A Tiny Victory

 Hey all--I'm going to come out and say it--the weather is kicking my ass. My eyes are itchy, I'm tired even when I can't sleep--you get the picture. You've all seen the screen shots of the west coast air quality--blargh.

Anyway--I do have something fun to relate today.

Mate was my guinea pig, I mean time keeper as I practiced another class today. I'm working on one tomorrow as well, btw. Anyway--today, he sat and listened to me talk about character and trope and conflict and all the English teacher things that I love to pull out sometimes and talk about. And I was pretty sure he was just humoring me and mostly playing on his phone.

But then, later, we started talking about his new favorite show. 

Ted Lasso is an Apple TV exclusive starring Jason Sudeikis and if you get a chance to watch it--do! Sudeikis plays a sweet college football coach who is recruited to coach league soccer--and he's a good guy. He brings out the best in people--and he works hard at it. The fun part is watching him work hard to win over his boss--who originally recruits him because she thinks he'll run the team into the ground, ala Major League, but we can see her starting to warm up to him, because he's a decent human being.

Anyway, Mate and I were talking about the show, and he says, "It's like you said in your class--no character is just one of the five things. They're all of the five things and sometimes those things aren't aligned--they contrast, and that means the characters aren't one dimensional, they are multi-faceted."

I stared at him. "Five things?"

"Five methods of making characters. You know, speech, appearance, thoughts, actions, what other people think."

And suddenly my lesson came flooding back, and I was like, "You were PAYING ATTENTION?"

"Well yeah. It was a pretty tight class. I liked it."

You all, it was one of the best moments of my teaching career. No lie. *sniffle* 

You don't even... Wow. The only thing better would have been to have one of the kids internalize one of my lessons, but, no--that's a bridge too far.