Getting Started

This is my spring break week off. Thus the beginning of my education blog. I have to tell you that I still don't think of myself as a teacher. My whole family was nothing but teachers, but the older I got, the more everything started to lean that way. So I teach high school English/ESL but I don't call myself a teacher, I own no apple decorations or Christmas ornaments that say "#1 Teacher" on them and I don't plan on buying any vests that represent the seasons any time soon. :) (No offense meant to those teachers who are very proud of these representations of their field.)

I am teaching English II (I am teaching myself not to say 10th grade English because maybe only half of my kids are actually in the 10th grade. This is simply the second of four years of high school English.) My school is about 94% hispanic, therefore the main issue is language learning. The research says that it takes 5-7 years to acquire an academic level in a language (reference children beginning school at the age of 5 or 6). However, in the state that I live in we transition students into a mainstream classroom and require them to take the state mandated test at 2 years.

Right now, since I am talking about language, I am teaching Julius Caesar. I would like to point out that this isn't in the curriculum, but I was told that I am expected to "fit it in." Personally, I am not a huge fan of Shakespeare. Give me a modern rendition and I'll appreciate the intricacy of the story, a sonnet and I'll appreciate the language, but to read the whole play and figure out what on earth they are saying every 3 lines. . . !!! Don't revoke my English teacher status for that. The English dept of my college should never have let me graduate. . .but then again I don't like Milton either, or Thoreau, or anyone from Concord except Louisa May Alcott. I love Dante and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and random Victorian writers. I even like Dickens. . . the teacher across the hall can't understand that one bit. But he loves American lit so we called a truce.

Back to Shakespeare. We are doing Caesar. They are bored. Incredibly bored. I got them interested in Portia referring to herself as a harlot (Act II, Sc i) and Brutus using the metaphor that Caesar is a serpant's egg (Act II, Sc i also - once he hatches it would be a lot harder to kill). One student even brought up that a baby snake venom is more dangerous than an adult snake. A fact that I was able to verify. Those are the days that make it worth it.