Loving kids

As I've said before, I am just a 3rd year teacher. Teaching is actually my second career (or maybe 3rd or 4th if you count retail and restaurants as careers). My goal when graduating from college was to work in international business...travelling the world and being a liaison between cultures and countries. Well, graduating in December of 2001, post-9/11 by 3 months was a disaster. There were no international jobs...there were hardly any jobs at all. So I went to my back-up business career: human resources. I'm a bit of a bleeding heart, and my hope was that I could be the voice for the little guy. After surviving lay-offs and dealing with the heartlessness of corporate America, I decided that I needed a new life. Teaching seemed like a great way to combine my love of French with my love of people. (if only I could throw in an accounting class to my day...life would be perfect). So I went back to school and got a Masters and my teaching certificate at the same time. Man, I thought, I love kids and I love French...life will be great!

Enter reality: I was told by many language teachers that you should teach most, if not all, of the class in the target language. Speak to your students in the hallway in the target language! Create an environment of language! Okay, I can try to do that...but what suffered was my relationship with the students. I would smile at them in the hall and say "Bonjour!" and they would clam up. "OMG...that teacher is trying to talk to me...in FRENCH..." I never felt more like a dork than I did my first year. I wondered about the Spanish teacher who always had kids in her room after school...talking about music and books and movies. I thought, "I'm cool. I've seen Blink 182 in concert many times. I've read Twilight...Why aren't these kids connecting to me??" I chalked it up to leftover nerdiness in high school. Maybe I was just super sensitive to it because I was so dorky in high school...

Not this year!!!!!! (I'm excited...) Through the questionning and making kids the stars of my class, I've opened that door for conversation. I have students smiling at me in the hallway because we have an inside joke from yesterday's story. I have students coming into class early to tell me about the shirt that they bought yesterday. Today, I had a student (VERY quiet student) come to the front of the class and BREAKDANCE during a French video. I'm just amazed and awed by these kids. I smile just thinking about what we did in class today. How many teachers can say that?