The Interview

My teacher- and blogging buddy Ricochet posted an interview over on her site.  I was just thinking this morning that I haven’t posted here in a while, so I’m posting this.  Thank you, Honey, for posting the questions by themselves; I wasn’t sure I could manage not peeking at your answers before I wrote my own.

My background information is that I am in my 5th year of teaching in a high school (though I have taught at the junior college and university level, as well)  in the Northeast.  I teach English, writing, literature, poetry, public speaking,  critical thinking, and film as literature.

Interview:

How was actually teaching different from what you expected it to be when you went into teaching?

Teaching is both better and worse than I expected it to be in college.  Truly, nothing that happens in a college classroom can prepare one for the experience of being a teacher; despite their best efforts to get us prepared for classroom management and curriculum design and all the day-to-day stuff that happens, there’s really no substitute for being in it.  Honestly, I don’t think that someone who hasn’t taught in the field in the last few years has any business teaching a class that prepares teachers for their jobs; I have no problem with someone who’s never (or not recently) taught giving classes in the respective disciplines, but the classes specifically designed to teach people how to function in an honest-to-Goddess classroom should only be taught by people who actually do it (or have recently done it).  Maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, I realized that I’m not answering the question.  I guess my answer would have to be that I didn’t expect to do as much on-the-fly teaching as I do.  I mean, I knew that I wouldn’t be following a plan word-for-word, but I find that I can go off on any of a million different fruitful tangents depending on what interests the students.  A kid will pick up on some little detail or ask a question that I didn’t expect, and we’ll spend a whole class period exploring where that takes us.  Personally (and professionally), I have no problem with that – in fact, I think it’s really wonderful – but it sometimes leads me to have to recalculate my trajectory for the semester.

What do people not know about schools or teaching that you wish they did?

I wish that people understood how emotionally invested in our work, and our students, we teachers are.  Of course, there are the exceptions – I know for sure that I had teachers who were just going through the motions – but I would have to say that the greater percentage of people who go into teaching do it because they love their disciplines and they love their kids.  I CARE about how well my students do; I know I have something to give them that will help them get along in the world, something that will ease their way and make their lives richer and more productive.  It matters to me that my kids are safe and well cared for.  It matters to me that they be given the space they need to grow and change and to sometimes fall flat on their faces.  I know I didn’t go into this work for the money (she says with a sharp edge of bitterness in her voice), and I resent the fuck out of people who discount the work that we do because of their perception of the hours that we (supposedly) work.  These people take no heed of the fact that teachers are building human beings – the future citizens of our world – and that is no small thing.

What do you think is the biggest problem facing educators today?

The single biggest problem that faces education is that we SAY we value it, but we don’t BEHAVE as though we do.  I won’t even tell you how much money I spent out of my own pocket because there are simply no funds for things like paper and pens and books.  I hold book fairs and bake sales and I beg my friends and family and the members of my community to give our school the things we need because we don’t have the money to buy them.  We talk a good game about how America needs to be on the cutting edge of science and technology, yet we do practically nothing to serve the kids who are in our schools right now.

There’s a bumper sticker that says something like “it will be a great day when schools have all the money they need and the military has to hold a bake sale to buy another bomber.” Our priorities are NOT what we claim them to be, and until we start behaving as though education matters, it will all be just so much lip service.

What is the best thing about teaching?

The kids, without question. I ADORE my students, and I bear each and every one of them a particular variety of maternal love (though I will admit to loving some more than others). I have formed great relationships with most of my students since I began doing this work, and it is the exchanges and interactions I have with my students that I find most rewarding about this job. There is little that equals the high of seeing a kid finally GET something that she’s been struggling with for however long we’ve been working on it; the look of “Oh, my GOD, I GET IT!!” that crosses their faces is just fantastic, and the fact that they’ll never think the same way again is something that I treasure. I’ve been fortunate to witness a lot of those moments (I call them “Helen Keller moments” in honor of the famous scene at the water pump), and the potential for more is what keeps me hooked on this work.

I’m also in love with my discipline, and getting to share that with a new group of kids every year is more fun than I expected it to be. I get to read and talk about books for a living! Really; how can that be bad?!

Where do you see yourself ten years from now?

