To all the hustle and bustle and rustle:
I have a bunch of 12 year olds coming in four minutes from now.
It’s school.
I guess I don’t get my way.
My way:
(Can’t I just hang out with my students in French?)
(In quiet awareness of each other? Yes? Maybe? Please?)
(Where the pauses between the words are just as beautiful as the words?)
(Building something together in French.)
(It doesn’t matter what we build.)
(Just some French.)
(Such a beautiful language!)
I don’t speak to them in French, however.
We do other stuff.
A ton of English.
All kinds of things. School things.
Sit down. Quiet down. Grab a book. Read. Yes you sit there in that nice chair because you are the Professor 2. You are reading now. Class has started. Why aren’t you reading? Oh you are reading? You don’t know what a Ford Mustang is so you have to look it up? Oh, OK. I guess.
(I’ve always wanted to just hang out with them and build something in French.)
But they will bring hustle and bustle and English and I will bring worry, teacher worry. If you aren’t a teacher, don’t even try to figure that out.
I will speak more English than they do.
We will start with SSR. That will calm them down.
Maybe I’ll just start there.
I still have hope.
That’s something.
I’m trying my new yellow/red card grammar initiative today.
Wish me luck.
One good thing. I’ve been rescued by angels in over 34,000 classes. I know it more than anything. So I have something to fall back on.
I just wish it hadn’t taken me 25,000 classes to figure out that they were there.
They’ll guide me.
Otherwise I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t be a teacher.