Monday night brought spring semester parent-teacher conferences. Parents had expressed interest in seeing you, but were free to visit any time during a three-hour timeframe. I saw about a dozen sets of parents, and I thought this was a fair number, although some teachers doubled that return.
Most of the parents just wanted to put a face to my name and make sure that their student was achieving well and behaving in class for me. I was able to give the parents lots of positive comments, so it was a good feeling evening that promised benefits from meeting my students’ parents. I made a set of parents cry because I read to them an amazing post that their son had made in an online discussion of Frankenstein. Although it referred to the death of his grandmother, so it was tear-prompting in that sense, it also was very reflective and academic in nature, which impressed them (and myself, which is why I decided to share it with them). Not that I feel good about making somebody cry, but it was for a good thing!
Speaking of connections, I asked my CP class to locate an online news article or other piece of information on a topic that can be related to the themes in Frankenstein. Most of the students were very capable to search for this type of article and return useful results. Some began encountering articles they had read in other classes, and they made this awesome connection between my class and their economics class and a genetic conference some students attended with their science teacher the day before. They were dumbfounded at how this relation between classes was possible, and worked diligently at summarizing the article they located and connecting it to the novel. This is when the magic happens! Some of these connections include cloning, fertilization, gene therapy, and psychoanalysis. I can’t wait to read these!
