I had your traditional high school English fare, apathetic eleventh graders who would rather yell at each other about name brand sweat pants than do worksheets covering exciting topics like parallelism, tone and vocabulary. In my rush to leave (I assumed there would be a two-hour delay since "all the other counties were doing it"...but we know what they say about assuming), I forgot my cell phone and realized it was missing when I was about 15 minutes away from the school.
This usually wouldn't be a problem. I'm not too terribly attached to my phone, but my parents were flying and I get all sorts of nervous when they fly.
Needless to say, I was excited to see my teacher had planning the last period of the day. This typically means I can go home after picking up the room and writing up my daily report as long as there aren't any other areas in the school that need me.
And...there wasn't...until there was. I was a little upset about this. One of the special reading teachers left and the teacher covering her class needed a little help. I've never been with a special class like this before. From what I observed, this was a class for students who need extra help with their reading and writing skills, there were also a number of behavioral problems in the class.
I didn't think of it until today, but out of the eight kids I helped with the lesson, one really stood out. One of the boys in my second group sat so contently, listening to each word I went over, nodding his head and writing down his answer. When I asked if things made sense, he looked at his paper and nodded. He told me he liked that I wasn't being very loud and asked if I would be back again with the class tomorrow.
That, my friends, is an original moment of, "this is why I want to teach."
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