Magic Words That Can Make You Disappear
Yesterday I managed to make a ridiculous post about the dangers of using humor in the classroom. I managed to leave out one of the dangers that daily annoys every teacher of middle schoolers who has ever been even remotely dedicated to the notion that you must at least try to follow the school rules if you wish to remain employed and outside of the prison system. That tiger trap is the important societal rule against certain magic words. You know the ones. Those words that, if you dare to say them out loud in the classroom as a student, make you instantly disappear… and learn hard words like the word “consequences”, and “eternal detention”, and “Would you like fries with that?” And if you are a teacher, those words lead to other hard words like “special school board meeting” and “disciplinary action”, and though they take longer to work their magic, eventually also “Would you like fries with that?”
These magic words are a serious danger and roadblock to teaching young minds because they so easily begin flowing out of young mouths. When you become a teacher infamous for using humor in the classroom, those young minds who don’t really have the big word of “inhibitions” wired into their circuitry yet will think license to laugh in the classroom is the same as license for dropping the magic F-word, or the magic S-word, or the combo-magic M-F-word. And those words invariably make somebody disappear completely… sometimes even permanently.
Being a Texas teacher, I have experience with the ridiculously harsh notion of Zero Tolerance Policies. Yes, in Texas we give the death penalty for swearing at the teacher. Well, maybe only a trip to court in front of an unfriendly judge who will levy a fifty dollar fine for the sin and then forbid the parents to pay it, making the child choose between paying it himself or spending a night in jail. So it is definitely in the students’ best interests if the teacher navigates around magic words in the laughing classroom environment.
You do this primarily through modeling. I never use even remotely offensive words in conversations with students. I sometimes even correct myself out loud for using interjections when I am mad like “Oofahdoo!” or “Fabulous French Frick-a-see-see!” because, as I point out to them, we all know what magic words they are filling in for. Context can often say for us the word we are not supposed to say. I have also been known to fake getting mad at them for saying “Criminnittly!” or “Hang-dang it!” in imitation of me because the teacher getting mad over the use of certain words is an absolute guarantee that the word will come out of the student the next time he or she needs to express inappropriate sentiment in the classroom. A teacher’s job, then, becomes the putting of lipstick on the pig. Because we are burdened with rules that absolutely prevent the use of George Carlin words in the classroom, and when the powers that be see the lipstick on the pig, they will think “Marilyn Monroe”, and their absolutes will be satisfied. Of course, I am begging you… please don’t tell them that it is really still a pig.
Catch a Falling Star 
Reading Other Writers
Nobody who wants to be a writer gets by with just writing and never reading anything by anybody else. It is too easy to devolve into some kind of human mushroom that way, thinking only thoughts a mushroom could think, all fungus-like and having no chlorophyll of their own. You never learn to decode other people and other people’s thinking if you don’t read other people’s thoughts crystallized in writing.
And not every other writer is Robert Frost. Or even Jack Frost who thinks he’s Gene Kelly. There has to be some interpretation, some digging for understanding. What did that writer mean when she said political correctness was like a tongue disease? And what does it mean when a commenting troll calls me a nekkid poofter? Is that how he spells “exceptional genius”? I think it is. Trolls are not smart.
I know people have to make an effort to understand me. When I write, I am writing under the delusion that I can produce literary quality off the top of my head. In fact, I can barely produce hair off the top of my head, and it is gray when I do it. See what I did there? It is the kind of joke a surrealist makes, pretending the idiomatic expression you use is to be taken literally when it doesn’t literally make sense. That kind of nonsense is what my readers have to put up with, and probably also the reason why most of them just look at the pictures. If you have to think too hard when you read, your brain could over-heat and your hair could catch fire. I like that kind of purple paisley prose that folds back in on itself and makes you think in curlicues. But most people don’t. Most people don’t have fire-proof hair like I do.
Sometimes, it doesn’t even take a word to make the point. For instance, why, in the picture, is Fluttershy trying to drink out of the toilet in the dollhouse bathroom? For that matter, why does a doll house even need a bathroom? Applejack doesn’t even fit in that yellow bathtub. I know. I tried to stuff her in there for this picture. And, as you read this, doesn’t this paragraph tell you a lot about me that you probably didn’t even want to know?
When I am reading the writing of others, I am looking for a cornucopia of things. I want to not only understand their ideas, I want to detect the limping footprints across the murder scene of their paragraphs and come to know the deeper things about them as well. I spent years decoding and trying to understand the writing of preliterate kids in my middle school English classes in order to be able to teach them to write better. And I learned that no writer is a bad writer as long as they are using readable words. I also learned that very few writers are James Joyce or Marcel Proust. Thank God for that! And given enough time I can read anything by anybody and learn something from it. I read a lot. And it may not always make me a better writer to read it, but it always has value. It is always worth doing.
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