It’s Friday. I meant to write this yesterday. But better late than never.
Thursdays can be difficult for me. As some if not most of you know, I play soccer, indoors in Woodbridge, on Wednesday nights. Sometimes the matches begin at 10:30 p.m. This means sometimes I get home at or past midnight, and, adrenaline still coursing through my body, in no state of mind or body to quickly fall asleep. I usually come to school Thursday having slept very little, and at my age that is no good.
That was the case, especially, yesterday. I came to school VERY tired and was in the unfamiliar situation of not looking forward to a full day of teaching. I am one of the fortunate ones who love their job, but yesterday I just didn’t think I had the energy for it.
When I came home from work yesterday, my wife, who is also, as some if not most of you know, a middle-school language arts teacher, asked me, as spouses do, how my day was. I thought about it for a bit, and said, “Good. Very good, actually. In fact, I think it was my best day of the year.”
I said that as I thought about all of my classes during the day, especially the three language arts ones. In those classes, each group of students was so into what they were doing, that I had very little to do other than walk around the room and see if anyone had questions. It was so great to see every group – and I mean every group – working so hard on their Easton Learning Foundation grant proposals, talking about claims and reasons and evidence and counter-claims and plastering your pieces of chart paper with sticky notes full of argument-bolstering pieces of evidence. If most if not all of you are enjoying the project, then that makes me really happy, and I’m looking forward to seeing the final drafts of your proposals (read: argumentative essays) and your presentations.
So, in conclusion, thank you for being such good students, and for making what I thought was going to be a long and dreadful day a breezy and enjoyable one. That’s teaching, and teaching in middle school, for you: you think one thing but the other happens.
Enjoy your weekend.