on guitars, peanut butter and the grinch..

My students are doing demonstration speeches now. Nothing too exciting. The main goal is to teach something to other students in the form of a demonstration. One girl today, Beth, showed students how to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while singing a peanut butter and jelly song she sang with her grandfather when she was little.

Another student had a particularly difficult time with the assignment. He came in an extra period to talk about it with me.

“What are you good at?”

“Nothing.”

“You must be good at something!”

“No.”

*remembers journal entry*

“What about the guitar? Don’t you play? That would be a great thing to do something with.”

“No!”

“Why not??”

“They’ll think it’s stupid. No one cares anyway. They will think I’m showing off!”

I got him to talk about band. Finally, after much encouragement we decided to do a speech using his guitar. His goal was to show his “audience” how to put a string on it.

His speech was wonderful. And his classmates convinced him to play a song when he was finished. He actually did! I was proud of him. Sometimes I feel like my students are my kids.

Something else I’m proud of is that most of my students are understanding “Julius Caesar.” It’s taken forever and a day and much discussion, but they are getting the hang of it. I love when they say “why can’t he just speak English!”

One of them yesterday told me as I passed…”Hey, Ms. K! I actually think I’m getting it!”

That made my day. 🙂

My Honors class is doing a project now where they are putting together a trial to go along with The Scarlet Letter. They actually are interested in that too. It’s wonderful to see enthusiasm.

It’s difficult getting enthusiasm out of students.

Before student teaching, my co-op told me that I would have to learn to become an actress if I was to be successful as a teacher. There are days when I feel like collapsing, not entertaining a group of unmotivated teenagers. I feel like they drain me at times.

For instance, we were doing research. I explained to them as a class how to do citations, asked if there were any questions, gave them a paper detailing the method needed to do them successfully and told them to have at it.

Not three minutes later, I had a student come up.

“Have you started your citations?”

“My what?”

“Your citations. The thing I just went over.”

“Ummm…what’s a citation?”

Thus I begin showing how to do a citation one of the many hundreds of times I would end up doing it that week.

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I love my job. Parts of it. There are still times when I wonder how good I am at it. There is one class that seems to take up most of the time having me correct their behavior. Yesterday as they were leaving, I mumbled “I would be surprised if any of you learned anything in my class.” One student paused what he was doing, looked up and said “I have. You’re the first teacher who showed me how to write an essay.”

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I’m looking forward to the Christmas season. Oddly enough though, what I’m looking forward to the most is spending part of it with my bf. This will be our first Christmas together. I wonder if sentimental things even mean that much to him in the long run. I want to decorate a Christmas tree with him, watch the lights at night reflected in his eyes, be able to curl up in his arms while listening to Christmas carols, watch old faithful Christmas shows by his side–like The Grinch and Frosty the Snowman. Everything seems so new with him here. I look at things a different way.

During the day I can’t wait to come home and hug him. At night I look forward to sleeping next to him. I love knowing that he is here. I can’t even begin to describe how much I love him. He can make me feel so much in just a glance.

He is planning on going home for awhile before Christmas and then spend the holiday there. And sometimes when I look towards that, I feel like maybe it would be good to be apart. After all, when you are apart you come to appreciate the “together” time. I know that he would like to see his family. And that’s a good thing. But I’ll miss him. And I don’t want to hold him here. I’ll be waiting for him when he comes back. It will just be so hard to come home and not have him here. I’ll miss him beyond words.

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My diary description runs out in *checks the yellow box* 20 something days. I can’t imagine not having a diary. Even though I believe I’ve lost most of my readers and even though I don’t write too much anymore. I want to write more. I just don’t.

I feel better having written. Writing used to be the outlet I turned to most when I needed to release tension. Not so much anymore. So much has changed even in just one year.