A Good Day Teaching

While I have enjoyed my four weeks teaching in person classes again, they haven't all been fabulous classes.  I had forgotten how exhausting it can be to teach in person.  At the end of my three hour teaching stint, my legs ache, and then there's the drive on either end.  There have been days when I've felt like I'm the only one who has any enthusiasm for the work at hand, days that I wish that my students had less expressive faces or better skill at handling their irritation at being asked to put away their phones and concentrate on something else.  But there are days I feel that way about the world at large.

Yesterday was different, so let me document a good teaching day.

In my English Composition II class, we talked about the upcoming paper, and then we looked at Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings."  I had my students do a quick daily writing, having them write a list of the ways the old man was God/Jesus/Vishnu/Allah/other Divine One in Charge.  It became clear that they were baffled, so I shifted gears.  I projected the story on the big screen, and I pointed to elements to guide them.

For example, I pointed to the text and said, "Here the Old Man is put in a chicken coop.  How is that similar to other God stories?"  "Here he is branded with an iron stick . . . Here he grows new feathers and flies away.  Tell me how that's similar to Jesus."  Then I did a quick review of the life of Jesus and had us focus on the Old Man as representing Jesus.  My students did much better when I asked the pointed questions, had them write for a minute or two with each question, and then we had a discussion.  It was more involvement with the text than I've seen so far.

It may be because the text wasn't completely unfamiliar; some of them said they'd read it in high school.  Or maybe they did better because it's a short story which is less overwhelming than a poem.  Or maybe it was just a better day because of something I can't track--maybe they all had something to eat.

Then I went on to my English Composition I class, where we did peer editing.  Instead of having the 9 students sit in a circle or in groups, I was the one moving--distributing essays, having them read and comment, taking them back up and distributing them to new readers.  It worked fairly well, although it was tiring for me.

As I left the classroom, a group of five students stood in the hall, talking about their essays and the feedback they'd gotten, and it sounded like it was a mostly positive experience.  By the time I left my office 10 minutes later, they had moved to one of the lounge areas in the big hallway; they stretched out on sofas and read each other's rough drafts.

I couldn't resist saying, "Y'all know how to warm a teacher's heart."  They smiled, and indeed, my teacher's heart stayed warm the rest of the day.

I have never had students stay after class to continue the peer editing--wow!  Yes, my teacher's heart continues to be happy.