Holy moly

Wow, time flies. It feels close to the end already. Students begin their first year of testing next week (third graders), which is 3 days out of each of the next two weeks. Then they go on a 3-day grade-wide camping trip (which my fourth-graders are going on). They return the first of May. My placement ends on the 17th.

I feel like this has gone too fast. The fall felt fairly slow, even with the week we missed for Sandy. I have only barely gotten to know these kids. Help!

I will plan to visit them in June. But still: I am marveling at how fast it's gone. I could teach them all summer and still be fascinated, and want to come back every day to learn more. I can only hope for their sakes that they're sick of me already:)

Water and conversation

I have been thinking a great deal lately about language and its work as the main medium of teaching. The Japanese have a saying: “Water and conversation are free.” This was an obstacle in my previous career in consulting, as there is a predisposition in Japanese business culture not to pay for “conversation,” which is often what our services boiled down to. My job was to make the conversation interesting and valuable enough to pay for.

In teaching, it’s even harder than that. Language seems so ephemeral- do students hear the words we say to them? Do they understand? Out of 25 kids, how many are hearing me at any given moment? Did that fire truck mean I should start over? We don’t have the luxury of meandering conversations: if nothing else, we’re limited by the attention span of the least attentive child. We have to write koans and haiku. Every word has to be packed with meaning, we have to know how to say the most in the least amount of words and time, and the lesson has to be more than the sum of its parts: its substance has to stay in their minds somehow. Right now, I waste words, and time, casting around for just the right lever to pull, to tip their minds in the direction I want them to go. I feel like I don’t know where we’re all going—mainly because I’ve never been there before. I am not reliably leading them, yet, where I want them to go. If they do wind up there, it feels like a happy accident, and I need to also find a way to know if it happened at all. It’s all still water and conversation.

。。。水とお喋り