So February is (almost) over. I took Annika to see the Roseville women’s basketball game tonight. They played against Irondale in the first round of the section and we left with, like, seven minutes left because Roseville was up by about 30 points and Annika wanted to see my classroom before we left.

Tomorrow is the last day of the trimester, which is really bittersweet. It took ages, but my Composition kids finally warmed up and now I don’t want them to leave. I got to work with kids who *hated* writing, but now they kind of like it, or at least they aren’t afraid of it anymore. I got to teach kids how to play around with language, revise, and in some cases, how to use the shift key – I showed two guys who had been using the Caps Lock key every single time they capitalized anything! It made me wonder what other small things that they didn’t know and I was just taking for granted that they did. It also made more sense why so many words that should have been capitalized were not capitalized! I also had to teach kids about how to double-space their writing without pressing enter each time. The other thing that surprised me was they didn’t know they could use the [tab] key to indent paragraphs. A number of kids needed to be shown that.

I wish I was better able to catch some of those things before I get too far into the trimester, but I think next time I teach the course, I’m going to go over some of those really basic formatting things. The cool thing is, when you teach a kid how to do it, they act like you are the smartest person ever or like you are a wizard or something. They are so grateful to be shown some basic shortcuts that I just take for granted.

I guess I do remember the time I found out about the [INSERT] key… that was the most frustrating thing ever, not knowing why, when I typed, it would go over the other words. When I learned I was “overwriting” and I just needed to press a button, it was the most amazing experience ever and I probably praised whomever showed me as if they were a deity. It was like a whole new world was opened for me.

I love doing that. I’m glad February is over and I’m ready to move on, but I’m going to miss these kids. My first full classes at Roseville. I hope they learned as much from me as I learned from them.