My Kids

It's 3:30 AM and even though I should so very very very much be in bed right now, I'm riding too high on Starbucks and the weekplan I just finished to hit the sack yet. Note, however, that Whitman is affecting my prose---I'm writing slangy. :-P

I don't think that any of my co-op kids have discovered my blog yet, which is a good thing because what I'm about to say would swell their heads something tremendous, and I'm saving that for Christmas encouragement notes. I don't subscribe to the theory that a teacher should never crack a smile or a joke until Christmas (at least, not when you have four moms in the back of the room who are ready and willing to crack heads for you), but I do believe that personal authority has to be maintained somehow (my preferred method is by keeping an Evil Overlord persona up my sleeve---my left sleeve, of course), and anyway it's a little too early for them to relax into the realization that I think they're fabulous. It might lull them into a false sense of security vis-a-vis their grades.

So, thus far I've confined my enthusiasm to the corners of their quizzes and emails to their mothers, and that's how it should probably stay until they fully understand that my being preposterously fond of them doesn't mean I'm going to go soft (because after all, going soft wouldn't benefit them).

However as I said none of them yet know about the existence of this blog, and I have to tell somebody or burst. Guess who's elected, dear reader? That's right. You are.

I will give nicknames to all parties in order to protect both the innocent and the guilty. I have thirteen students and four student teachers. (These are actually parents of students learning from me about how to teach literature, if you can believe that. Them learning from me? Try the other way round!) Anyway, when I first counted them---the students, not the parents; but they are four moms in case you were curious---at the beginning of my first class, I turned to one of the moms and said, "Ah. Thirteen. That's a lucky number."

Of course at that point I was shaking (note to self: how can I still be shaking at the beginning of a new endeavor after all those times teaching co-op?), so it was a pretty weak joke, but yes, I will confess it here (and never to my kids, at least not until we've all been together for a year), I was feeling intimidated.

I go about this vilely. Let me back up to my moms for a second. As I said, they form a quartet... or, if you prefer, a quatrain. Each week I meet with them for half an hour before class, then conduct class for an hour and a half. (Then incidentally I have another two-hour meeting with a coworker right after that. I lead all three meetings. Yeah. Let's just say that I come home utterly exhausted on Fridays.) My moms are, basically, the best. Three of them are three of my favorite people on earth (I'll call them Faith, Hope, and Love, which are appropriate names, believe me), and the fourth is a lady I don't know very well, but she's smart and has done a terrific job with her own kids, so I've got plenty to learn from her (let's just call her Lady).

So we kick it for half an hour and have all kinds of fun. I'm planning to tell them this coming Friday that the invisible three-ring Venn diagram we drew on the board last week (nota bene: bring whiteboard markers!) is actually the literary version of a three ring circus. It's great fun to talk shop about what and how and classroom this and students that, and have I mentioned yet that I learn tons from them? You wouldn't believe. Oh, and the best part is that everything we do right is one more thing I can add to the "Teaching R Lit" doc that I'm compiling for the Loom. Sweetness and light for moms all over the country! I love it when stuff works on two or three levels at once. :-D

Okay, so then the kids. By now I'm well warmed up but also starting to reach for my water and looking for a place to kick off my shoes. My kids are used to this now, I hope. Somehow I can only teach in shoes for so long, and being as it were at home with these people, I take the liberty of losing the leather as soon as I think of it after class begins.

(Oh, by the way, there's a piano in my classroom! Do you know how long it's been since I last had a chance to tickle the ivories? ::happy sigh:: Not that I'll have much of a chance between the pre-meeting, the class, and the post-meeting, but hey, I can still dream!)

Now, back to the kids. I call them O My Students and privately add (and O the Delight of My Eyes!). Thirteen, as I said, and I wouldn't loose a single one to make it a less dangerous number. Call it a baker's dozen, if the thirteen thing bothers you. Three boys and ten girls. Uneven? Oh my yes, and would you believe the guys were silly enough to bunch up in the corner and on the edge of the seating arrangements? You'd think they would have known that I'd want them right under my eye. So of course I stuck 'em smack dab in the middle, flanked by girls from sea to shining sea.

