An Education In Royalty

I officially take charge of my student-teaching classes this week.

It’s the culmination of my college experience and it seems a little daunting. Lessons and activities to plan, students to get to know in a short amount of time, and a block of classes I still have to take throughout the first couple months of teaching. Not only is all that going on, but then you’ve got Opening Day thrown into the middle of all that* and it looks like I’m going to have a busy semester.

*In other news, school districts have yet to declare Opening Day an official holiday. This is legislation I plan to fight if I end up an English teacher. I need to have an entire day off to enjoy the season’s first baseball games.

Maybe it seems like I’m whining. I realize that you can’t be a college kid forever* and that at some point the real world steps in and you have responsibilities you have to tend to.

*Meh

I love English. I love literature and I love the unpredictable animal that is the English language. I can drone on for hours and hours about the beauty of one of Hemingway’s works or how Dickens was able to create wonderful characters in his stories. I really enjoy talking about how the English language has evolved. How 30 years ago, if you said you were going to “google” something, people would have stared at you like you were an idiot because “google” hadn’t become a verb like it is in our usage today.

Can’t you just see how exciting I’m going to be in the classroom?

Don’t be a critic.

But while I’m planning for the semester and trying to determine how I’m going to take up the time allotted to me in each class period, all I can think about is how awesome it would be to teach a class on the Royals.

Think about it. You want to talk about a class I could get pumped for? Or how about a series of classes?

“Champions: The Kansas City Royals and the magical ’85 season” – There would be a required viewing of the 1985 World Series…..naturally. We would spend a good portion of the class solely breaking down that series. However, we’d also take the time to go over the cast of characters that was the ’85 Royals squad.

“Royals Managers We’d Like To Forget” – Special emphasis on Buddy Bell and his innate ability to always appear like he was asleep in the dugout.

“Heartbreak and Facades” – This is a class where we’d do an in-depth study on the 2003 Royals and how they fooled us into believing they were for real.

“Ridiculous Trades” – This speaks for itself, although we’d take a few weeks just to discuss how we are to approach stupid haters who continue to talk about the returns from players like Jermaine Dye and Carlos Beltran. (If you’re still mocking us about those players then you’re not current with the way the Royals run things. The return on the Zach Greinke trade turned out a little better.)

“Awesome Royals Attire” – For the fashionable-minded ones of the group. This is literally a class where you bring all of your Royals gear, dump it in a huge pile, and talk about how cool-looking it is. This is also the class where we reveal the embarrassing shirts/jerseys we happen to own. Mine would be not one but two John Buck jerseys my dad found at garage sales. Those babies are well-worn.

I could go on and on, but sadly I won’t get to teach any of these. It probably wouldn’t take with people in my current part of the state anyways. Most of them seem to be Cardinals fans.* However, I do plan on telling my students how much of a Royals fan I am. And in all honesty, it’s probable that I’m going to somehow work Kansas City Baseball into as many lessons as I possibly can.

*Gag

Here’s to a semester of English lessons learned and hopefully some KC Royals converts.

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