Your regular hosts are attending to other pressing duties, and have very responsibly called the hotline for a substitute tonight. I promise I’ll try to follow the usual lesson plan, but be warned! Attendance will be taken! The passive voice will be used! And yes, this will be on the test.
A student in one of my classes wrote a sentence today.
In another class, kids got into a fight.
Those may not seem like great examples for starting a "Happy Story" diary. But once you know that the sentence was the first step in a major assignment for a kid who has been struggling all year, and that the "fight" was in my honors British Lit class over a critical interpretation of Beowulf, you’ll start to smile with me.
My happy story tonight is about liking my job. One of life’s greatest blessings has to be finding a true vocation—something which suits both your talents and your interests. While teaching high school is all the bad things you think it is—too many papers to grade, too many needs to meet with too few resources, and of course, the ever-present teacher pay issues, it is also many things other jobs will never be: Rewarding. Enriching. Life-changing, for both the teacher and the student.
There’s nothing quite like those "ah-ha!" moments—like my student this morning who came up with the first sentence for his required-for-graduation senior research paper. This is a kid with all sorts of "issues:" learning disabilities, little family support, never really been successful academically. For his graduation paper he chose to write about the importance of the farmer in America’s history. Now, you need to understand that this is a kid who would never voluntarily go to the library or open a book, and as his senior English teacher I’m charged with getting him to write a 5-7 paper in correct MLA documentation format with a minimum of seven sources. Whew.
But after a lot of "scaffolding" and "chunking" and all those other education-ese words that mean accomplishing something big by breaking it down into little steps, he has come a long, long way. We were in the computer lab at school, working on writing creative, attention-getting introductions, and I was showing the kids how to do easy searches for famous quotations, as one way to open a paper. Suddenly a hand shot up, "Mrs. Brown! Mrs. BROWN!!!" With exited yells, the kid pulled me over to show me this quotation as though he had just discovered the best thing ever found on the Internet:
"Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization."
Daniel Webster
"This is exactly what I want my paper to prove!" He was actually standing up at this point, he was so excited. A few minutes later, he had crafted the quote into a lovely first paragraph, complete with his own thesis sentence at the very end, just as God intended.
Try putting that into a paycheck, or a resume.
So did you ever have a job you loved? How about a moment in school when that proverbial light bulb went off?
Or what else have you been up to this week?
Your happy story can be about anything—anything at all. And I promise I won’t take a red pen to any of your thoughts. :-)