One of the absolute best parts of teaching young kids is that you are there for all those quotes and stories that come out unfiltered. Young kids don’t always put the words in the right order, they don’t care what others think and they are never politically correct. Which makes conversations with them one of the highlights of my job. So whenever we had downtime, whether it was eating at lunchtime or riding on a fluorescent orange school bus coming back from a field trip, I always liked to ask my third grade class questions. About love and books and …READ MORE
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Yes to big ideas. Not to marriage proposals. So just… get that thought of the way. (If you listen quietly, you can hear my mom weeping). A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about saying Yes. I wrote about branching out and creating a list of 10 liberating and slightly irresponsible choices and using the month of June to jump into the deep scary end of the ocean of living. Here is the list and what I’ve done so far… 1. Instead of skipping out on the bill (which was suggested in the original list- which? Is too …READ MORE To my grade 3 class, I have exactly 31 teaching days with you left. You don’t realize this yet- you are eight years old and the concept of counting down to something other than Christmas is beyond your reality. You are living for soccer at recess and spelling games and Art class on Friday. You live for computer class free time and the moment you realize how to multiply 6 by 7. That’s one of my favourite things about you- you aren’t thinking about tomorrow because you are too busy filling up today. And you’ve filled up my year beyond …READ MORE I’m sitting here in my classroom- one that was so ugly when I first met it, I almost cried. It was a thousand shades of beige with ripped construction paper and borders that didn’t quite meet around bulletin boards. It had dirty walls, smeared windows and it smelled like my grandmother’s basement. It had torn posters haphazardly dangling from the last cold remnants of sticky tack, a small collection of tattered books housed in a dirty plastic bin and 10 lonely desks stood in the center of the room. I look around now. I have brightly colored material stretched over …READ MORE Do you ever go to write something and then go read your archives and find a post you already wrote that is pretty much identical to what you were going to write? And you are both elated (hello link love, let’s just save mamma some typing!) and deflated (I was way funnier two years ago)? And then you realize you just called yourself ‘mamma’ and you wonder what it says about you when you admit to yourself that you like it? Me too. Saturday is the *birthday. TWENTY EIGHT. I’m sure I’m supposed to be feeling all sorts of things …READ MORE I have a job. An honest to goodness teaching job. This year. In a school. Where I will go to the same classroom everyday and teach grade four students about reading and writing and how to not write run on sentences like this one. I have a job. (Also? If you want to make a difference and gain huge karma points- go here and see how you can help!) Thank you so much for your kind words and emails everyone! The title says it all. Here are ten things I said today (and I only started writing them down at lunch- that’s how crazy this class was). I spent a better part of my drive home daydreaming of a workplace where no one put things down their pants while talking to me. I’m sure there is a GREAT dirty joke in there but I’m too tired to find it. 1. “If you keep talking inappropriately about Michael Jackson, you will spend your recess with me”. 2. “Show me that you are ready for gym. That means you need to get …READ MORE Yesterday I spent the day with the Obama class. We were working on a tough language arts assignment when one of my favourite kids in the class, Kyra- came to show me her work. Now, we were working at a grade two level so I wasn’t expecting precision coloring, but I could tell that this wasn’t her best work. Instead of going all Nazi-coloring judge on her, I asked her what I ask all kids who I know are giving a 30% effort because the other 70% of them is thinking about when the hell class is over. I simply …READ MORE |
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