Happy Mother's Day to all of you mamas--the smiling moms, the screaming moms, the waiting moms, the weeping moms...no matter what motherhood looks like in your life, today is for you.
Meet one of my moms
I have a really amazing biological mom, and I also have some equally amazing other kinds of moms in my life. And here, today, I want to celebrate a mom who is no stranger to most of you!!
MICHELE WHALEY
You know Michele--or at least, you know her work! Michele was the 2016 PNCFL Teacher of the Year Finalist and is responsible for developing or discovering many of the strategies that we comprehension based teachers know and love. Michele and Laurie Clarcq developed Embedded Reading; Michele connected language teachers with Dr. Ashley Hastings and drew attention to his work; she saw the potential for training and growth in Bill VanPatten's work and brought him to the Alaska state conference before Tea with BVP was brewing. Heck, I realized last week that she posted about using MAFIA in her classes years before I did!
Michele is a thinker, a finder, and an innovator--and she is my pedagogical mama. Michele introduced me to comprehension based teaching (at the time, in the form of pure TPRS), and she guided, coached, and nurtured me in my first few years of teaching. Now that I am out of the classroom and living thousands of miles away, she continues to mentor me and share with me all the new thoughts she is thinking about language teaching. I am so grateful for Michele and her profound impact on my life.
WHO'S YOUR MAMA?
I bet you have a pedagogical mom or dad too. Someone that has given you a family, brought you into a new world of teaching, breathed LIFE into your classroom and your spirit. Someone that has guided and nurtured you through the trials and triumphs in your classroom and your career.
This Mother's Day--on the heels of Teacher Appreciation Week--would you take a moment to reach out to that individual (or those individuals?) and say thank you for who they are to you?
Let's follow the example of these impactful individuals in our lives and always be contributors to our profession--to our colleagues and to the next generation of language teachers!
Happy Mother's Day!!