My intention is to keep doing what I’m doing, though I can’t say for sure that I’ll be doing it WHERE I am now. I teach at a tiny charter high school whose long-term future is somewhat murky (between funding and the disposition of the Department of Ed toward charter schools, we’re not sure whether we’ll see ten years though, in a fit of optimism, the board signed a 20 year lease with our current landlords, so….). Mr. Chili jokes that I’m his retirement plan, so it’s a good thing I like what I do, because he plans on my doing it for a while. I’m okay with that; I’m still excited to get up and go to work every morning. Someone once said that if you find something you love to do, you’ll never work a day in your life. I think that someone was exactly right.

The Alice Light Bulb Moment

Yesterday, I posted an entry on the Blue Door in which I said that I was too busy to blog about some things, and one of the things I was too busy to blog about was the fact that in every single class I ran on Thursday, I was able to pull off  what I call “Helen Keller” or “light bulb” moments; that glorious few seconds when a kid leaps from “I don’t get it” to “OH!  NOW I see!!“  I live for these moments, and the fact that I was able to execute the same one in all three of my core English classes was kind of a record for me.  I needed to share.

The entirety of CHS is reading Alice in Wonderland.  Several of the kids have read it before (and a number of them are familiar with bits of the story through various film interpretations), but none of them has analyzed it yet; they’ve read it for the surface stuff, but really haven’t taken the time to really think about all the weird shit that happens in the novel.  I had suspected that the kids were blowing through the book without really getting what they were reading, and I suspected that they were missing some of the funny stuff, so I decided to point something out to them to see if I was correct.

At the very outset of the story, Alice impulsively follows a waistcoated white rabbit down his hole and finds herself falling for what feels like forever; she has time to observe the walls around her and to investigate an empty jar of orange marmalade, and then she starts thinking about how she’s going to apply this experience to her life when she returns to it (though she doesn’t really give a thought as to how she’s going to get out of her predicament; her impulsivity is something which serves as a constant through the novel).  She thinks to herself:

“After such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down-stairs! How brave they’ll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn’t say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!” (which was very likely true.)

I read that passage aloud and asked the kids to really think about what was being said here, both by Alice and by our narrator (who, it turns out, has a flair for snark).  They read it, and read it again, and really didn’t see anything much to it.   Just when they started thinking that I was seeing something that wasn’t really there (“because English teachers do that all the time, you know; they try to find something deep and meaningful in everything!”), one girl gasped and her eyes got HUGE and I pointed at her and said “SHHHHH!  Let them work it out for a little longer!”

Of course, this got them all riled up; they HATE it when one of them is in on a joke that they don’t get, so they went back to the passage and tried to will themselves to figure it out.  One by one, a few more kids got the joke, and when about five of them were bouncing in their seats wanting to explain it to all the other kids, I pointed back to the first girl and said “GO!”

“YOU GUYS!” she said, “The narrator is telling us that she wouldn’t say anything if she fell off the top of the house because she’d be, like, DEAD!  She LITERALLY wouldn’t say anything about it because she’s be a smear on the sidewalk!”

Yes, my lovely; that’s it exactly.

That scene played out, in almost exactly that way, in all three of my classes.  It was awesome.  My hope is that this little exercise will inspire my babies to read more carefully, and with an eye toward the snarky and ironic.  We shall see if my hope is well-founded.

I love my job.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

There are two “grading periods” per semester at CHS; the kids get a progress report in October, another one in December, and grades close for the semester at the end of January.  I finished writing their December narratives this afternoon.

Man, but it’s hard to write an academic death sentence in a polite way!

I’ve got this kid.  You’ve met him before, in fact, and he is nothing if not consistent.  The boy still refuses to do any work at all (charmingly and without malice, I’ll grant you, but still…).  The child has been booted out of my room no fewer than five times in the last several weeks because he’s come to class without having read the assignment for the day (and, consequently, he can’t participate in the class discussion; he just sits there and stares vacantly into space).  He spent today in the director’s office, as a matter of fact, because he not only admitted to not having read the assignment, but he didn’t even bring the book to class.  The boy has a 33.6 average in my class (and I know for sure that he’s running right around there in at least one of his other classes, too).  Truly; his proverbial ship has sailed.

How on earth do I write a narrative that doesn’t tell the kid to just give up, already?

He’s one of the (surprisingly many) kids who’s in line to be booted back to their sending schools for non-performance at CHS (we’re in the process of reevaluating the admission standards; they’ll be in place for the next batch of admissions that begins in January), and there’s nothing I can do to save him.

