Thursday, September 24, 2009

a spoonful of sugar

First, thank you to all who e-mailed me about yesterday’s blog post. I didn’t know the affect it would have on other women. Your voices can be heard.

I baked cookies for my students today. It’s that whole Mary Poppins “just a spoonful of sugar,” philosophy. What’s the medicine, you ask? Well, a whole day of modifiers yesterday: prepositional and verbal phrases, misplaced modifiers, dangling modifiers. They all had this glazed over look in their eyes by the end of class, even my best students. Heck, I had a glazed over look in my eyes. I know the grammar bores them to tears, but they’re hanging in there, and I admire them for that. I can already see an improvement in their writing skills, so it’s paying off.

I had to come down pretty hard on a few students who are still learning how to respect authority. It’s tough on my soul, especially since my soul still isn’t up to full strength. I know resisting authority has been a necessary survival technique for several, and so I try to find the right combination of compassionate patience and firmness. But by the end of the day, I just wanted to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head.

Instead, I baked cookies. A spoonful of sugar for me, too.

1 comment:

Jerseystitch said...

This is Kittenkissies.
I am glad they are hanging in there. I hope they are doing it to improve themselves; putting themselves through all the tedium to get to the real meat of learning. It was nice for you to cook for them.