That Warm Glow

~After my vacation, returning to work has been, as always, a challenge. My job requires tremendous amounts of energy and a great deal of time and effort. But there are also rewards to teaching, the kind that I imagine many other jobs lack. After I've waded through mediocre classes and dealt with apathetic students, I find that sometimes the simplest of things sets my heart aglow and makes it all worthwhile. I've written about this previously, but I'd like to share another couple of great moments in teaching.

For one of my advanced classes, I considered using Choose Your Own Adventure books as part of the curriculum. For those of you that were born on another planet, the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books were a long-running series of action novels written in the rare second-person point-of-view, in which you, the reader, go through some kind of adventure and have to make choices at critical moments. Each book features many possible endings that only you can determine.

I'd always enjoyed them as a student, so I had two of them sent to me (thanks Mom!), but I found that I simply lacked the class time to effectively use them the way I wanted to. So, I gave them away as Christmas presents to the two students in the class.

After the winter vacation, I asked them if they'd enjoyed the books, and one of the students told me that he loved it and had spent three hours over the vacation reading it. He enthusiastically discussed his favorite parts and the endings he'd reached. I'm very pleased that he's enjoyed reading a book in English.

Another great moment came when one of my older students won first place in an English speech contest for the entire prefecture (state) of Niigata. We'd worked for months on the speech she'd delivered until it sounded almost natural, and I was very proud of her success. Now I know how a sports coach feels--you want your students to do their best, because their success is also your success. At the same time, you know that "winning isn't everything", and that it's more important for them to be learning.

Of course, now that she's won the prefectural contest, she's going to Tokyo for the nationals. She's been working hard on the speech with help from me, and I am already so proud of her efforts. Dedication like that from my students makes me very happy and makes the difficulties of my job seem trivial when compared with the joys. ~Oyasumi!