Excellence

It seems to me that our culture holds up this ideal of excellence, but then we are constantly told that the ideal is not for us to reach, it is for others. How many times have you heard somebody say, "I don't want to be a saint." Why not? Why can't we reach for the stars?

I felt this when I was applying to my last teaching position, it was at a school for gifted and talented students. I was asked during the interview process if I were gifted and talented. Rather than simply saying "Yes" I hemmed and hawed and tried to find a politically correct answer. It's ok for our students to be gifted, but it's pride if we claim the same ourselves.

Last week I was at a Fluency Fast teacher training seminar in Denver. The goal of the training is to actually be able to teach for Fluency Fast. When I applied, I thought for sure that I was not qualified at all. I was surrounded by people I have been looking up to for years. And, I was awful. The first day I bombed completely. I got in 9 repetitions of a verb, when the goal is closer to 30. Ouch. On Wednesday evening, I went to an immersion dinner with the Spanish students. I spoke with the owner of the company. She said that she always hires teachers who are better than she is, because she wants the best. Duh. On Thursday I told one of the coaches that I couldn't understand why I was so nervous. "In my classroom," I said, "I am an excellent teacher." It was the first time I can remember articulating that sentiment quite so clearly. And I didn't mean it pridefully, just truthfully. I am an excellent teacher. It was so liberating to say that and to realize I believe it. I kicked butt on Friday. What a shame I had to spend the whole week scared of being too good, thinking I couldn't possibly compete.

I had a conversation with another teacher later on Thursday about the role of the teacher. He said that it isn't about the teacher. It's about the kids. The teacher should basically disappear in the classroom. And, he's right to an extent. It is about the kids. The kids are the most amazing people in that room. But if I don't start with the knowledge that I am excellent, than I am not going to reach excellence, and neither will my students.

books I have read

I saw this list on another blog I sometimes read, and I was curious about my own literary habits. I don't normally participate in anything resembling a chain letter or mass forwarding of emails, but I got a real kick out of doing this, so I decided to share it here.

This was a list of the top 100 selling books published by (some publishing house). The original post said that the average American adult had not read 10 of these books. So, I wanted to check. I have read 52 and have serious plans for at least two more of them.

1) Look at the list and put one * by those you have read.
2) Put a % by those you intend to read.
3) Put two ** by the books you LOVE.
4) Put # by the books you HATE.
5) Post.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
**2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
*3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
**4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling (I’ve read them in two languages)
*5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
**6 The Bible (the whole thing too, all 63 books)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
*8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
**10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
*11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
*12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
*13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
**14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
**16 The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
*18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
*21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
*22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
**25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
*28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
*29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
**30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
**33 Chronicles of Narnia- C.S. Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
**36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis (I was confused by this one until I remembered the list is compiled of top selling books published at this house. This book is sold separately and as part of a series - it makes the top 100 in both forms go CS Lewis!)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis de Bernières
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
**40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
*41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
#42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (I read it in Spanish, but was still singularly unimpressed)
*43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
**44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
*46 Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
*48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
*49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
%51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
*52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
**57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
**58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
*60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
*61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
*64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
*67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
*70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
*71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
**72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
*73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Émile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A.S. Byatt
**81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
*83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
**87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
**89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (all of them)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
**91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
#92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
**94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
%95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
*97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
**98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (And I have played 5 different roles in this play as well)
**99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
**100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

why I blog

In my husband's grad program they were asked to debate the relative merits and demerits of blogging. The biggest complaint against blogging was that it is such a self-serving and self-aggrandizing vehicle. And, I can see that point.

I don't blog just to see my thoughts on the screen, and neither (I think) do the people who's blogs I tend to read. I fell in love with blogs when I realized how much we can reach out and form communities across space. I read a handful of blogs fairly regularly and I love that I can be invited into these communities in such an intimate way. OK, that sounds corny.

But, teaching is such a lonely profession in so many ways. I have colleagues for sure. But we all teach different material. And we all teach at the same time. I can't pop into somebody's room just to see what they do. My students come in, my door closes and its just the 26 or so of us. But with the few listservs and blogs that I read and participate in, suddenly that door is able to open again. I love talking to people about the things I love doing - teaching, speaking different languages, theology... I get "jazzed", to quote my husband, and I need that interaction to be at my best. So I blog to keep the lines of communication open, even if it sounds corny. :)

The tree

Shel Silverstein wrote a great book called "The Giving Tree."

That is me these days. I don't have any apples left - I gave them away. I don't have any more branches from which you can swing. I don't even have a trunk left for you to climb. I am nothing more than a stump.

If you want to sit on me, you are welcome. Otherwise, please don't ask me for anything else. I don't have anything left.

This is of course, directed to my school and my administration. I am asked if I want to be on this committee or that committee or to do this or that, and frankly, the answer is no. I don't have any more time or energy to commit to a project that will be voided out with the next administration or board or project du jour.

woohoo! My observation

I had my "annual" observation two weeks ago now, and we sat down to my post-observation meeting this Monday. I don't think it could have gone better. (Other than throwing my back out in an effort to show I really do know how to walk through the classroom and check-in with every student.)

I had two administrators doing the observation. They both caught all sorts of things that I try to use in my class, so that was cool. They both had Spanish in high school, and asked me about two things they caught in my class. 1) el problema - it is an irregular masculine noun meaning that it looks like it ought to be a feminine noun. 2) bve largo vs. bve corto - the letters "b" and "v" are homophones in Spanish and I clarify this the way I learned in Chile. "B" is bve largo (long bve), and "V" is bve corto (short bve). The really cool thing is that I apparently repeated both of those items enough times that both administrators caught them.

My one administrator told me in the meeting that he had really been enjoying the dictation because he was just starting to feel like he was understanding what was being said. He was sad when that was over and we went on to the next activity. And then he was happy because the story we read had all the same vocabulary and structures in it, so he really did understand! And that is really the woohoo moment for me. That I was going slowly enough and had enough repetitions that he actually "felt" that comprehension!

Both administrators also commented on how engaged the entire class was. They did ask why I checked in with the same students more often than others, but when I explained the concept of barometer students they were pleased with my answer. (A barometer student is a student who is really trying, but processes information slower than most of the class - I check in with these students often to make sure I am pacing myself well and that every student can understand.)

dilemma

Three months into school I just had a student transfer into the school and thus into Spanish class. I have no idea how I will catch her up so that she can understand what is happening in class.