Day 1 Reflection for Becky's Summer Science Class

I often need to step into my student's shoes to understand where they're coming from, both in their approach to English as an academic subject and also in their personal approach to education and school. So, it was good for me to be silenced today with an absence of coherent and intelligent thought. I was blown away by the knowledge contained in the pre-test and astonished that even my strong reading skills couldn't help me deduce a possible answer. What brilliance it must take to create a test in the sciences?! Back to my opening line. So there I am, standing on Mississippi River Road, staring at the damn without a clue as to what to do. I kept peaking glances at my peers and was depressed to note that everyone else seemed engaged and alive with the activity. All I could do was to keep my pencil moving and try to describe what I was feeling. The emotions I experienced? Frustration. Anxiety. Fear. And so in that moment, I chose to consider how and why my students might feel that way. I considered something like "Sonny's Blue's", a dense short story about a young man's struggle against an urban living that included drug addiction. The story is told through this brother's eyes. Most of my students- after their first read- find it dull or too difficult to "get into", just as I was feeling about looking at this wall of rock. When I teach it, I am all enthusiasm and joy, because I know and love the tale, how it is written, what it provokes in me. As I glanced at the three teachers of ESST, I saw that same vigor and familiarity in how they spoke about the wall of rock. Others in the class, with more background knowledge than me, had something to connect to, a starting place. For me, I felt like a person carrying an empty toolbox. And that is something I have to remind myself of with my students every single day. They look around at other people furiously writing in their notebooks or blogging off of one of my writing prompts and they wonder what to do, what to say, how to even phrase a question... This course will be enormously challenging for me and at times I may want to crawl away and sink into a novel that is familiar and safe, but that would be the cowardly thing to do. My students deserve better of me. I need to know and understand what their brains are being asked to do other hours of the day so I can respond in a way that builds off of that and complements those practices. I need to expect of myself that I can learn new, foreign knowledge even at this age.