...are sometimes difficult to find. Especially when one is subbing for an aide, and not a regular classroom teacher. But the other day, I happened upon one. I love it when those happen. They are so rare, so individual, so heart-warming, that they make everything worth it.
On the day in question, I was in the last period of the day, helping Mr. S.'s students read particularly difficult stories in various groups. One group of fairly high ability students had the entire version of Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." One girl stated she didn't understand anything that was going on. So we went through it together slowly, word by word, and she followed my finger with her eyes and looked into my own as I painstakingly explained what each word in the passage meant and what was going on in the story as a whole. She asked questions and genuinely wanted to understand. We get toward the end of the story and I ask her if she can translate one particular sentence. She says she can't, so I slowly explain it again, then say something like "Essentially, Ichabod dies." "He dies!?" she exclaims, "Cool!" I was going to go on, but then Mr. S. asked for the class' attention, so I briefly said to her, "You understand?" and she nodded so I quickly nodded back then relinquished my attention to the front of the room.
So maybe she still doesn't have a grasp on the archaic language. Maybe she isn't ready for independent learning. Maybe she only gets the basic gist of the story. But the point is that she understood my explanation, but even more than that, she really wanted to learn. She was invested in her own education. THAT, fellow students, is what teaching is all about. It made me feel so good that my own efforts were, at least for those brief moments, worth while.
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