My two highlights this year were:
– Staying positive with a girl who has experienced abuse all her life at the hands of her mother. She fought tooth and nail not to be included, for about five months, until, as per John’s comments about Pepe, a point was reached somewhere in January where she knew that she was safe. It took me a thousand bite-my-tongue moments, but look how it ended up. Yes, John, if we don’t let them know that they are liked first, we can forget everything that this way of teaching offers.
– There is a song called Aicha and in the beginning of the year a Latina came up and acted out that role with such precision and dignity with a guy who handled his role almost equally well, that it kind of blew everyone away. There is a part in the song where the male suitor implores Aicha to look at him, listen to him, stay with him, speak to him. That is one hell of a song for teaching those verbs to a French 1 class at the beginning of the year is all I’m saying. Lots of buy in. (They don’t have to know everything in the song, of course, to get that one stanza.) The only other thing that I saw this year that was even close to that moment was when Dominique over at George Washington (I was visiting Joseph Dziedzic that day) did the MJ dance move, ducking his head under his arm to show fear in the middle of Kayley Delinger’s establishing meaning for “has fear”.
Share some of yours!