I am a swift wind sweeping the country

Yesterday in the schoolyard, one of my few soft-spoken, mild-mannered students ran up to me. "Miss Brave!" she said. "Remember when we made our flat selves and we sent them to your friend and your friend took a picture?" (How could I forget?) "I have the picture, and when it's vacation, I'm going to visit my cousins and my sister in Santo Domingo and I'm going to show them!"

My boyfriend has been telling me for months that the Flat Stanley project was one my students will remember for ages to come, but I don't think I really believed him until that moment.

Today, in that student's ESL class, I played the R. Kelly song "The World's Greatest" as part of a lesson on metaphors. I had printed out the lyrics on big chart paper and accompanied them with lots of pictures so that there would be visual aids, and we talked about what kinds of metaphors we might hear in the song before we listened to it.

It was fabulous. They really, really liked listening to the song, and they begged me to play it over and over again. And it was just awesome to see them all sitting there, all quiet for once, their lips moving as they followed along with the lyrics, grooving a little with the music.

Even though I was really not looking forward to returning to school after vacation, I've been surprisingly chipper these last few days. I've been keeping my cool over things that might have driven me over the edge before the vacation, and I've been working on reacting to challenging situations in a calm, non-threatening way. Plus, I got observed doing my "World's Greatest" metaphor lesson (in a different class), which means I only have to survive one more observation before the year is out.

Maybe I really am the world's greatest!