... (Sigh)

I just graded SO many papers (well, according to my standards - not Chad's). Grading papers is the only part of teaching that I don't love. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I don't even especially like it. To tell the truth, there is little that is more discouraging than a stack of papers to grade. But I had to get them done this evening because I have to submit my midterm grades tomorrow. Sigh. So of course, to console myself in the drudgery, I turned on the Bruins game as a sort of self-deception (ha ha I can't be miserable because there is a game on somewhere in the outskirts of my consciousness!). Okay, okay, miserable is a mighty strong word. And as long as I have a game or something it's quite endurable.

I had a college professor who said that the only way he survived paper grading was by setting a strict quota for every day. Otherwise they would pile up and completely overwhelm him.

And in honor of professors and the dread of paper grading, I bring to your attention this fascinating bit of trivia I ran across recently, concerning our dear friend J. R. R. Tolkien and the creation of The Hobbit.

"One day when he was engaged in the soul-destroying task of marking examination papers, he discovered that one candidate had left one page of an answer-book blank. On this page, moved by who knows what anarchic daemon, he wrote "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."
In typical Tolkien fashion, he then decided he needed to find out what a Hobbit was, what sort of a hole it lived in, why it lived in a hole, etc." (From tolkiensociety.org)

Pretty good, eh? So who knows what good may come of paper grading! Take heart my old professor! Take heart, Chad! Take heart all you other teachers out there! Some great epic work may yet come of this business...

Happy Christmas Season!

I LOVE the Christmas season, and I love it more and more as I more and more comprehend the incredible significance of what it stands for. Emmanuel: God with us. What an amazing – staggering – life-changing reality!

Yesterday I read in Colossians: “To them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles: which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

Jesus’ birth means Christ in us, salvation, and a Savior who understands the human condition, who has made the way of escape from that “condition” to eternal rightness and perfection. Amazing truth!

I still remember and am blessed by Amy’s 9:00 hour message during our third year: Jesus was willing to come to live on “this mortal coil” (quoted from Hamlet! Amy is incredible…) with all of its “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” for our sakes. He lived through it. He understands it. He died in it. And He won the victory over it.

He “counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in likeness of men.”

Almighty God, Love Himself, would not allow mankind to suffer and perish. And Christmas is our yearly reminder that because of this we have a Savior: God with us.

Teaching is a Serious Business

There are some scary things about teaching. These kids think you know what you're talking about, and expect you to be right. And they have amazing memories (except for where quizzes and tests are concerned, of course). Students will remind me of things I said last year - things I'd totally forgotten I even told them. And if I'm wrong... phew!

Last year I taught my science class the phases of the moon. We spent all of class on it. It took them awhile to catch on. Then I went to assign their homework, and discovered that I had taught them everything exactly backward. I spent the whole next class trying to fix the errors of the class before ("okay kids, remember everything I told you, except in the opposite way"). Oy vay.

One must really be careful in the teaching profession. What if I hadn't caught that mistake, and they'd gone on to college and told their teacher that a waning gibbous was a waxing gibbous? Oh the horror. As a teacher, I cannot o'erlook these possibilities. (Sorry - Shakespeare is on my mind. We finished Hamlet today. SO good. The kids really liked it.)

All of this is just to give you the context (which, as we all know, is vital) for my leaping up in the night, grabbing my laptop, flipping it open, and googling "hanged." You see, ever since last year with The Tale of Two Cities I've been telling my students that you haven't hung the person, you've hanged him. Weird, but true. But in the dark watches of the night I wondered: Was it really true? What if I just picked that up some weird place and it's really not the case at all?!

Google, however, came to the assuring rescue. The past tense of hang (when talking of people) is indeed hanged. Phew. That's one thing that won't come back to haunt my students in later years!

Schooling Ups and Downs

Yesterday was SO much fun.

Okay, you know how Hamlet is described as the "melancholy Dane?" Well. Danny, when he taught Hamlet, spent a day doing personality testing for the four personality types! He suggested this to me and I tried it and we had such fun doing it. My class has a Choleric, a Sanguine, a Melancholic/Sanguine, a Phlegmatic/Melancholic, and a Sanguine/Phlegmatic. They had such a great time going through the questions and laughing and comparing and discussing.

One of the classic moments came when one student looked up from the incredibly meticulous drawing he was working on to ask "What do they mean by detailed?" Ya. That would be you, pal.

I pointed out how their diverse personality types were probably part of the reason the class gets along so well...

Then came today. Whew. The kids came to class and within ten minutes trouble broke out. It was a small thing, really - one of the boys took one of the girls' water bottles. But that was just the straw that broke the camel's back, as it were. [Side note: on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire someone got out at the $100 question for saying it was the stick that broke the camel's back. It pays to know your cliches!] Up to the surface bubbled the wrongs of three months. People were mad in no time! So much for the class getting along so well...

The lesson plan was chucked. Well, I attempted it, but looked out upon sullen and flushed faces, and decided other things were more important. [Happy thing! In the mornings I pray for the Holy Spirit to help me to be the teacher I need to be, and to remind me of Him throughout the day. During this class I actually remembered to PRAY for help in dealing with the situation! That was a big deal for me, and I'm thankful.] Instead of reading of Hamlet and Polonius, we talked about give and take, personality differences (how handy that we'd just done the personality tests!), kindness, and going on a journey from where we were now as a class, to a place of harmony:) I encouraged them that they have a special class - uniquely close. They're lucky!

Then I resumed Hamlet. But I could tell some of them were still pretty upset. My poor choleric had been ganged up on, and was not recovering quickly. SOOOO, the lesson plan was scrapped again and we played the telephone/pictionary game! Fortunately they loved it. Laughter once more filled the classroom.

They were ten minutes late to their next class - I ran ahead of them to tell the teacher it was my fault. But I thought it was important.

I love that class so much. They are so much fun, and so fabulous. But they need to work on the whole "walk in love" idea. And we will work on that, boy howdy! They have incredible potential, and there's no sense wasting that in squabbling and needless barbs. So there are my recent adventures in school-world.

Man. I love teaching.