CHS doesn’t just rely on numerical grades; factors such as work ethic and participation are considered in the final grades, as well.  Nothing this kid is doing, though, will make these considerations enough to get his grade up to anything even approaching acceptable.

There are some kids, however, who are on the borderline – some on the wrong side, some on the right side.  For those kids, considerations such as participation and work ethic WILL matter – some kids will rise with them, and others will sink.

I like this grading policy better than straight numbers, though; I don’t think it’s right to judge a student’s performance solely on the work they produce, especially when so much of my classes are discussion-based.  A lot of how I understand my students’ progress is tied to how they interact with me and each other in the classroom.  I want to give credit to the students who strive for those Helen Keller moments, and I want to ding the kids who sit there and pass notes or, as our dear Peter is so fond of doing, stare vacantly into space for an hour and a half every morning.

The truth of the matter is that I have always adjusted my grades according to how my students function in the classroom, even when such things weren’t built into the grading scheme.  Now that I work in a place that does honor more than the raw numbers, though, I’m feeling more confident than ever that the grades I record for my students more closely represent the whole of the work they do.

Ten Things Tuesday

Ten things I love about my CHS job:

1.  My coworkers.  I’ve got a serious bunch of kick-ass colleagues.  I’m certain that I’d not be as wildly enthusiastic about my job if I didn’t have these people around me every day. The math teacher and the social studies teacher in particular really rock, but they’re all pretty damned great in their own ways.

2.  My students.  While there are a bunch of them that make me stark-crazy furious (“are you KIDDING me right now?!“), most of them are really great kids. I love it when the light bulbs go on over their little heads…

3. The rest of the students. There are a bunch of kids at CHS who aren’t in my classes, but with whom I have a relationship, anyway. They hang out at my table at lunch, they come to me for SAT help or to ask me to proofread their college essays or to challenge me to a game of Scrabble (to their detriment) – there are a lot of really great kids at this school.

4. The work environment. While I’d love to have, you know, BOOKS, I really do love the environment at CHS. We teach in an old building; the place has a lot of character, it’s sufficiently warm in the winter (once we got that whole no-heat thing worked out, of course) and we’ve got a perfect mix of private and public space. We’re close enough to be cozy, but we’re not up in each other’s stuff all the time; it’s really kind of great.

5. The hours. Yes, I work a lot more than the hours would indicate – every teacher does (don’t even start with me about summer vacations, either). I have a good schedule worked out, though; I drop the girls off at school and head right to work, giving me about a half hour to do copying or grading or whatever, then I teach two back-to-back, hour-and-a-half classes, then it’s lunchtime. I very often stay through the rest of the day (though, technically, my responsibilities end at 11); I get a lot more done if I stay at work than if I come home and start blog-surfing.

6. The administration. Technically, the administration consists of Carrie, my boss and the director of the school. She is the mistress of walking the line between talented professional educator and capital-G-Girlfriend. She’s supportive and no-nonsense, she is fair and even-handed, and she’s funny as hell.

7. The professional freedom. Essentially, I was hired and told to “do what you do.” I don’t have to follow a set curriculum, I don’t have to teach to tests, and I don’t have to justify every single thing I do in the classroom. In fact, I have been tasked with coming up with a whole new English curriculum for next year (I’m still waiting to hear back from those of you who said you’d think about it and get back to me…). While I’m excited at the prospect, I’m also a little intimidated by it, so help a girl out, would you?

8. Location, location, location. I have, no lie, about a six minute commute. It takes me about as long to walk from my car to the top floor of the building where the school is located as it does for me to get from home to the parking lot. LOVE. THAT.

9. Electronic classes. Our goal is to never have a snow day, so we’ve set up virtual classes that we’ll hold when the building is closed. This means that we’ll not be in school until nearly July. I’m totally behind that.

10. I’m getting paid (albeit, not very much, but still) to do something that I would happily do for free. I LOVE the job that I do, and I actually look forward to going to work every day. So few people get to say that, and I know how lucky I am to have found my professional place in the world. Someone once said that, if you find a job you love, you’ll never have to work a day in your life. That person wasn’t far off the mark…

Happy Tuesday!

