Tales of a 7th Grade Nothing

I'm back in full swing with student teaching, working at the center, and bishopric duties--all at full tilt. It's going well, but the all day--often 12 hour--schedule is pretty rough. The kids in my classes are pretty good though and it's funny to remember middle school. It is SO much different than high school. Here is a funny conversation I had with a student in my 4th hour class (keep in mind that this is 7th grade):

"Did you know that my brother and sister are models?"
To which I replied, "Hmm... that sounds an awful lot like a brag to me, wouldn't you say?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well--it's kind of like saying 'My parents are really rich!'"
"Oh. Well, my parents ARE rich!" she said with a giggle.

Silly girl.

My own son said this to me on my first day of being gone from 7am-9pm. He was in my room trying to fall asleep on my bed (this is the current protocol as the kids have a hard time falling asleep in the same room--they just talk to each other--so we just move Seth into his own bed when he falls asleep) and this is what he said when I told him I had been missing him all day:

"I've been missing you too, Daddy--'cause you are a really great man."

At least somebody thinks I am.

He said something else funny a little while ago that he must have seen on a commercial for Go-gurts. He said that he really needed to get them because (and then he quoted from the commercial exactly) "kids on the go need Go-gurts to grow, Daddy."

I thought that was pretty funny.

One good thing about my student teaching situation at the moment is that since its 7th grade and there is a heavy emphasis on reading, the kids spend a lot of time in class doing required silent reading. I have already finished one book in the four days I've been here because of this extra reading time (My Name Is Asher Lev--I'll comment more on this book later--I absolutely loved it) and am almost finished with a thin Steinbeck novel (The Red Pony). It's nice to just read. It's also awesome that my mentor teacher is so chill and doesn't make me pretend to be doing something more productive when there isn't anything to do. In fact, I am typing this during our third hour prep. While very time consuming, this semester should be pretty low-key...which is exactly how I wanted it.

From time to time

Intimidation in advanced Literature classes is inevitable. There are always plenty of smarty-pants' as well as genuinely smart people in the class that seem to know more about the subject than I do. Or at least understand the discourse enough to sound articulate when they talk about the literature. I can usually combat this tendency with either becoming a smarty-pants myself, or by actually learning the subject well enough to make meaningful contributions to the academic discussion going on. I am having trouble doing so in my Milton class. If you have read Milton you know that he is prolific, complicated and very dense. My professor, a Harvard man, is a smart guy--and I took the class more because of his reputation than because of a Miltonist impulse. So far, just feel dumb. I don’t feel like I am among friends, and there are probably 50 people in my class, so shining brightly enough to encourage my instructor's praise will be a challenge.
*
Dr. Blasingame wrote me a nice letter of recommendation yesterday for a scholarship. He also mentioned that he knows some publishers in Utah, one of which is very famous, whom he said he would be willing to submit a finished manuscript from me. He has been such a great support to my budding interests in really all things literary. It’s got me thinking again about my short story series about my San Francisco mission experience. He mentioned that in order to submit something to these dudes, I would have to have a finished product...something at least 300 pages. I maybe have 25. Probably not even that, but still, I have started thinking about that again. I would like to significantly expand this work. I think that I will take a creative non-fiction class this summer, in fact I would really like to try to make the project part of my summer activities, among GREing, and finalizing where will be applying to grad school.
Anyway, I really have only written about two areas of the mission (the Mission and Palo Alto), and neither with a whole lot of detail. There is a ton of stuff that I could explore:
Petaluma, Marin, Foster City, the Sunset—let alone the some of the substories: Crabtree, Mclane, Hall, The Great Fall, etc. So anyway, encouragement sure is nice. From time to time.