A moment I felt like a teacher

I’ve mentioned, maybe only once, that I teach remedial English at Troy University when I’m not working as a journalist extraordinaire.

Well, last week, I had a moment that just made me feel like I connected with my students.

Typically, I teach freshman, so as of right now, I’m not that much older than them. Still, it feels like I graduated 80 years ago when I talk with them before class. I definitely don’t know what they’re saying half the time.

I don’t know how I feel about this, but I digress.

Last week at the beginning of class, one of my students wanted to talk about a story that was making its rounds on the news.

As a communications professional, I was happy to talk news. Though I hadn’t had time to really read much on the particular story, I was more than happy to moderate a short discussion.

In the end, the discussion lasted longer than it needed to, so I brought it back to English. We were reviewing comma usage that day.

I told them we could still talk about this topic if we could relate it to what we were going over in class that day. We would create sentences about the news and learn about commas at the same time.

As soon as I suggested this compromise, my class was more than happy to learn about commas.

So, they came up with original sentences about the news story, and explained to me why they used commas the way they did in each sentence.

They were more confident in themselves than I’ve seen since the beginning of the semester. There was more discussion and interaction, and there was even vigor shown by some of the students that I haven’t seen before.

Needless to say, I squealed in glee. In my head only, of course.

I can’t be the weird teacher that squeals in class.

Anyway, we were discussing cumulative and coordinate adjectives (which can be its own article), and I asked the class to come up with their own sentences to show they understood the lesson.

These students worked so hard together to come up with sentences to show both cases of using commas and adjectives. They were determined to give examples of both cumulative and coordinate adjective use, and teach me some slang I never knew.

I’m sure seasoned teachers teach in similar ways as this, but I was never trained as a teacher. I was just taught English.

I thought it was a great class overall.

At the end of class, one of my students told me they had learned more this semester than they felt they had learned in a while.

I don’t know if that is necessarily true, and I don’t want to say anything negative about any student’s high school, but I was proud to at least hear that they were learning.

I was also proud to see that my students seemed interested in what they were learning, even if the material was a bit off-book.

I hope to have more moments like this in my classroom.

Cassie Gibbs is a staff writer for The Southeast Sun and Daleville Sun-Courier. The opinions of this writer are her own and not the opinion of the paper. She can be reached at (334) 393-2969 or by email at [email protected].