Learning Curve


My name is Kelsea Jones, and I'm a first year English adjunct.

(Hi Kelsea.)

If you willingly voiced the above parenthetical in the traditional AA meeting voice, good on you, because that's more interaction that I got from my students today. Granted, I do teach College Prep Composition. If that sounds condescending, I'll say this in my defense: I tried to give them more credit that this. I actively tried.

I was a little worried at 7:55 when no one was coming in to take their seats. I went out into the hall to check on them. There they were! Waiting for someone to unlock the door...which wasn't locked.

Mental note: Sheep need more careful shepherding, apparently.

Once I got them in the room and in their seats, things went smoothly, more or less. We wrote 2-3 sentences about ourselves (and only had two students refuse to do it), introduced ourselves, and read through the syllabus. Here I think I lost them (my fault). Syllabi proved to be a departure from high school almost too great for these little sheep, and I wrongly approached the syllabus as if they had a couple under their belts already.

Mental note: The sheep are not as experienced as the shepherd.

I finished out the day with a grammar pretest. I hope that it will be useful to the students, but mostly I assigned it so I would better understand from where they are coming. My goodness. I was prepared for dangling modifiers and run-ons and fragments...but capitalization? Question marks? My sheep and I have a long way to go. (Has anybody here seen my old friend Comma? Can you tell me where he's gone? With Abraham, Martin, and John...)

On a positive, I was able to sign into the class a working mom who needs to take early morning classes in order to spend time with her kids. I'm so thankful that I'll be able to bless her with my time. There are two other moms in my section. I already know without a doubt that these ladies are all going to work their hearts out and pass this class.

Shall I explain all of the sheep imagery? The novel we'll be reading in class is The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Let me tell you, Santiago knows a lot about sheep, and according to him, sheep know a lot about the Soul of World. Though how I'll explain that is anybody's guess.

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