smile a day #10

[samanthabryant]

 #smileaday When a kid realizes how much they have learned. 

 

I'm showing a movie to my eighth graders right now: Bajo la Misma Luna. (If you haven't seen it, you should. It's brilliant). The characters in the movie speak a mixture of English and Spanish, just whichever they would naturally be speaking in the scene. I show it with the English subtitles on because it takes time to be able to listen to Spanish spoken at normal conversational speed and understand it, and very few of my students are ready for that yet. 

 

Kids are impatient and expect to be able to understand everything immediately. One of my big jobs is just keeping them hopeful that someday they will understand it better than they do now, and help them keep plugging away. 

 

Today, a kid who hasn't been all that strong a student came running up to me at the end of our class to tell me that he had understood enough to "get the gist" during one of the scenes. He's now newly enthused about his studies and I'm so pleased to have been there when we had that "maybe I *can* do this" moment of joy.