This is a post from 2017 that I happened across this morning. The words are even more true than they were then:
Reflections on a Career
I was sitting at my desk at the end of another long day in the trenches, thinking back, just thinking about the almost four decades and roughly 35,000 classes I taught in my career.
Looking around in my files I found a picture that jumped out at me as perhaps the happiest moment of my career:
It was taken about four years ago at Lincoln HS on Denver’s “West Side” where there are a lot of Latino schools. The student I’m talking with in French in the photo, being fluent in Spanish as 99% of the students in that school were, could process French faster than just about any student I remember in my career. I’m glad I wasn’t making him conjugate verbs.
I remember that Dr. Krashen was actually in the room that day, with his entourage from the district office, observing – he happened to be in Denver that week – and how nervous I was, but when the kids saw a visitor there, they turned up their good will and looked like a bunch of French super stars!
Yup, I think that the image above captured what was maybe the highlight of my career. It wasn’t the time my students in a private school in South Carolina took the top ten scores in the state on the National French Exam that year. It wasn’t the time I had a student in French in Level II earn a 4 on the French AP exam with no prior knowledge. It wasn’t any of the awards. What was it?
It was the time spent with those kids. Thank you, God, for making me be a CI teacher so that I was actually able to align with the research in my instruction. Thanks for turning me away from the textbook so long ago. I wouldn’t have made it. And sorry about all the bitching.
