Today was one of those days; nothing seemed to go right.
On my way home, I struggled to find some light spots in the day.
I walked in the house. My “I-really-don’t-like-reading” high school daughter came up to me and said, “Mom I read 200 pages last night! I’m so proud of myself.”
She’s reading Insurgent. She saw the movie Friday night, bought the book Saturday, I watched her read on Sunday. Her head down, totally in the book.
This may be “it,” I thought. The Book that shows her what it means to love reading.
We talked about why it was so good. She said, “I like to see the movie first. It helps me picture it.” Hmm. A lesson for my students perhaps.
My son is working with a few of my students. He’s thinking about teaching so what better opportunity to see what teaching looks like. During dinner, we talked about his thoughts, observations, and teaching moves. One of the students is a fast-taking-joke-telling, run-on sentence making, hyperactive blogger who has great stories to tell.
I asked my son how it went working with him. He said:
He seemed to understand my metaphor of playdough. You need to stretch writing out and play with it. So when you are writing digitally, if you hit return at the end of every line you can stretch out your writing and play with it, like playdough. That can help you see where ideas begin and end.
Never did I mention using a metaphor to teach writing. And playdough — perfect. He instinctively knew to do this. Jeez. Some people have to go to the Reading Writing Project, read Lucy Calkins, plan and practice the idea of using a metaphor to teach abstract ideas. My son just walks in and does it. If he weren’t my kid, I’d be exceedingly jealous. In the end, he came up with a cool strategy. Who knows what I might learn from him as he gets to know my students.
After dinner, my daughter came out to the kitchen saying, “Mom I’ve got to share this with you. My film teacher showed me these.”
“I just love them,” she said. “I watched them over and over.”
The fact that she wants to share, share things that matter to her and connect to ideas that matter to me made my night. She walked back into her room saying, “I just love my film class.”
I can see why.
Being taught by your children is something to work towards and cherish. That was the light that happened today.
Thank you, Anna, Beth, Betsy, Dana, Stacey and Tara of Two Writing Teachers blog for hosting the Slice of Life March Story Challenge. Read other bloggers slices here
To Read To Write To Be 