first day of cooperative

sigh, what a great, great thing we've done... i had soooo much fun. and the kids...oh man, they were in heaven.

e loved his classes...math was the favorite. (she brought an electric card shuffler...this was, in a word, genius...well, i almost said cheating, but i don't want to be bitter...it was freaking genius) then i did an art class where we matched paintings and then we did our own paintings...e called his "charger" and the other student (yep, there're only two littles for now) called his "at the park"....guess what it was of... they finished the day with spanish, which i also believed they loved, but it was unanimous...math rocked.

s and o did spanish first. then writing and grammar, which sounded like they were having a good time. and their last class was philosophy with me...oh man, i LOVE that class... s and o said they liked their classes a lot, but s was kind of sleepy and shy and i will say that out of all the kids in my philosophy class (seven), my two were the least talkative, with o being more chatty than s by far...so i'm thinking s was a little sleepy and trying to figure stuff out the first day.

n had founding documents...he's reading the magna carta for next week, i think. then speech. then biology. he sounded pretty happy with his classes.

so let me talk about philosophy for a minute... first of all, i was so RELIEVED at how much the kids were ready to talk...i only had to remind them a few times that we had to speak one at a time. and the two emily dickinson poems we did? easy shmeasy. ok, not really. but the kids stuck them out, picked out the words they didn't know, worked to understand them and put them together to figure the poems out and we actually left off with a pretty good understanding of what dwelling in possibility meant. one of my students, when i gave them their journals and asked them to draw or write what possibility was, said the empty page was like possibility...nothing and everything at the same time. that almost made me cry. then when we were talking about imagination and what it felt like to be imaginative...the kids were talking about imagination being dreaming...that was cool. and they all talked about how good it felt to be imaginative or thinking or meditating. and they were the ones to make the leap between imagination and dwelling in possibility...the limitless opportunities, the freedoms. it was awesome. i'll share the poem they wrote together as a class, modeled after dickinson's "i'm nobody. who are you?" these kids are brilliant.

my spouse left me a card and a plant to congratulate me for being part of getting this co-op rolling. it was pretty freaking sweet.

so now, i nap. snort... well, i think i will rest for a bit. then work on getting the shit organized that i stupidly left until, well, now to organize. (that probably would've been good to have done, oh, say, before today.) but live and learn....that's what i always (starting now) say...live and learn.
peace