Well just get me an apple and sweater embroidered with the alphabet and call it a day.

A couple days ago, I was talking to one of my friends, another volunteer who also teaches English. It was really one of those conversations where you only really understand or care about the conversation because you are in the same situation. When I was in college with a bunch of journalism majors, the subject would usually drift to the newspaper. Now, my conversations tend to drift to my middle school.

I was telling her about how the day before I had tried to teach my students the comparative of equality (He is as tall as Florent. She is as smart as Aziz.) when I had to improvise my lesson plan after realizing I couldn’t teach them how to use adjectives to make comparisons when they didn’t understand the concept of an adjective.

This class was normally the smarter of the two classes at this grade level (5eme), so I had not been expecting much when I started my 5eme class that day.

When I began my lecture on adjectives, I had 41 faces staring back at me with a look like, “duh Madam. Adjectives.” I was telling my friend how pleasantly surprised I had been in class that day, and for once, they had ended the class period ahead of the other class.

It was when I uttered the phrase, “Amazed by their knowledge of adjectives” that I realized how much of an English teacher I’d become.