A Most Beautiful Accent
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| Glass House © Noll, June, 2015 — |
Sliding down into the darkness of knowing, I’ve hit the bottom
of midterm madness, grading papers and tests, and processing it all into the ether
above. I’m made to post journal entries for a ministry upon high, education of bureaucracy-not-nigh.
I’ll post it now, the last post made, just so someone says something, anything,
in this strange new world I find myself swimming upon, flailing high in my own mind,
and quite possibly a belly-flop towards hell:
I’m almost done with midterm grades, at the end of grading
70+ material exams for high school and the last 40 or so video and written book
reviews of 150 to watch, read, and grade. I have to post it all correctly to
Smart-School along with all the other Google Docs and whatnot that need
attention from ‘this’ novice English teacher. It’s a lot. I have good days and
bad, today of which was more in the red than yesterday’s highs. Yesterday was
quite lovely, as a matter of fact. So, I think Wednesday, with a class of 9th
graders, is the best place to start today’s entry for staj:
Normally I read aloud to the students in order for them to
hear correctly pronounced English, with the proper intonation and expression.
On Wednesday, however, a handful of the students in one of my classes really
wanted to read aloud. It was a very boring literature piece, so I had been
spicing it up with descriptions and antics in front of the class, trying to
keep 38 teens with me; it was difficult for us all. Most of my students really
want to help me succeed as a new teacher, and I can palpably feel this often in
classes as the students quiet each other down, pay complements after, and laugh
a lot during key moments in the lectures I give and tell.
One student was raising her hand non-stop to read aloud and
when I gave her a turn, she spoke loudly and with confidence – right up until
almost the end of her paragraph, when she began to giggle and grin. I
complained that we couldn’t hear her with the overlay of laughter between
words, and so she admitted being embarrassed about her accent, most Israeli,
most guttural. I stopped the lesson right there and then, insisting upon
telling a story that I had learned somewhere, pop-culture, maybe from a friend.
“Who knows who Gal Gadot is,” I said loudly to the class.
They all giggled and nodded with conspiratorial agreement with each other. Of
course they knew; and I also found out that they already knew the story I was
about to tell – that an entire cast of women from around the
world had tried their best to imitate the exotic accent of Gal Gadot in order
to accentuate the fact that they were all portraying Amazonian warriors from
ancient times and a mystical dimension beyond us all. I told the
young lady reading in my class that her accent was beautiful, and to be proud
of it. She immediately began to glow as bright as I’ve ever seen from some of
my new students in English class, all engaged with learning a second or third language,
maybe more.
Excited, after class, the young lady made sure to say
goodbye to me as she left, that same glow hovering about her being … and then
slowly following her out the door and down the hall to her life, and, of
course, enveloping her Wednesday afternoon.
The end.
