school marm day 2

I cried last night.

I looked over the pages in the teacher's manual and tried to figure out how to break down the day and teach the kids about writing and grammar and be interesting and teach enough that would be an entire week's worth of work and give homework and know what i was talking about. but really, i have no idea.

teaching terrifies me. and last week and even leading up to today, i still road the magic coattails of this 'anne of green gables' idea. i loved telling people i taught in a one-room schoolhouse across the street from the amish. it seemed so strange and new and odd and old-fashioned that i never really acknowledged the reality of it...until last night. (the reality that i will never be miss stacey. i will never be anne. i am at best catherine brook, and really, i don't even know if i can live up to being 'an old gooseberry.')

i sat on my bed and cried. i stared at these books and pages and realized that i have no idea how to teach. i mean, really, i am rarely grammatically correct (the proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is this blog). i cried and wondered how i agreed to spend seven hours every thursday teaching and who knows how many hours through the week preparing for class. i still don't know how to put together a lesson plan, for pete's sake. and all this for very little (if any) money. i love this family so when i think about the lack of money, the ol' catholic poverty vow screeches from my insides that i should never turn down helping others. it's good, giving work. and i'm just a modern-day selfish scrooge mcduck who's after one thing - money. so how could i live with myself if i told this family that i couldn't do it?

so this morning, driving through the smaller and smaller towns, passing grain fields and silos, in my half consciousness, i wished to run off the road. i wished for a deer to dart out and careen into my car. i wished for an oncoming truck to cause me to fly into a ditch. i didn't mean to wish for great harm to myself or anyone else, i simply wished for a good excuse not to have to go through with today.

but luckily, my wishes weren't granted.

i pulled into the driveway and was once again greeted by randolph, the goose. i got out my books and purse and J came out of the house and told me i could go on into the schoolhouse. so i wrote words on the board: originality, active voice, etc. who knows. i got caught up in the way the chalk felt in my hand and i really wanted to stave off the beginning of class.

but class began and J, R, and K came in. it's funny to start a class with people i know. it seems so casual and we joke around and then finally, i'm the one in charge (yeah, me...crazy) and they sit at their desks and i ask how their homework went. they had to write an essay about a time when they learned from a mistake - or something like that. not sure. and as i talked to J and R about their essays, i asked K to read her book ('the lion, the witch and the wardrobe') and write down any sentence that she loved - any word that caught her eye. seriously, i have no idea what i'm doing, but last time she colored for the first hour of class.

J and R read their essays. R's was about being late to a fiddle contest and J wrote about plowing corn with his father (you get the picture). i asked them to pick out three sentences that showed off their own voice - three sentences that they were most proud of because of the language they used, the imagery, but that still sounded like them. and then i asked them to pick out three sentences that anyone could write - sentences that weren't particular and didn't have any interesting element. and i asked them to take the plain sentences and rewrite them to such a crazy, extreme over-dramatic version of it, it would be ridiculous. and they did. they wrote hilarious sentences. seriously, hilarious. and from those, i asked them to pick out a phrase, an image, a word that they could keep that would make the plain sentence a little more their own.

and then we had to go into the boring subject of colons and semi-colons and ellipses and parentheticals and shit that i really don't know about (again, point made clear by this very website).

while J and R did some exercises, i worked with K on the sentences she picked out. she's so smart and creative and goofy, but terrified of making a mistake. absolutely terrified. and when i sit beside her and she has to pause before she spells something, i can see her shake. i can see the tears almost spring to her eyes. but then she gets it. so, today, i introduced her to a new best friend - a dictionary. i told her to never be intimidated by a word she wanted to use, because her imagination simply ran a bit faster than her spelling - and pretty soon it would all come together.

of course, i have a great difficulty actually putting thoughts into words, especially when i'm teaching or relaying information, so what the kids probably heard all day was, 'you know, um, like when you write - um, cause, you know?'

[and at some point in class, R asked if i had ever seen the film 'high noon.' i replied that of course i'd seen the film because i love gary cooper and they all three stared at me in disbelief and R asked, 'you know who gary cooper is?' she's 13. it was a very strange backwards moment.]

but i think today was a good day. maybe. my stomach doesn't feel as horrible as it did with my anxiety last night and i felt a bit more in control.

let's see how the next week goes.