Well I believe I had my first real experience with "teaching" this past Thursday. I was a guest speaker at the school where my friend Amanda teaches fifth grade. I spoke to four classes of fifth graders at one time!
I really had no clue what to expect or what was expected of me for this "guest speaking" experience, so I completely winged it! I'm not sure what the 5th grade teachers thought of me, but the kids seemed to like it! Truly, I'm really only concerned about pleasing the young'uns because adults can be too serious about everything and kids are the most honest critics anyway!
I talked to the 5th graders about creativity and how to brainstorm ideas for a story or poem; I taught them words like "speculate" and what "Choose Your Own Adventure" books are. I asked them lots of questions so that they could participate and "have a say" in this weird author-writer-girl coming to talk to their classes!
I got so excited to see them get excited and to see them want to participate. I knew that if anything, this was the way to get kids to want to learn and participate...by involving them and interacting with them. The kids had fun, telling me about stories they could make up and (with my guidance) making up a mini story about a Leprechaun who rides a magical unicorn and who comes to the kids' house to find some gold before the kids get to it and whose clover gets taken away by the kids' parents and then the Leprechaun gets angry and turns into a giant and eats the entire family! And the whole story came from the fact that sometimes the kids heard scratching sounds in their home!
Still not sure I could handle teaching, but it was fun! Maybe God is leading me in that direction, maybe He's not...we'll see!
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Yesterday I was pondering the phrases "Bless his/her heart" and "God rest his/her soul." I recall attending a storytelling festival one year and one storyteller interrupted one of her stories to remark on the irony that I was pondering last night: it seems like people feel comfortable or justified saying anything they darn well please about another human being, as long as they precede it with "Bless his/her heart" or (if the person is deceased) "God rest his/her soul." As if saying those phrases makes it okay to say whatever you want about the person. Mind you, sometimes these phrases are used in earnest, but many times they are "abused."
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Tonight Travis and I were driving on the Blue Ridge Parkway and I pointed out a cow pasture to him and said "This is the place where I once saved a cow."
"You saved a cow?" Travis asked.
"Yup...kinda," I said.
"Praise the Lord! You have brought a cow to know the Lord! You brought him to his knees to repent and accept Jesus as his Lord and Savior!"
"Not like that," I laughed.
"Well do tell me...I want to hear the story of how you led a cow to the Lord!" Travis said eagerly.
"Why, I preached the gospel to him, of course! How else would you do it?"
*** If you don't find that funny, maybe it was one of those "you had to be there" kind-of situations
