You’re The Real Deal
By Kevin Gray
By the end of the first week of my long-term sub job at Prairie View High School, a girl in one of my English classes said, “You are the real deal!” after it dawned on her that I had been making assignments, grading their papers and recording grades. “You’re really grading our papers?” she stated and ended with, “You are the teacher,” meaning this guy isn’t going away anytime soon, and they would have to do some work.
Everyday since then, some student asks, “So you’re really doing our grades?” I can’t help but smile and say, “Yes, I am and will be for weeks to come. Plus, I’ll be there for conferences.”
It may be taking a while for a few students to get past the, “but…he’s only the sub, so we don’t have to do anything” mantra or, “He’s not going to care.”
The problem is for them anyway – I do care – and I walked right in when it was time to start revising research papers. And another two classes were writing essays. I tried telling them about my 30 years doing research papers with Paola sophomores and 28 teaching Fort Scott Community College composition classes, but to a few it was only some guy talking…blah, blah, blah. He’ll be gone pretty soon.
Their sub just happens to be the weird one – the kid who had liked writing research papers – and who as a teacher enjoys taking students through the paces of in-text citations and Works Cited (bibliography) pages. This doesn’t sound like fun?
My grades until senior year were pretty pathetic, except for research papers, which always brought me my only As or Bs. Even at the time, I knew why I enjoyed writing them. As I put it in my head then, “Man, this let’s me do my own learning.” Or I used to think, “This way, I don’t have to listen to the teacher on what I want to learn. I can do my own!” After all, I enjoyed learning and reading, but on my own terms.
There was the matter of classroom time spent listening to the teacher cover the style basics of what in those days they called term papers. This was no fun at all, but since I wanted to do well, I listened or made a grand effort to take it all in. Otherwise, I could pursue the topic to see what I could learn…on my own terms. This I liked.
My first term paper was over Washington Irving (sixth grade). Others included the Kremlin (seventh grade), the Effects of Alcohol (eighth grade), the Mounting Menace of Drugs (nineth grade), but my senior term paper was my favorite. The infamous senior term paper was hated. It could blow your grade for the entire semester or really help, which is what I counted on. My teacher suggested I write over the book, “The Hobbit”. My disbelief showing, I said, “Really? You’re not kidding,” not sure why.
Before I knew it, I had immersed myself in German and Norse mythology and stories about rings of power. Hiding myself away in the State Library of Virginia seemed so unlike me, but I found I really enjoyed the drive downtown and digging through the volumes (no googling in those days). If not for commas, I would have earned an A for that paper. Instead, I was quite satisfied with the B, knowing I had learned so much without my teacher – I truly liked her – opening her mouth to give one note, no less endless lectures.
Given the topic I walked into at Prairie View, a Native American research project and the Potawatomi heritage and that of other Indian tribes in Linn and Miami counties, I was doubly thrilled to help finish off what they had begun with their teacher, Christy Nickelson. Like my teachers had given me choices I appreciated, Mrs. Nickelson provided many directions for her students to research and their results have been impressive, especially when her students shared their findings with fifth graders at the St. Philippine Duchesne Memorial Park near Centerville.
Only…a few students didn’t like me making them type up a Works Cited page and adding in-text citations. When several had completed the “painful” task in under 10 minutes, I heard a “That’s all?” from several of them.
“Yep, that’s all,” I answered, “you’ve already done the hard part by writing the paper.”
“Oh!”
Short URL: http://osawatominews.com/?p=462
Posted by admin
on Oct 20 2010. Filed under Kevin Gray, Opinion.
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