The Miracle and the Moment (Michelle Kerr)
Michele Kerr is a second-career teacher with a master’s in education from Stanford University, with credentials in math, history, and English. She will start her fourth year of teaching in the fall.
My best moment as a teacher–so far–came right after a miracle.
It was the end of the school year. I was teaching a unit on Elizabethan theater in my freshman humanities class, and on this day the students delved briefly into the sonnet. With reading abilities ranging from fifth grade to college-level, they wouldn’t all be capable of close analysis, but that was beyond the scope of my lesson anyway. I just wanted to give the students an hour of listening to and thinking about sonnets, with the hope that they would later be able to tell me later that sonnets had 14 lines.
I’d chosen five poems; three because they are high on the list of Sonnets: All-Time Greatest Hits, making them useful content knowledge (and they are, still, beautiful). The other two are personal favorites that never fail to
My best moment as a teacher–so far–came right after a miracle.
It was the end of the school year. I was teaching a unit on Elizabethan theater in my freshman humanities class, and on this day the students delved briefly into the sonnet. With reading abilities ranging from fifth grade to college-level, they wouldn’t all be capable of close analysis, but that was beyond the scope of my lesson anyway. I just wanted to give the students an hour of listening to and thinking about sonnets, with the hope that they would later be able to tell me later that sonnets had 14 lines.
I’d chosen five poems; three because they are high on the list of Sonnets: All-Time Greatest Hits, making them useful content knowledge (and they are, still, beautiful). The other two are personal favorites that never fail to