Helen Keller Moments

My job is a series of nearly whiplash-inducing ups and downs.  Sadly, of course, the downs – the dumbass kids – make up the higher proportion of this particular roller coaster ride (and, coincidentally, a higher proportion of the fodder for my writing here).

Luckily for me, though, the occasional good ones are enough to keep me getting up in the morning.  These are the kids who “get it” in spectacular and obvious ways, and whose entire perspective of the work we’re doing – and, not for nothing, of themselves – changes in what I call “Helen Keller moments.”  I spell W-A-T-E-R in their hands and suddenly they’re off to the races.

These are the kids who make me love – LOVE! – my job.

Take today as an example.  After a couple of excruciating weeks of apathy and piles of pink paper (have I told you all about my pink paper policy?), I decided to do a review of The Book Thief in preparation for an essay test I’m going to give the students on Monday.  (Chili’s note; what follows kind of requires that you’ve read The Book Thief; I’ll do my best to explain it so that it makes sense to those of you who haven’t, but that’s really not the point of the story.  Sorry if I leave some of you behind).

I told the kids to do their morning writing about the book; what questions, observations, or connections did they make that they wanted to bring up to the rest of the class?  One of the students – we’ll call her Jennifer – mentioned that she was intrigued by the idea of Death as a narrator, but that she felt she couldn’t quite get underneath it.  She knew it was important that Death was the narrator, but she wasn’t sure why.  We talked a little bit about how Death describes his senses (he can smell color and hear emotions and taste ideas, that sort of thing).  Then, I brought up the fact that Death tells us he only sees Liesel four times; once when Werner dies, once when the pilot dies in the plane crash, once when the air raid hits Himmel Street, and once when Liesel herself dies as an old woman, many years after that air raid.

I held up three fingers to represent the first three times Death sees Liesel.  “Okay, you guys,” I said.  “HOW does Death know about all this stuff” – here I pointed to the spaces between my fingers – “when he’s only seeing her for the time it takes him to collect these souls?” – here I pointed to the fingers themselves.  “He isn’t presented as an all-knowing narrator, so how does he know about Max and Mama and the apples and, well, EVERYTHING?  Why is his knowing kind of ironic?”

There’s silence…

This is nothing new…

I’m willing to wait it out.

I looked up to find that Jennifer had a look of utter shock – SHOCK!  I tell you! – on her face.  Her eyes were huge, her mouth was in a big O, and her eyebrows were up to her hairline.

“OH.  MY.  GOD, Mrs. Chili!!  Death STOLE Liesel’s BOOK, didn’t he?!”

DING, DING, DING!!

Yes, Honey; Death essentially stole Liesel’s autobiography (though, to be fair, the book was tossed in with rubble and debris being removed from the ruined street; it’s not as if he wrestled it from her hands).  THAT’S how he was able to know about all the things that he couldn’t have known about.  It kind of blew one or two minds to think that, really, this whole time, LIESEL has been telling us her story – through Death’s reading of her autobiography – but I didn’t want to get them too worked up over that (we’re still working on basic plot and characterization functions here; I don’t want to push my luck too far).

I made a HUGE deal about this connection – this clicking – that Jennifer did; they know perfectly well when I’m upset with them, and I want them to know just as clearly when they do something great.

Jennifer’s discovery helped salve the last few weeks.  She left the class “getting” it, and that’s what I’m in this for.

Taking it Up a Notch

I’ve been thinking about how I ran my public speaking classes in the past.  I’ve also been thinking about Dr. Prezz’s recent entries about authenticity in education and standards-based grading.  I’m re-thinking how I put my classes together, and here’s what I’ve come up with so far.

1.  I’m teaching at a community college where it’s likely that none of my students is going to go on to address the U.N.  While I’m certainly not discounting the possibility, mind you, I’m also mindful of the fact that this class should be less about public oratory and more about confidence in communication.  I want my students to leave this class with the skills they need to negotiate with a superior, make presentations to clients, and speak to small groups of people they don’t already know.

2.  I will not apologize for making the students read and write during this class.  It’s a communication class, after all, and communication is far more than just talking and texting.  Learning to be a proficient (and an efficient) writer is an important component in learning to be a confident speaker, and I’m going to get my students writing on day one.

