2017 Thursday -- End of Week 3

The autumn semester is racing . . . Week 3 has ended.

Most of my students don't remember 9/11/2001. I tell them that when I started teaching, we had to dodge dinosaurs in the parking lot, and we had buffalo races during college hour on Tues & Thurs.

Most of my basic writing students do not read instructions, and text messaging is their first language, and entirely too many of them arrive to the classroom without their finished writing assignment, but I know that in each of my classes there is a student who wants to be a veterinarian or a video game developer or an architect or an astronaut or a police officer or an elementary school teacher, and in some microscopic way I can help that student on that journey to the destination.

I tell them that I was a high school drop-out, married Mr. Fun when I was 15, and years later when the bulls-eye on my target was to be a community college professor, almost everyone said, "Impossible."

So now I show-up prepared and demand their best work and step outside of my introverted self and animate the lesson into stories and examples that they will, hopefully, never forget . . . so they will remember how to find prepositions and can define something as simple as a "draft" and will be able to "show" not "tell" when they write. And oh yeah, the eight comma rules, they exit the semester as experts in the comma world.

So I have arrived at the Finish Line of Week 3 exhausted, but I have a satisfaction and contentment that defies definition. And retirement . . . I keep thinking it's got to be just around the corner. So far, the corner hasn't arrived.

Rosie (& Mr. Fun), aka Carol