Something Special.

During my professional experience at Homebush West Public School, I came across a little stage 2 boy who had the cheekiest smile. Students who were 'in trouble' and had to see the principal and or associated teachers would sit in the corridors near the staffroom during lunch. On my first week, I didn't know this so I thought this little boy was looking for a teacher so I asked him who he was looking for and he said he's not looking for anybody, he was just in trouble... again. He grinned like it was nothing new so I told him to try and be good. During the four weeks at HWPS, when I walked towards the staffroom for lunch, I would see the student in that corridor at least once a week. I repeated myself every time, "Try to be good, okay?". So I've never actually had this student in my class, I didn't even know his name until the last week. But during my last week, his teacher told me he had something to give me, it was this picture. His teacher told me she was surprised that he kept to himself the whole lesson and concentrated in drawing the picture during art. I was surprised that this student, out of all the people he knew, just randomly decided to draw me a picture. It's amazing how just one smile, just one nod of appreciation and just one sentence of encouragement can brighten a child's day.

Something Special.

A while ago, I quit one of my part-time jobs working as an ESL teacher at a tuition centre. Whilst I was there, I did a intensive 2-hour session with two ESL girls, one had come to Australia about two years ago and the other a bit longer. They were in year 3 and they were always so excited to learn new things. When I told them I had to leave, they thought I was leaving to teach at another place but I told them it was because I had to study to become a better teacher. The girls wrote and brought me some farewell cards in the following, last lesson.

I was very proud when I got these cards, not because I got the cards but because of how much they wrote and how hard they tried to use the correct sentence structure we had been working on! Even more, we had been doing 'shape poetry' the previous lesson and one of the girls wrote me some shape poetry in the silhouette of... well... me. Despite the spelling errors, the improvement these girls made during the year I had them was immense. As a teacher, when you can see the improvement in your students, and when you see your students truly enjoying the process of learning something new, nothing is more precious than that.