Reflections and resolutions

Claire Doll
MSMU Class of 2024

(1/2025) As I write this, we are forty-eight hours away from the shortest day of the year. I can feel time reeling, the night creeping into day, the day growing inwards. There is both dread and relief in this: dread that the rest of winter is frigid and long and before us, yet relief that after December 21st, the daylight begins to inch our away again. And as a teacher in December, all I want is more daylight, more warmth. While I’m praying for snow days, I also can’t wait to see 2025 into its sunny skies and springtime weather. I am (nearly) halfway done my first year of teaching.

December has proven to be a beautiful, chaotic month. First, I began a creative writing club at my school (so fitting, I know!) and I’ve met some really great kids throughout this. It’s fun to watch middle school students plan out their poems on a whiteboard, or write for 45 minutes straight, or have energetic conversations with friends before scrawling words onto a page. I even provided these students with their own composition books, and every month they bring their journals to the library and write. It’s an awesome club to lead.

In ELA class, my students and I read the drama version of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens in its entirety, and they loved it. I typically read texts to my seventh graders, or I’ll have them venture through the text independently, but for this play, I assigned my students roles. While some begged for the role of Tiny Tim, and others longed to play The Ghost of Jacob Marley, no role was as highly coveted as that of Ebenezer Scrooge. For all the other characters I took volunteers, but for Scrooge, I held auditions.

My "Scrooge" candidates lined up at the front of the classroom and had to shout their loudest, darkest, most Christmas-raging "Ba Humbug!" while the rest of the students voted on which actor would play the lead part. While this ended in laughter and fun, I also found the perfect Scrooge for each class. Every day in ELA felt like a conversation, a shared experience of joy and discussion. My students were intrigued by Scrooge’s past romance with Belle, and the joyous spirit of the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the dark, mystified Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come. We had made the play come to life, and each student played a role in this—whether big or small. We ended the play on a Thursday, and that Friday, we ventured out to watch a live performance of A Christmas Carol. Being able to take my students on a field trip as part of our curriculum—and showing them the beauty of theatre—was a first-year teaching highlight for sure.

I’m now writing this in my last week before Christmas break. My students have been busy creating ‘One-Pagers’ to demonstrate their knowledge of A Christmas Carol—this entails illustrations, color, symbols, and summary writing. I felt that this was the perfect way to assess their understanding of the text without assigning an essay the week before break. My students learn best when challenged in new forms of learning.

This month I have also realized just how grateful I am for my students. All week I have been given holiday presents, from gift cards to homemade cookies to candles and even earrings. There is truly something special about school in December. There have been mornings when it’s snowing and my kids marvel at the window, and I let them, because when will they ever be 12 and 13 again, watching from their classroom as flurries fall? Sometimes I look around my classroom, at all the twinkling lights and posters, wondering if they’ll remember these times.

As time turns to a new year, I can’t help but be excited for what’s to come in the rest of winter and spring. I’m starting off the year with poetry: students will read three different New Year’s poems, and then they will be challenged to write their own! I am hoping to tie in the idea of "theme" in poetry to the "themes" in their lives, whether it be positive or negative. Anything I can do to engage my students in literature is a win. We’ll then finish up with some more fiction, before we begin a rather long unit on nonfiction texts: informational, argumentative. While this isn’t my go-to form of reading, I am looking forward to making this an experience that my students can (hopefully) enjoy. It unfortunately falls around the same time that my students begin state assessments, so my goal is to get through our content successfully before we land on more poetry and fiction in the late spring. These informational texts include articles on ads, social media, eating healthy topics that I hope will engage students. While I prefer fiction any day, I am looking forward to experimenting with nonfiction as well!

So, my resolutions for 2025 are as follows: I hope to teach my students, truly teach them, so that they will not only have definitions and terms memorized, but that they’ll also be encouraged to read and enlightened by anything that they choose to read. I hope that we will have more engaging, deep conversations, because this is where students learn, more than through rigorous notes or tests. This is where they think. And thinking is a lifelong skill, something that sticks with you, while memory of seemingly small things often fades. I hope to find more short stories that will resonate with my students, and I hope to bring awareness to certain issues as we read informational texts. I hope to give my students a voice as we learn how to write argumentatively. I hope to experiment with all forms of writing, creative and persuasive and everything in between. But most importantly, I hope to continue building relationships with my students so that they will always want to come to school and pick up a story and read.

Read other articles by Claire Doll