Good teaching moments

Holding onto the good teaching moments from the past week:

• When I told my year 9 students that I would not be going on camp and would therefore be teaching them I prefaced it with the sentence "I'm not sure how you are going to feel about this..." I expected groans of disappointment that they won't have a slack-arse week and instead received an almost positive response of "Okay, Miss," which in year 9 speak means "we're kind of pleased."
• When I told my year 7s I would not go on camp with them and received groans of disappointments and daily checks to see whether I'm feeling better and could go. My sweeties.
  
• Delivering a lesson to year 9 students on incorporating adjectives, verbs and features of horror in their climax and reading some wonderful extracts that uplifted me.
  
• Developing a memoir scaffold orientation for my year 7 class using Bianca Elmir's Fighting Spirit as inspiration and reading some amazing orientations that I had to read out loud to class.
  
• A First Aid officer coming to my year 7 Integrated Studies class to see a student and thinking they were doing a test because they were so quiet and focussed. This one wasn't an example of inspiring teaching, but instead inspiring and diabolical classroom management by giving them a choice-complete a unit summary for Ancient Australia or stay in at lunchtime to finish. Yes, I am that teacher.
  
• Reading my year 7 plans for memoir writing and laughing out loud and feeling sad at what they want to write about. So looking forward to teaching this unit and reading the completed pieces.
  
• Another moment that happened a few weeks ago was having them write their I am poems and they were mad good. I got to know my students so well.
  
• Creating a website for the House System and finally figuring out an efficient way of streamlining the swimming carnival sign ups using an embedded Google form, and exporting responses into an Excel spreadsheet I could format. I feel so technological and accomplished. Although I did have some great teachers support me in developing this idea to concept. 

I'm holding tightly onto these moments because they have been in short supply for the past few months after my mother's death and the emotional fallout I'm still reeling from. Feeling happy almost feels like a novelty so I'm going to sit on the couch and watch Vampire Diaries with a smile on my face.... until 7.30 pm when I have to return to school to conduct a presentation to parents and teachers for the Year 7 Expo from 7.45-8.00 pm. I guess that's one more thing to be thankful-that my work/home commute is so short that I can come home instead of staying at work until 8 pm. Ah, the teaching life.