Maybe soon these posts will become more frequent

I'm already thankful for and puzzled by and frustrated with a thousand things. Some days I can cross incredible territory with my students and others, it takes all their energy to think of why a stop sign is red. If nothing else, these first couple days have been a valuable lesson in patience. I am evermore appreciative of elementary and middle school teachers.

Something that's been unexpected but awesome is how eager Mick is to have me in front of the class. He considers me entirely capable of managing the room and trusts that I will raise important, interesting information when reviewing the material they've been assigned.

This past week, for example, he had me take over all the reading classes and present a mini-unit I'd planned based on Graeme Base's illustrated wonder The Eleventh Hour. I had originally developed the idea for a class last semester, and extended it with only a vague intention of actually using it one day. When I proposed it to Mick for his classes this semester, however, he was immediately excited about it and suggested I present it as soon as possible.

Here is a copy of the original overview I wrote for the assignment:

The rich paintings that dominate Graeme Base’s numerous children’s books are full of color, detail and subtext that invite readers to spend extra time with each page. The story of The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery, one of his most popular, is an actual riddle on top of this, and demands that the reader dig into each illustration, uncovering clues and decoding messages of various types. In discovering who stole Horace’s elaborate birthday feast, children and adults alike can explore a multitude of essential literary techniques and reading strategies, and The Eleventh Hour becomes a valuable resource in any reading classroom.
The story revolves around a young elephant named Horace and 10 of his friends who have joined him to celebrate his eleventh birthday with games and an elaborate feast. Horace has set mealtime at 11 o’clock, so they play the barrage of games until then; when they return to the banquet hall, however, they find that someone has stolen the feast, and the narrator teases: “They never found out who it was that stole the feast - can you?” It is then up to the reader to determine which party guest ate all of Horace’s beautiful food by returning to each page, look closely at the illustrations, and find the codes hidden in each piece of art.
The book employs three main types of codes to give hints to readers. First, every illustration hides, but not necessarily well, a message in the iron gates to the mansion, on the walls, or woven into banners. They are relatively obvious, and don’t hold a lot of valuable information, but are still important to remember. For the most part they encourage readers to simply use their heads. The second set of clues are slightly more difficult and require more time and maybe a pencil to unravel. These may be morse code, number association (where A=1), a backwards alphabet (where A=Z and Z=A), or even hieroglyphics, and teach patience and perseverance in reading. The third level of clues includes things like foreshadowing, symbolism, and color, which are easy to pick out for regular readers of literature, but must be pointed out to young students; teaching skills like this alongside more the game-like deciphering challenges allows readers to discover the fun in reading and the tools they need to get more from each piece they pick up.

In essence, I got to teach my classes that reading a good book is like figuring out a riddle. Authors hide clues within their words and pictures that we have to discover and decipher in order to gain the full meaning of the story and have more fun with it as we read. They get a jump-start on recognizing and understanding common symbols in art and literature, and enjoy themselves in the meantime.

"Ms. Maes, we found a message! See?"
"Good, that's an important one! Did you write it down?"
"Yeah. This is fun. We should do this the rest of the day, and skip science!"

Bon voyage!

Tomorrow is almost kind of my last first day of school! After this semester, I'll be done with college and no longer a student, but a teacher. I'll officially receive my license at some point after that, suddenly deemed capable of caring for, educating, and inspiring packs of teenagers, and getting paid for it.

For now, this blog is meant to act primarily as a reflective journal so that I can, along with those involved in my experience, witness and remark on my growth during the student teaching semester. I will also post lesson plans I create if they turn out to be remarkably successful (and maybe the bad ones, too), links to ideas and people that jazz me, and, if they are pertinent, news and upcoming events in which my readers, whoever they turn out to be, may find interest.

The title of this blog, "The Thing Itself," comes from one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite writers, Virginia Woolf: "We are the world, we are the music, we are the thing itself." I stumbled upon it out of context several years ago, and haven't been able to determine where it was taken from, but I like the unifying sentiment it presents. The idea that a person or group of people represents a community, turns their world into a song, and finds an immediate link to everything they encounter is refreshing and empowering in a world of greed and distance. I think it can easily be applied to teaching, and hope to find opportunities to communicate this ideal to my students somewhere along the way.

To close this evening, I'd like to give a brief thanks to those that have helped me get this far. College years are difficult for everybody, and without the unending support of a few people, my path would have been considerably more difficult. As such, I'd like to thank my parents, of course, firstly for paying for my tuition, but more importantly, believing in any and all that I do; my little brother Whittaker, for giving me hundreds of chances to try out what I'd been learning in the education classes (gotcha!); my boyfriend Clark, for being a total rock in my life ever since he arrived in it; the community of English Education students at UM who know exactly why I do this; my cooperating teachers Mick and Stacey, with whom I worked and learned from last semester and who graciously invited me to stay in their classroom through the spring; and teachers like Cathie Day, Doug Johnson, and Katie Kane, who have reminded me over the years how truly powerful a teacher can be, and who made me want to enter the field in the first place.

So, sorry to make you weep on a weekend, but I had to get it all out, so it wouldn't contaminate the rest of the semester. I expect my sixth graders will provide ample opportunities to relay more silliness than sappiness, so I think you're fine for a while.

JULIA OUT.