I Heart my Job

First full week of teaching over, and I couldn't be happier. I'm at Bertie Early College High School, and I think I may have lucked out with the best high school in the region. It's a new program, only the 2nd year, so we only have 51 kids in the entire school. I teach English to all the freshmen, and I love it! I am totally nerding out about teaching high school kids one of my favorite subjects, and to try to get them interested in reading and writing. I gave them a quiz today, and they rocked it, only 2 failed and those are students with learning disabilities whose IEPs we haven't received, so we are in the dark about what accommodations they need. My students participate and are engaged for the most part, or as much as you can expect from HS kids. Some of them still whine about having homework every night, but they'll live. All of the classes here are honors classes so they just have to get used to the workload.

Yesterday I had a complete after-school special moment. They are reading the first chapter of Black Boy (which is great, I'm just reading it now for the first time) and most of them are really getting into it. While they were reading part of it in class, a girl said, "Ms. Pennell, I want to say something. I really like this book, and I'm glad we're reading it, because reading about all that he went through makes me appreciate what I have." I felt like there should have been a noise, like the ones that happen in fairy tales from a magic wand. Golden!