A Good Monday

Mondays are generally awful days for everyone. For teachers, it's hard to get motivated and it doesn't help that students don't want the weekend to be over (especially here where Sunday is their only day of the week without school). But today was one of my best teaching days of all time. When you teach 7 or 8 classes a day it's hard to be on your A-game 100% of the time. For me, every class is different and the curriculum and level change from class to class. Generally I have a few good classes and the rest are average. A lot of times its just drills or spelling tests or review. But today I was on my game in every single class and I felt like each class learned and I connected with all of the students. It was great.

Here's one nice thing that happened today:
In my first class of the day (6 students, all 8 years old) one boy was trying to spell the word "those" out loud. He kept on spelling it incorrectly so I kept encouraging him that it was ok and to try again. Unfortunately the other kids started laughing at him quite meanly. He tried to keep going but his little eyes welled up and tears started spilling over. Instead of comforting him which I figured might embarrass an 8-year old boy even more than crying in class, I gave all of the students a calm reminder that we all make mistakes and that part of a being a good friend is not laughing at each other when we mess up. One little girl was so convicted by this reminder that she started sobbing uncontrollably. I ended up having to take her out into the hall so she could calm down. As I stroked her hair she was still crying but saying, "Teacher! I'm very sorry! I am a good friend. I'm sorry!" It was precious. When the little girl and I came back into class the students started apologizing to the little boy they had laughed at and comforting the girl who had cried and it led to a nice discussion about what it means to be a good friend. I wish there hadn't been so many tears in that class but I felt like the kids learned a valuable lesson.