3.  Going along with my goal that the students learn skills that they can take with them into their professional lives, I AM going to assign them a topic for at least one of their presentations.  It’s true that, at least once or twice in their careers, they’re going to be asked to work on or put together a project or presentation that they’re not personally invested in.  Finding a way in to work like that – finding a way to take something that doesn’t interest you and figuring out how to do it well, anyway – is an important skill I want my students to have.

4.  I’m also not going to apologize for looking closely at speeches from history – and from right now – and teaching students to analyze what they read and hear.  Communication isn’t only about transmission, either; I want my kids to understand what’s being said to them, to question what’s being said to them, and to draw conclusions and make connections in such a way that the information they receive means something.

5.  I’m going to be far more clear about the standards for grading this term than I’ve been in the past.  Students will receive rubrics along with their assignments, so they’ll know exactly what skills and techniques I’m looking for as I assess their work.  While this will represent a bit more work for me, it also places responsibility for performance directly into the students’ hands.  If I tell them that I’m going to be looking closely at their Power Point slides, and their slides are bland, boring, and misspelled, then no one should be surprised when the grade reflects that.  Conversely, if I don’t say I’m going to be focusing in on the polish of the written part of the presentation, then the student needn’t put hours of work into it.  Students know where to put their effort, and I can zero in on just those things.  Everyone wins.

I’m going to be spending a good chunk of this afternoon getting my syllabus in order.  Class starts on Monday, and my intention is to hit the ground running and to keep up that pace until March.  Wish me – and my students – luck!

The Ad Lesson

I had a GREAT class the other day, and I wanted to share the experience with you in the hopes that you might be able to steal something good from it for your own classroom.

I have never been able to teach a class without including a heavy dose of critical thinking in the mix.  Really, everything I teach boils down to that; there are mechanics and such to include in the curriculum, certainly, but what good is grammar if one can’t use it to get ideas out?  What’s the point in learning how to deliver a speech if one can’t put into it solid and well-supported ideas?  Really, English classes (in my context, anyway) are all just thinking practice; I’m teaching students to see beyond what’s on the page and to really think about what’s happening and why, and about how they can use the experiences they gain from the work we do to inform the rest of their lives.

That’s the goal, anyway.  I’m pretty sure I fail far more often than I succeed, but I never stop trying.

My comp. students at Local U. are working on analysis papers and, if I’m going to be fair, I’ve got to admit that I really nailed them.  My morning students are tasked with choosing a controversy, analyzing three different views about that question, and representing those views in as fair and objective a way as they can.  My evening students have it even worse; they were asked to choose a topic, event, policy, or person – past or present, foreign or domestic – that ties into an aspect of civil or human rights, then write a paper that explains their chosen topic, puts it in context, and makes clear that human rights connection.

Ooof!

I recognize that I’m asking a lot of them, but it’s not as if I’m tossing them in the pool and expecting them to swim; I’m bringing noodles to the party, but whether or not they grab hold of them is entirely out of my control.

The other day, for example.  I decided to run an exercise in analytical thinking, and I thought long and hard about how to present this activity in a way that would be both challenging and engaging.  I chose to build the class around two sets of two different television advertisements to see how well the students were able to 1) identify the messages in the commercials, 2) investigate the ways in which the ads got those messages across, and 3) assess whether or not the commercials were effective for them – or would be effective in general – and why or why not (because we English teachers LOVE to ask “why or why not?”).

The first set of ads came from the insurance industry.  First, I showed them this Geico commercial:

They were all familiar with the caveman campaign – almost all of them had seen this ad before, even – and they all agreed that it was a good one.  More on that in a minute.

I also showed them this ad from Liberty Mutual:

I took an informal poll after we’d watched the ads a couple of times each.  The cavemen won the popularity contest hands-down.  Students thought the commercial was funny, and they all agreed that the company did a good job getting the message of their accessibility and ease of use across through this campaign.  One or two students preferred the Liberty Mutual ad, though, and stated as their reasoning the idea that insurance should be responsible.

