sparks

I have to remember the good moments, because the bad ones are measured in hours.

Today, in the half hour before lunch, I offered my room to four junior girls who needed a place to work on math for a test prep class. One of them is the smartest most articulate wundermonkey in any of my classes, who's frustrated in my class because it's too slow: she was tutoring the others (which, by the way, she does amazingly, because she's also a natural at that part of teaching). When we got to the room, another girl was waiting - she spent the next twenty minutes writing down the homework she needed to make up. Twenty minutes in, it was lunch time. An 11-th grade girl who's way, way, way behind (in a class that averages 6 grade levels behind) and trying furiously to catch up (partly so she can be a good mom to her daughter) came in, got a calculator, and sat down with the girls working on test prep. A guy who's constantly trying to improve his grade from, say, a 92 to a 97 (which, at my school, is endearing rather than irritating) came in to catch up on back homework - I told him I'd give him extra credit if he taught inverse functions to the other girl who was working on homework and she did well on a quiz. A 9th-grader started working on a diagnostic test. Meanwhile, four people formed a line to talk to me about why they were suspended and what their grades were.

That was when the principal walked in. She said, "What class is this?"

It's not class. They're here because they want to be.