Proud Teacher Moments

This week has been great in terms of teaching moments. There are three major ones that stand out to me.

To start off, my classes and I are really starting to gel (after two and a half weeks of awkwardly silent one-sided discussion). They have gotten really involved in the discussions this week. I don't know if the material that we are covering are just more interesting to them or whether my excitement about the material is rubbing off. Hopefully both!

On another fun note, I have a student, X, who has been doing quite poorly lately and seems to be a bit of an self-isolating student. Well after we started Beowulf last week, he has participated in and contributed to every lesson since last Friday. Since he has been participating more and turning assignments in, his grade is now borderline "D" instead of so far entrenched in "F" territory that he won't receive a passing grade for the nine weeks. I found out today from a colleague in the science department and the 11th grade English teacher that student X acts and performs better in my class than he does in their classes. While this confuses me some, I am glad that I have made a connection with this student. Maybe he'll end up passing this semester of English 12.

On my last note for this round, I have taught two lessons back to back that I thought would end up being total flops that have ended up going far better than I thought they would. We looked at two excerpts from John Gardener's Grendel which is a story written from the perspective of Grendel. We used this Wednesday to discuss point-of-view and perspective by comparing the Grendel excerpt to what we get of Grendel in Beowulf. The end of the lesson on Wednesday was used as a primer for yesterday's lesson. We took an excerpt toward the end of Grendel when he bursts into Herot for the last time and analyzed the types of sentences and how they reflected the mood and action being observed in each sentence. I thought that this would be utterly confusing, but I thank my heavenly stars that the students in class got the concepts we were working on without needing much extra assistance.

Overall, this has been one of the best weeks I have had so far. This week helps make the dull, slow weeks worth it.