Today I'm back to work with kids after an extra long weekend for Honduran Independence & Honduran Teacher's Day. WooHoo for independence and teachers. I went to the island of Utila for the holiday. Certainly one of the great advantages of working overseas has been the ease to get to nice places on vacations.
Yesterday (Sunday) I went into school to work on bimester exams. As I worked out Erickson questions for the 8th grade I began to wrestle with my own stage of conflict (generativity vs stagnation). I’m looking at 35 years in this business and I’m writing these questions to fill up a 2 hour test. I’ll spend half a week in review. Another week will be spent in giving the different tests. The kids will soon forget the stuff (if they take the time to study in the first place) and off we go again in the cycle for another 9 weeks. Beyond filling a government reqirement there doesn’t seem to be any point. How much of my life has been spent like this? Has there been a real difference in the life of any student or have I been a well paid baby-sitter for 35 years?
I feel the kids should see the questions in some form before the exam, and I think there should be 120 questions – 1 per minute. I’m not sure why I have made these assumptions. They just seem right to me. I’m about 35 questions short in each grade level. I don’t want to throw 35 bits of info at them in the next 2 weeks on top of what I already have planned. Maybe I’ll pick 4 relevant BrainPop movies on topics we have covered this term and let the students know the BrainPop quizzes will be on the test and let them watch them on their own. Anyway, I have 2 weeks to work out the missing 35 questions and the rest of the school year to work out the generativity vs stagnation conflict.
I live on a golf course and as I was walking home tonight from the pitch and putt game I play a few times a week it had turned dark and the fireflies had come out. Their twinkling green lights brought back memories of other firefly moments in the past 35 years. Once on a trip into the Amazon headwaters in Ecuador, the kids in the village where I was staying smeared their faces with firefly fluid and danced around the campfire as I played the harmonica. Another magical twinkling moment was when my wife and I took a trip to Benin our room completely filled with fireflies.
It has been a career that has brought me a lot of great memories. Hopefully it has made a contribution.
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