Believe it or not, it's the moment they've been waiting for. My students finally got to meet Mr. Boyce today. If you think that Nate is no big deal, the kids in room 9 would definitely disagree (of course, I would too!). I used the excuse, "Mr. Boyce is an accountant, and it's the busy season," for about four months. But since then, they've been hard to please. I was able to go from that explanation to, "Mr. Boyce is studying for a really long (CPA) test," but they had a hard time understanding why in the world a grown-up would be taking tests still.
Without any prompting from me, a couple of my students recently wrote him letters. My favorite one said, "When are you going to come see the class and me? I have been looking every time the door opens to see if it is you, but it's not." Good job, start with guilt and work from there.
It's been funny how much my students have come to like Nate without meeting him. About mid way through the year I was teaching the cursive letter 'q' and a student asked, "Mrs. Boyce, how does Mr. Boyce write his q's?"
I have no idea how Mr. Boyce writes his q's. He's a printer, not a cursive writer. But I couldn't tell them that. I have them convinced that they have to know cursive to get to fourth grade and survive in the real world. Ever since then the question has come up with every cursive letter I've taught. I'd say, on average, someone in my class asks a question about Mr. Boyce at least five or six times a week during a lesson. If it's a story we're reading where the family is eating Mexican food, you can bet some little darling is going to ask if Mr. Boyce likes Mexican.
You can imagine how surprised the kids were when they walked in from lunch and there he was, the infamous Mr. Boyce with brownies just for them. Nate answered all of their questions, from things like, "What's your favorite month?" to "What kind of wild animal do you like?" And then, of course, he had to show them his cursive. That brought on all kinds of requests to write certain words. He writes 'Mississippi' really well, by the way. I'm pretty sure Nate's not jumping the accounting ship for the chaos of the elementary world, but it was great having him there. It was the highlight of our day and definitely a great memory for this last week of school.
1 comment:
That was a great post. Nate looks like a great teacher. more happy than I expect he looks when he's accounting.
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