Rewards

There are few things that give me more pleasure, as a language teacher, than hearing my students speak the language we have struggled with all year. It shows me that I have done my job - imparted skills and knowledge that will stay with my bébés for their lifetimes. This year, I have had a really lovely class - and my smallest class ever, at only 12 students. This class was the highlight of my day, the class that I looked forward to the most, the one that barely seemed like work. It was rather evenly split between IB students and what I like to call "normal kids." (joking! Some of you IB kids are normal... ok, maybe not so much...)

My bébés, for the most part, exceeded my expectations. They were able to take what I've taught them and manipulate it for their own purposes. They remembered great whacking scrolls of vocabulary. They conjugated verbs with seemingly effortless ease, making beautiful sentences - sentences of their own ideas, too. They went beyond the memorized chunks and saw deep into the bones of the language, learning to move those pieces around to give voice to their own visions. I am thrilled to the marrow with their progress.

Do you want to know what else thrills me? Because I got another thrill this afternoon when I checked my email. When former students speak to me in French (actually, when they speak to me at all! sometimes they walk right by without a spark of recognition, but that's another story for another day). Sometimes they come back and visit, and sometimes they leave a comment right here on this blog. Seeing them use this knowledge - knowledge that some marginalize (c'mon, it's French! You live in America - you should be teaching them Spanish!) just leaves me speechless. Not an easy task.

To all the students that I teach and that I've taught - continue mes bébés to use what you've learned. You make me so proud to be your teacher.