And reader, would you believe it, they are all three fun? Really! One of them is my firebrand---I'll call him Enjolras. He's smart as a whip and likes to test me at every opportunity, but he also takes it almost as well as he dishes it out and I can always count on him for controversy to liven things up. The other two are much quieter: bases to Enjolras's acid. I think of them as Gawain and Galahad. Gawain is a little slower and not the world's greatest quiz-taker, but he's always worth listening to when he makes a comment, and his questions are spang-on. Galahad is quiet but intelligent like nobody's business, and if I could just get him to talk more I think he'd be one of my best and brightest in discussion.

And then there were ten. What was I thinking of... oh yes, the parable of the ten virgins with the oil. I'm pretty sure that that doesn't apply, but at 3:30---no, it's 4:00 now---some loose allusions are to be expected. Well, what makes the girls more confusing is that I've got two sets of twins (none of them are related, but each shares a first name with one of the others). I'll call them .... um.... well, let's say the Annes and the Dianas (Green Gables).

One Anne is dead silent but as determined a student as I've ever seen. If her work isn't perfect, nobody's is. Now if only I could get her to talk more! The other is brilliant and good in discussion, so I find myself working to challenge her. As a point of fact, I'm toying with the idea of splitting the the thirteen into smaller groups of four or five each so that the moms can take turns teaching, but maybe that's next year. In any case, if I do that, I'll handpick my students to be the ones who need the highest level of challenge and can handle the biggest workload, so that they can go as far as possible in the time we have.

The Dianas... well, they're both intelligent and both quiet. In fact, the combination of intelligent and quiet is probably going to be one of my biggest obstacles. Oh, it isn't that my kids don't talk; they do. But I always want more than I have when it comes to talking. I want each of them to say at least one thing that they really want to say each class. That's kind of my goal.

After the Green Gables Girls, I have six left: The Princess (not because she's stuck up, but because she's beautiful and sweet and brilliant and self-contained), Kitten (the name says it all, except for the part about her being one of my most diligent workers), Shy (because she is, and that's saying something in this group: I'm still working on getting her to talk), the Tsarina (she reminds me of a Russian queen), and the two who are actually sisters, whom I shall describe as Margaret and Elizabeth, after the English princesses of the World War II era. They are from one of Those Families where all the children were born brilliant and only want training to do practically anything. All I ask, where they are concerned, is for Margaret to talk a bit more. But by now you are probably sensing a theme on the subject of talking. 0:-)

A word on geography. After making the mistake a dozen times in a row of referring to the place where I teach as if it were out-of-state instead of simply in a different county, I have decided to treat the whole geographical issue in the manner of the English. Where I live is, corresponding to a map of England, London. Where I teach is up north, which would be "the country" in England, or possibly "York" or "Edinburgh," to give it a name. Now the curious thing about the English is that they always speak of going "up" to "town" (by which they mean London), even though this invariably means going south, and of going "down" to the "country," even though this is north.

I therefore have decided to adopt their charming inconsistency (take that my old enemy, the metric system!) and will henceforward refer to going to teach as going "down to the country" and to coming home as "coming up to town."

To return to my kids. Again. Almost 4:30 now, and I must go to bed soon, whether I feel sleepy or not. Anyway, my kids are simply the brightest bunch that anybody could wish, and have such a delightful assortment of personalities for me to learn and love that I sometimes feel quite embarrassed by these sudden riches. I keep waiting for a squad of parents to appear out of the woodwork and say "Ooops, sorry, we didn't realize that you are only 24 and don't know what you're doing. We'll withdraw our children now." Surely somebody ought to do that, but somehow they haven't. Which leads one furiously to ponder....

Is it possible that I shall really have this joy for the next two years?

I must be dreaming already. :-)