It’s sheer panic on their faces, when I tell them they’re going to learn over 700 Spanish sentences during the year. “I cannot do that,” they say to me with their eyes. Can’t blame them, can you? But what they don’t know is how much sleep I’ve lost thinking about how to help them succeed….
I stood in a tiny supply closet many years ago, laboring to organize it once again. (Organizing closets is my super power. My kitchen floor hasn’t been mopped for…a while, but my clothes closet is perfection.) Anyway, I came to a box of scissors, and every one read “property of________” and had a teacher’s name…
I’ve had one goal over the last month –to help my students be prepared for their Spanish final. Clearly communicating what they need to know. Explaining the test again –and once more for the kid who says, So what will be on the test? Going over flashcards. Practicing sentences. Because their GPAs are counting on…
This from a student today: Finals might kill us. No. No one has ever died from taking a final, I said. But they might leave eternal emotional scars. Well, there is that. Having to prove you’ve learned something at the end of the year when you’re tired and the sun is shining –that is some…
I did not expect to feel nauseous on test day. Come Thursday I had the students pull out pencils. (Lapices, por favor!) They stood up their manila folders as privacy shields (an ingenious anti-cheating idea I stole from another teacher), and I handed out the Spanish test. The room became completely silent, except for the…
Is your only purpose to build a tower?
It’s just me and my man snuggling on the couch under a flannel quilt. He checks his phone to see that it is now officially 1 degree outside, and he wonders why 68 degrees in the house feels colder in this weather than it does in the summer. We’re being all peaceful and chatty, then…
It’s a goal-making kind of day. This year I will clean regularly. I will read the Bible every day. I will exercise myself back into those jeans (which spent all of December 26 unsnapped). I will… But it’s not the resolve that stands with chin up today. It’s the I can. Any mom wills to…
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