AUSSIE

Blog entry posted October 26th, 2009 by Dale Worsley

In last week’s “Paragraph Six” I was walking out the door of her classroom when pregnant 7th grade teacher Maria Carrua told me she would soon be going into treatment for breast cancer. I pick up here with what she said to relieve my consternation: “I’m all right. It’s really all about perspective. You can beat these things if you have the right perspective. To tell you the truth, I’m mainly worried about the students – how well I am going to be able to teach them once the treatments start next month.”

When it came time for my demonstration lesson a couple of periods later, I referred, as planned, to the guiding words that I had written on the board (see last week’s blog). I found myself focusing especially on the sentence Try not to be sad, which hadn’t made all that much sense to me until Maria told me what she was going through. I couldn’t explicitly tell the students why they were so poignant, but I think they got the message. They expressed themselves well. Here, for example, are some of one student’s words:

         Express yourself.

   I move a lot when I can,

on a bike, running, jumping,

dodging, fighting, climbing,

swimming, diving, splashing.

I move in the world, in town,

in back yards and front yards,

in the streets.

It makes me feel good,

like being in a marathon,

or just crazy.

The students were kind to each other when they shared their work. The world seemed like a pretty good place in Maria’s classroom, that day.

What about the student in Maria’s vexatious classroom, the one who had needled her into expressing her pedagogical beliefs? I was able to visit that class a few weeks later. Maria was trying out the idea of dramatizing a short story. The provocative teenager was acting out her role, no complaints – at least for that lesson.

As for Maria now, two years later, she is the mother of a healthy boy, her cancer is in remission, and she continues to soothe the sadness of students in her classrooms.

Altruism may be the essence of the best teaching, but belief alone isn’t going to give the students what they need. And this is the segue I need to get back to the number pi, and the state math exams, and the poet Wislawa Szymborska. In Paragraph Six we may go on “dynamic digressions” but we always return to the main path. I will get back to pi in next post. That’s a pinky promise.

I hope that Gina appreciates how well I curbed my verbosity this round. Post a comment and let me know your thoughts.