The amazing Robert Harrell is this month’s Teacher of the Month on the PLC. He is our resident scholar here. The complete fisherman, Robert casts his intellectual net far into the ocean for all of us on the PLC and consistently brings in big delicious fish and cooks them himself so that we are never hungry in our quest to learn more about teaching languages.
Whenever we get into anything esoteric, it takes Robert but a few paragraphs to sort it all out for us. I’m not sure where we would be without him here with us over these past years to clarify and explain things – we might be lost. At best, we would certainly be further down the mountain. Robert got jGR rolling. Bringing us closer to the Three Modes is one of his biggest contributions to the group, but it is far from the only one.
Most of us struggle to get the language across and make furtive attempts to touch on all the culture, but when Chef Robert cooks up the CI for his lucky students, it’s always got a lot of big chunks of culture in it. That is what I have gathered, at least, over the years, as I have read all the articles and comments here by him that have made me a much better teacher.
Robert is the clean up hitter on our baseball team. His is the gattling gun on the battlefield where most of us have those old kinds of rifles. In a way, we have gone to war together, and have fought more than one campaign together. I am so proud to be fighting next to Robert. How could we ever lose?
I just can’t stop talking about him, so I won’t. People like Robert are extremely rare. Let’s just say it. He’s one in a million. I once started a Word file called “Sayings of Chairman Robert” some time ago. I was going to go through and choose from comments he has made here and make a book out of it for us to read.
But it is one book I’ll never finish, or if I do it will be 500 pages. I started, and after pulling about one month of comments, I already had five really pages of really thick and scholarly material on a variety of topics that always seemed to relate back to standards, either nationally or those in CA. How to organize it all? How to find time to study it all again?
Anyway, I’ll stop now. But it’s not easy. The dude is a force. So here’s to our great California colleague who has made our learning curve so much easier. Here’s to our Chevalier de l’Ouest, PLC Teacher of the Month for June, Robert Harrell!