Why, then, let's home again.

"It is not well done, mark you now take the tales out of my mouth, ere it is made and finished" - William Shakespeare

Here I sit, more than twenty-four hours after my return from the Folger and my mind is still racing. So many ideas, so many resources, so many things to plan... and if you asked me what I want to do first my answer would be - sleep. I am so run down it's really hard to express in words. I am not well. I suspect I have a nasal infection. Yeah, it's as nice as you think. My stuff is still all over my apartment, which is a total mess by the way, for reasons I'll not delve into here, not not at least, I'm mentally and physically exhausted. A month is the longest I've ever been away from home since the nineteen eighties when I was in the Air Force. Seriously. A week or two here and there for vacation, that's it. A month doesn't sound like much, but it's serious business. Especially when you're doing the work that we were doing.

Okay, there was fun too, but the fun never got in the way of the work, never the other way around. The work was why we were there, and it really wasn't a lot, it was just a short time. Research paper, lesson plans, other projects like the text illumination project (which you can see on my portfolio page - http://mjklein67.googlepages.com/home) Most of the fun, as I have previously mentioned, happened on the bus. Ahh, the bus. Perhaps the most interesting time of the day. I know I've talked about the chanting, the cheering (the young man doing push-ups story is now legendary), and I've mentioned Albert, but I haven't gotten into detail. Allow me...

Albert is perhaps a 45-50 year-old African-American man local to the area. He is dark skinned, and wears glasses. He has not a gray hair on his head and the biggest, brightest smile a human being can have. Always. None of this is all that interesting. What makes Albert interesting is his genuine interest in you. He never said the same thing to anybody. If someone was sick a certain way, and many of us were, he'd ask about those particular symtoms. And then he'd offer some helpful advice "Make sure you're takin' enough Vitamin C. You can never have too much. It'll do ya some good." He'd remember names. He had a number of greetings and goodbyes, but seemingly, they were always different to me, as if he knew what he said yesterday and didn't want to repeat himself the next. Still really, not that interesting, okay. Albert was the fanciest dressed school bus driver I've ever seen. On rainy or dreary days he'd be decked out head to foot in a Burberry rain suit. He always matched. I like that in my bus driver. He was never without a chapeau of some sort, straw, baseball, sun. And he always was putting on hand lotion. He is a good smellin' man. More importantly, he never complained about anything we did. He endured the chanting, the singing, the clapping (goddamnit there was a lot of clapping!). He never had a bad word to say, and we loved him. He even apologized for DC traffic. Most days it took us 30 minutes or so from the Folger to Georgetown, on a couple of occasions, it took over an hour. That sucked, but we of course never blamed Albert, but he apologized anyway. Like it was his fault. I'll miss him as well.

One of the most valuable things for me was meeting teachers from all over the country. All regions, it seemed, were represented - California, Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Tennessee, Fl, as well as a bunch of east coast people. I was the only person on the trip who had just completed his first year. Everyone else had at least three years; at least two people had over twenty-five years of service in. Speaking with other teachers who do the same thing was immeasureable. What was particularly great about it was that the conversation about teaching never stopped. It wasn't always about Shakespeare, mostly, but not always. Talking with people I work with is great, and I've gotten tons of insight from the people in my building, but the conversations usually last maybe half a period, and then it turns into a joke or about someone's baby and sometimes a joke about someone's baby. It's great don't get me wrong but, I don't have children so this conversation is usually irrelevant to me, unless the children are cute, and then I give the rightfully placed "AWWW!" when viewing pictures, but otherwise babies are babies to me. My sisters' have had six between them. Honestly, I'm over the cute baby. In my first year of teaching, I'm interested in becoming better at it.

There's a fine line that I'm still slowly treading. The short conversations about something specific and the long, sometimes drawn-0ut, conversations about the general. Both are important, and I need both. I seem to have gotten fewer of the latter. This month, though, has filled in some blank spaces. Which is good, I don't want to bother people. Much of teaching, from what I can tell, is experiment. What works? Well, what I've learned is something that works in one class, may be a complete disaster in another. I learned that all on my own this year. I come into the second year of my teaching already with the confidence of my supervisor, for which I am eternally grateful, and now with the experience of this past month I feel like I have opened more doors to more resources than I can count. I can't say if I'm good at what I'm doing, but one thing I've learned is that I love doing it. I know, it's a bit cheesy. I like cheesy. Sometimes the kids like cheesy too. What made me proudest this year were two things: first, one of my more reticent students, a tenth-grader, on the last day shook my hand and said "You were a good teacher. Thanks for teaching me." He barely passed the class, and I thought he hated me. He rarely said anything to me in the hallway, and never anything in class. Second, one of my seniors gave me a card that said she was glad I traded my old job "for this occupation." I'm glad too. There's a month left in summer, I've volunteered to do some work at school, but I have one week free. I intend to enjoy that one week, but I must admit, I'm really looking forward to starting year two.

mahalo