Meeting at the Coffee Shop

The first day I actually met Elphaba, the English department chair and the woman who was to be my student teacher mentor, was the second week in June just after the previous school year had ended. The Brit Lit team was meeting in a conference room in the back of a locally owned coffee joint called The Daily Grind. When I got there, I noticed one of the patrons gave off a "teacher-y" vibe, so I approached her and introduced myself. Slowly but surely, the rest of the team arrived, and we assembled in the conference room. The first woman I had met, "Dani," led the team discussion since Elphaba hadn't arrived yet. She was meeting with a new teacher down the road at the high school and was going to be joining us later.

Eventually Elphaba came in; she was pleasant, but not gregarious; I introduced myself since it was our first face-to-face meeting. She was very polite and business-like, and she began the main discussion with the team—the new transition from Georgia performance standards as simply a curriculum guide toward the new "standards-based grading," which requires teachers to align the specific learning tasks directly to the standard that is being measured. The team decided that the grading categories should be split into three categories: reading, writing, and listening/speaking/viewing (LSV) skills covered in English/LA standards. The assignments would be worth either 100 points for summative assessments and 50 points for formative assessments.

The meeting lasted from about 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., and when it was over Elphaba drove up and her white Lexus with a gold trim package and unloaded a whole bunch of text books and other resources for me. She told me I could keep them since the County was moving to new textbooks the following school year ('10-'11). "Cool," I thought, "I'll get a chance to see what I will be teaching before the school year starts." She also gave me her heavily annotated copy of Brave New World, which is the novel she usually teaches in her British Literature classes. She handed it me saying, "Guard this with you life."

Yes. I did need to have my "guard" up for something, but it wasn't Brave New World.