Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Seeing the sparkle in a student's eye he/she does something exciting

I have had the discussion with several teachers and, heck, a lot of other people about that amazing feeling I get when I see the sparkle in a student's eye when he/she figures something out, learns something new by experiencing it, teaches the teacher something, or (sometimes) "finally gets it" after several attempts.

Today I was blessed enough to experience that feeling several times.  As my previous entries alluded, I have been pretty excited by the students' response to blogging.  This afternoon I also felt like a kid at Christmas when I assisted the student who is the lead webmaster with the assembly of his new computer.  As I found out halfway through the process, he had never built a computer from components.  We installed the motherboard in the case, plugged in the various cables, installed the processor and its heatsink/fan, installed the RAM, installed the dvd writer and connected it to the IDE slot on the motherboard and to the power, installed the hard drive and connected it to the SATA slot on the motherboard and to the power, installed the graphic card, and hooked up the mouse, keyboard, dual monitors, and power.  The entire time the student had a grin on his face and was having difficulty putting in the final screws because he was getting so excited.  We did make a minor assembly error, but after some problem solving, the pc fired up beautifully.  While software was installing on the first pc, the student jumped into the assembly of the second pc with newfound confidence.  The experience of building the tool that he will use to create/edit pages on the district and high school websites has already given the student more pride than he had last year as webmaster.  Once again, I was getting just as excited as the student and was fairly giddy not only to see the new machine in action, but also to see the student beam with PRIDE at having assembled it.

Yeah, I worked for a couple of hours after school with the student assembling the pc and installing software, but seeing the reaction and excitement of the student throughout the process reminds me why I love doing what I do.

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