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.