HERE’S where we started getting somewhere!  The Liberty kids thought that the Geico ad gave off an impression of glibness and irresponsibility – “next time, do a little research” was cited as evidence for that claim.  Of course, they recognized that the ad was supposed to be funny, but the impression that the students who preferred the Liberty Mutual ads got was that the company doesn’t really understand their customers.  They were shot down by their peers who countered by saying that the Geico ads were supposed to be funny – that there aren’t cavemen, so they aren’t Geico’s customers – and the company really did a good job of getting across the idea that Geico is convenient and simple to use.  The students agreed – almost to a person – that the ads were directed at entirely different populations; the Geico ads were directed at a younger clientele and the Liberty ads were aimed at older, more settled customers.  I’m not sure I agree with that assessment – and I don’t think that the students’ reasoning was sound – but I was pleased they came to those conclusions; that kind of thinking marked a departure from their usual “retell the plot” mode.

We had a bit more trouble with the car ads, but I found this discussion to be much more fruitful (figures, doesn’t it?).  First, I showed them this commercial from Volkswagen.

Almost none of them had seen this ad before – as I recall, it was a pretty short-lived campaign from several years ago.  I have to keep reminding myself that these kids are just that – kids – and that they’ve probably not paid a whole lot of attention to advertisements up to now.

Then we watched this ad a couple of times:

Again, I asked for the show of hands and – big surprise – the Cadillac ad was the clear winner, especially among the men (this was an interesting breakdown – I’ll get to that in a minute).  I asked the students to explain to me what was going on in each of the individual commercials, and I was surprised when I got a whole lot of plot.  “These two guys are having a conversation in the car, and…”  They seemed to have a much harder time looking at how the ads WORKED in this case – they wanted to tell me what the commercials said or what they showed, but they were hesitant to dig in to how they manipulated their messages to an effect.

They were also completely clueless about the (in my mind, over-the-top-overt) role that sex played in the Cadillac ad.  The men identified with it, certainly, but none of them was able to articulate what was at work in the ad beyond the “hot babe” and the high-heeled shoe on the gas pedal.  I had to lead them through the idea of power and control, about the tone of Ms. Walsh’s voice (“like melted chocolate, you guys!” was the exact phrase I used, and that freaked them out a little, I think), about the use of light and sound in the ad, about the words that were spoken (“does it return the favor?!”  Seriously – how could they not see that?!) – all of it.  When I tossed out the idea that the ad was really just a visual representation of an orgasm (“Come ON, you guys!  Spaghetti straps – is she in a neglige?  She’s in a TUNNEL.  Look at the lights, VERY.  RHYTHMICALLY.  MOVING.  PAST.  Then she BURSTS out of the tunnel and there’s light and music and OH, MY GOD!), they were shocked and demanded to see it again, at which point most of them were embarrassed that they’d missed that implication every time they’d seen the ad before.  They’ll never not see it again, I can tell you that!

We talked then about who the companies were trying to attract with the ads and the nearly-unanimous assessment was that the VW ad was looking to hook the family-oriented consumer who’s concerned about safety while the Caddy ad was aimed at men.  I took serious issue with these claims and tried to push the students to justify their answers.  They responded by saying that the main idea of the VW ad was saftey – that you could survive a crash in this car – and that safety is very important to parents.  “Okay, agreed,” I said, “but I didn’t see any families in that ad.  In fact,” I went on, “the driver dude was talking about a girlfriend.  There were no booster seats in the car.  As a matter of fact, all the ads from this campaign that *I* saw featured young people, presumably single and out enjoying themselves.”

They didn’t have a counter-argument for that.

I had a BLAST shredding the claim that the Caddy ad was aimed exclusively as men, and I think I sent a few of my students a little over the edge with my response.  Kate Walsh is HOT.  I’m a straight chick, and she does it for me.  Men want her, women want to be her – she’s gorgeous, she’s in control, she’s smooth and confident and surrounded in luxury and power.  SHE’S IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT, fercryinoutloud!  Let’s not forget that she is an actress in a show that is almost universally loved by women (my guess – though I have no hard data to support this claim – is that most men who watch Grey’s Anatomy or Private Practice only do so becuase their girlfriends/wives watch it).  There is no way that Cadillac was excluding women from this commercial; the choices that they made – from the actress to the lines she spoke to the color of the car – were all carefully made and meticulously executed.  It’s a gorgeous, highly effective ad.

The students loved this exercise, even if they didn’t quite get it.  I don’t expect them to, really – at least, not yet.  I kind of feel like Annie Sullivan; I’ll keep pumping water over their hands; eventually, the cold, wet stuff and W-A-T-E-R will connect in their brains, and they’ll wonder how they ever missed all this wonderful, exciting stuff happening all around them.