Today is day 4 of the SOLSC at 2 Writing Teachers. Click the picture to join us!I know it's only the fourth day of this challenge, but today may be my best post this entire month! haha...I have this amazing group of tenth graders who are the best humans I've met in a long time! (Full disclosure: my daughter, Lily, is a member of the class, too). I just absolutely adore every one of them, even though there are so many girls with the same name but different spellings that I get them all confused. I think they forgive me most days.
Anyway, Fridays are always poetry days in Ms. McCabe's class; today, I shared my favorite sophomore poem called "Owl Pellets" by Ralph Fletcher. If you haven't read it, here you go:
After we read a couple of times, we talk about how love can be fleeting and some things just hurt and how teenagers are all about "the moment." Then, I tell them about my tenth grade Biology crush named Lloyd. Normally, this is just another #StephStory, but today, these precious kids were so upset that after Lloyd had flirted with me and leaned his chair back to rub my ankles and then dropped me like a hot tamale after I got him through our frog dissection unit, they ALL decided to "find this boy, Ms. McCabe!"
hahahhaahhahahaah.....
These kids literally spent the next 10 minutes scouring social media and Google to find my high school Lloyd!! When they said that I need to bring my yearbooks to school on Monday, I told them that my childhood was burned in a house fire; that was even worse because one of them said, "We almost lost our favorite English teacher in a fire and didn't even know it."
OMG....dear readers, today was a win in the teaching world. My students won't forget how I'm making them feel safe and loved and full of poetry. And I will not forget that they tried to fuss at a guy I haven't seen since 1985 because he was "mean" to their English teacher! Sophomores are the BEST!!!
Sounds like Lloyd lost out when he left you for whomever helped him in his other classes. I absolutely love how your students have this rapport with you. This was an enjoyable post-so clever how you tied the poem, your personal story about Lloyd, and then added the student's devotion on top. It was a well thought out 'dissection' of today's events.
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