Pen Pals

When you are in college,
enrolled in the teaching program,
reading about tons of super-fun ways to teach otherwise-monotonous stuff,
and excitedly exchanging ideas with like-minded, naive, and optimistic classmates,
you say to yourself,
"When I am a teacher, I will do THIS!
And THIS!
And THIS!
And THIS!
And..what the heck,
I'll also do THIS!"

And so you begin your first year of teaching with a head full of ideals, imagining 24 sweet smiles turned towards you, thrilled to discover that you are the most wonderful teacher ever and that learning in your classroom will be pure fun.

It is not long before your ideals are crushed.

After the first day of school, the "sweet smiles" become mischievous sneers, blank stares, or submissive terror.

Between making sure ADHD George is in his seat,
just-from-Mexico Juan and Lucia understand what they're supposed to be doing,
spacey Joey and Elijah are actually using their math tile to practice multiplication instead of building towers,
mean-girl Kate has apologized for making sensitive Julia cry,
and special-education Gary isn't just sitting there clueless,
you feel lucky if even one student demonstrates the skill you are teaching,
and any thought of idealistic, touchy-feely, hands-on, extra, fun stuff goes out the window, along with your temper.

I'm not exaggerating. At all.

So, I am happy to announce that I have managed to implement ONE of my college-days ideas - pen pals!

And the kids are LOVING it (plus it's such a sneaky way to teach about proper letter-writing format and the importance of punctuation, spelling, and grammar).

My two older brothers and I all happen to teach 4th grade this year (crazy, huh?) So, one day, my brother Mario and I were talking about the possibility of being buddy classrooms, and so the idea of pen pals was birthed.

I announced the idea to my class just before Christmas break, and they were thrilled with the idea! (Although more than a few were like, "What's a pen pal?") Our classes exchanged Christmas cards, and just this month Mario and I paired our kids up, and the letter-writing began. It was cool to see kids like Elijah, who reads at a 2nd grade level and spends most of his time at home playing video games, actually excited to write! He was even one of the more conscientious ones when it came to revising and editing his letter. He wanted it to be great for his pen pal!

We just sent the letters last week, through the school's delivery system, and Friday, at the end of the day, my kids got to open their pen pal letters.

Oh. My. Goodness! You would have thought it was Christmas morning. Hardly any of the kids were sitting down. They were walking around the classroom, hands clutched to their letters, earnestly reading the words aloud. After every sentence, they'd look up grinning and exclaim to the nearest body, "Oh, he likes soccer, too!" "Oh, my gosh! He's a dare-devil!" "Teacher, she likes Monster High!"

And now, as much as I hated to spend precious instruction time deviating form the writing curriculum to work on these letters, I have to say it was worth it.

I'm looking forward to continuing the letter-writing. Mario and I decided to try for exchanging letters once a month, so I'll have a couple of weeks' wait, and a couple of weeks of the daily, "When are we going to write back to our pen pals, teacher?"

But that's okay. I can't wait to start again, either.