As Alice Cooper reminds us every year about this time, "school's out for summer." Unless they die, however, school is not out for my freshman students "forever." For many of them, their freshman year isn't even really over since they get to retake several subjects again. I know roughly 100 who get to re-take freshman English. It seems not too many are going to go to summer school. Instead, they will be going to a colleague who has been selected, for the 2007/2008 school year, to take on this year's crop of failing freshman. This colleague was hired the same day I was and came on board after over a decade of teaching English Composition at UNLV.
I hate cliche but could not resist a silent "out of the frying pan . . ."
Interestingly, a rather large number of my failing students expressed an interest in having me as their Freshman English teacher next year for their second attempt. I asked them if they wouldn't rather have a less demanding teacher. They all replied that I was "cool" and made class "fun" even though I assigned "too much work." I told them I planned on making the course even more demanding next year but they didn't seem to mind. My favorite compliment was from a young Mexican-American male who told me he didn't mess around in my class because I gave him respect and therefore he respected me. In one essay, he wrote that I was "like a white Mexican."
Gracias.
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