Still struck or stuck

...or stricken.

Whew! I'm finding it really hard to think about anything but yesterday. I am in a sort of shockful bliss as best as I can describe it. My mind is chattering like a typewriter and I'm lost in my own thoughts most of the day. I've stopped baking and now I find it hard to concentrate on even cooking. Last night like an airheaded lover on cloud nine I burned our dinner and you know what I didn't even care.

My mind is on other things.

For many years I have been teaching English in France, mostly conversational English. I really enjoy teaching to High School and Middle School kids and I've taught both French and Japanese students. One of my most well-worn lesson plans and one that I often let span an entire semester is based on the American civil rights movement. As the conversational teacher you can use any subject to get kids talking and I used to just use pop culture but eventually I found that I had the opportunity to spread a message and to teach a little bit of history. I chose the Civil Rights Movement because it stands out so clearly in American history, but also because I became a little frustrated with the blatant racist remarks I heard around France. It is much more accepted in this country to say something off-color and I have always been shocked by it saying to myself "did he or she really just say that?" not believing my own ears.

This has always been a popular subject with my students and I am a fun teacher, or at least I like to think so. We start all the way back to the founding fathers and do a few short lessons on intolerance and revolution. This is all very brief and we quickly span the decades to the sixties. We learn but we also have fun. We act out the Rosa Parks bus scene and usually film it and play it back. I let the kids write the scripts. They do speeches on a civil rights subject. We act out mock telephone conversations, one person being MLK and one person being Governer Wallace , always funny in broken English. We play games based on the vocabulary. I know so many details about the movement I could probably teach it to University students by now. It's like any subject you teach over and over.

One thing that I always end the lesson plan with is the death of MLK because since his death there hasn't been a lot more of the story to tell. I tell the students that he made a pathway to greater understanding but that there was only so much he could do. I don't like to dwell on his death too much, instead we usually close the lesson with a film of MLK doing his speech and then we write our own "I have a dream speech." I let them go off writing a speech about whatever their dreams are so that they can identify with what it means to have a dream.

This lesson plan hasn't been taught for quite a few years now since I've taken off work to have my kids. All of the teaching materials--the videos, the papers and the notes are in a box in storage somewhere. I keep thinking about it though and all those French and Japanese students who I taught over the years and what they must be thinking about today. Where are they? What are their reactions?

I don't have a television. I never seem to have a television at crucial times! I don't really need one. I read so many amazing blog posts yesterday written by friends and strangers. The New York Times posted some of their best videos to date this morning and I sat there captivated by their poetic bytes of people's reactions to the election. A lot of people just cried.

I am still in awe aren't you?