2002-05-01
Improving mood buoyed by compliment, posted at 12:47 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com It's amazing how much of a pick-me-up a compliment from my supervisor is.Yesterday afternoon, she came into my 7th period unannounced with a prospective teacher candidate. It was a bit of a shocker. We were having a discussion about Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the two of them stood and watched for about twenty minutes. Until they came in, I was in ultra-relaxed mode - I had shed my nice-ish sweater in the heat, and had on my Akers res life staff shirt from three years ago on. I of course regretted that later, but oh well. The discussion went okay - we were discussing examples of Hurston's figurative language. The kids in that class are pretty sharp, so things went okay. But I didn't feel very comfortable up there.
She just walked in, and told me the following: "I didn't get a chance to talk to you yesterday about this because I never caught you alone (at this point, I'm thinking, "shit, I must have sucked!", but I wanted to thank you for letting us come into your class yesterday unannounced. I wanted to show (the candidate), who has only taught college-level classes, what these kids look like coming in as 9th graders. Even if he ends up teaching 12-grade Honors, he should see how they get from freshmen to where they'll be. And I wanted to show him an example of a very successful first year teacher who did teach in front of kids before this year, and has still found himself working hard to be successful with these kids. After the meeting, he said, 'wow! he's really good!' and listing off all these things you were doing, and I told him, 'Yup, he is'! Anyhow, thanks a lot for letting us come in."
So I'm feeling really good right now. Six months ago, I never would have guessed that I'd be hearing things like that.