While I was cramming to finish reading an article about the correlations between reading comprehension and reading speed and accuracy (for our grant seminar), I realized that I am still using the exact same strategies that I reiterate to my students every day: rereading, context clues, predictions, self-questioning. They are all strategies that we do unconsciously, so it's interesting to see my students struggle with them for the first time. I hope someday, when one of my students is reading Shakespeare, he or she will remember (fondly?) the days when Miss Walters made them reread Lon Po Po (the Chinese version of Little Red Riding Hood) multiple times to make sure that every word was understood through the text.

I loved reading such a hard article for our seminar! I actually miss the hours and hours of reading that I did for education classes; it's so abstract that you sometimes want to rip it up, but I long for the subtle thrill of mastering a difficult article (like L1-L2 acquisition based on phonemic awareness and interlanguage). Those days seem so manageable compared to trying to teach a student who only speaks Arabic how to read English. Today, she got really mad at me and wrote "no no no no" on her entire paper before I realized she was upset.

This week seems hazy. I am in such a coasting slide towards vacation, and yet so many different things happened this week that time feels like it's standing still. Today I told my students a general outline for how we would be applying the vocabulary for the rest of the week, like "tomorrow, we will share our new words, the paragraphs that they are in in our story, and the context clues we used to understand their meaning. Then, the next day we will compare and contrast the story with our own lives, using the vocabulary to write meaningful sentences that show that we understand the story. Then, on Friday, we will produce a class summary of the story, using the vocabulary and text-to-self stories, which will demonstrate our understanding as a class and show to everyone that teamwork helps us all to learn." They all looked at me for a stunned few seconds and then one persnickity boy called out, "Haha! Tomorrow's Friday!" Oops. I was feeling enthusiastic about those plans, too ;)

As I was leaving school, one of my second-grade students, who I work with in his regular classroom, yelled my name in the hall. He wanted to give me one of his birthday pencils that he had brought to share with his class. I asked him if he was sure -fancy pencils are a luxury for many of my students- but he said "Oh, Miss Walters, I have too many anyway," in his cute, Spanish-accented voice. So he gave me a "Student of the Week" pencil and eraser. That kind of kindness makes up for parts of my job like 90-minute meetings about entering assessment data when I don't even give standarized reading assessments. And listening to my principal sing "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" as a morale booster.

*Congratulations to my Dad! He now has 10 people working under him at Pfizer (6 more than before). Some of those people actually report to other people, who report to him: so he's a third-tier research fellow. And his birthday is tomorrow... *