So, does this title have more than one meaning? Of course it does. This post is about being a teacher and having wisdom. And I know you will immediately think, “You dumb guy! I know teachers who aren’t wise at all! Some teachers are stupid!”
You are especially saying that if you are a student.
You are not wrong, either. Some teachers have no business being teachers. It is especially difficult to find good science and math teachers. After all, those who are good at math and science can make so much more money in the private sector, that they would have to be born to be a teacher… and realize it, to go into teaching. There are very good science and math teachers out there, but many of them are wilting under the weight of a difficult job being made constantly harder by social pressures like truly dumb people who say things like, “You can’t solve our education problem by throwing money at it!” I guarantee no one has ever thrown money at the problem. If teachers were paid what they were worth so that we could retain good, competent teachers, you would see education make an amazing amount of progress in a very short time. What Wall Street firm fails to pay their star players what they are worth? Do bankers and lawyers get punished for doing a good job by asking them to produce more with fewer resources for less pay? Those folks in finance and law always pay the price for the best because that always produces the best result. If you want schools to routinely produce critical thinkers and problem-solvers, why would you complain that we are spending too much money per kid? Of course, there are those with the money and the power (especially in Texas) who really don’t want more students coming out of schools with the ability to think and decide for themselves. Smart people are harder to control and make a profit from. (Out of Control is a book they don’t want you to read.)
So now I have totally proved the point that smart people who are looking out for their own interests should never go into teaching. Still, among the unwashed, unloved, and incompetent that do make the mistake of going into teaching, there is still a great deal of learning and gaining of wisdom going on. After all, if a fool like me can become a good teacher, anybody can do it. You just have to learn a few bits of wisdom the hard way that have very little to do with what we call “common sense”.
As Dr. Tsabary points out in the book I plastered on the front of this post, discipline is not what you think. We all remember that teacher we had that nobody listened to. She was always yelling at us. She made threats. She punished us. And even the good kids in class would shoot spitwads at the back of her head. Why did we not respect and learn from this teacher? Because she never learned these profound truths.
1. Kids are people. They want to be treated with respect and even love. Their ideas matter as much, if not more than the teacher’s ideas. Good teachers will;
a. Get to know every kid in their class as a human being, knowing what they believe in, what they care about, where they come from, and who they think they are.
b. Ask them questions. They will never have an original idea if you do not make them think. They have insights and creativity and strengths as well as weaknesses, bad behavior, and wrong ideas. You have to emphasize the former and minimize the latter.
c. Laughing and talking in the classroom is evidence of learning. Quietly filling out worksheets is evidence of ignorance, and most likely the ignorance of the teacher.
2. Tests don’t matter. This is always true for these reasons;
a. Tests are a comparison, and nothing is gained by comparing kids. Comparing the scores of my bilingual kids in South Texas with upper class rich kids in Chicago and college-bound kids in Tokyo has no value. Their lives are completely different and so are their needs. If we don’t score as well on the tests as the kids in Tokyo, what difference will that make to what time the train arrives in the station in Paris? (Especially if Pierre has chosen the bullet train that goes south at a rate of 200 miles per hour. No trains in Texas go that fast without crashing and blowing up.)
b. If I spend time in class teaching students how to read and making them practice reading critically, they will do just as well as the kids who drilled extensively from specially made State materials preparing for the test on the reading and vocabulary portions. The only way that outcome changes is by cheating and giving them the actual test questions before the test. (I should point out that teachers caught doing this last thing are shot in Texas and buried in a box full of rattlesnakes. Dang old teachers, anyhow!)
I know I started this little post by convincing you that I am not wise, and very probably mentally unbalanced. And now that I have made my arguments, you know for sure. But over time, there is wisdom to be learned from being a teacher. You don’t have to believe me, but it’s true. (I don’t know how many times I used that phrase out loud in a classroom over 31 years, but I am guessing you couldn’t count them on fingers even if you used the hands of every kid I ever had as a student.)
Catch a Falling Star 
The Way Mickey’s Mind Works
If you’ve read any of the crap that Mickey wrote about before in this goofy blog, you probably already suspect that Mickey’s mind does not work like a normal mind. The road map above is just one indicator of the weirdness of the wiring that propels Mickey on the yellow brick road to Oz and back. He just isn’t a normal thinker.
But having a few bats in the old belfry doesn’t prevent the man from having a plan. If you read all of Mickey’s hometown novels, you will discover he hasn’t written them in time order. Main characters in my 2016 novel weren’t even born yet in my 2017 books. If you look at them in chronological order rather than the order written, you will see characters growing and changing over time. A shy kid in one novel grows into a werewolf hunter in the next. A girl who loses her father to suicide in a novel not yet completed, learns how to love again in another novel.
Multiple Mickian stories are totally infected with fairies. The magic little buggers are harder to get rid of than mosquitoes and are far and away more dangerous. And there are disturbing levels of science-fiction-ness radiating through all of the stories. How dare he think like that? In undulating spirals instead of straight lines! He doesn’t even use complete sentences all the time. And they used to let that odd bird teach English to middle school kids.
But there is a method to his utter madness. He started with the simpler stories of growing up and learning about the terrors of kissing girls when you are only twelve. And then he moved on into the darker realms of dealing with death and loss of love, the tragedy of finding true love and losing it again almost as soon as you recognize its reality. Simple moves on to complex. Order is restored with imagination, only to be broken down again and then restored yet again,.
And, of course, we always listen to Mr. Gaiman. He is a powerful wizard after all. The Sandman and creator of good dreams. So Mickey will completely ignore the fact that nobody reads his books no matter what he does or says. And he will write another story.
It is called Sing Sad Songs, and it is the most complex and difficult story that Mickey has ever written. And it will be glorious. It also rips Mickey’s heart out. And I will put that ripped-out heart back in place and make Mickey keep writing it, no matter how many times I have to wash, rinse, and repeat. The continued work is called Fools and Their Toys. It solves the murder mystery begun in Sing Sad Songs. This re-post of an updated statement of goals is the very spell that will make that magic happen. So, weird little head-map in hand, here we go on the writer’s journey once again and further along the trail.
Here’s the link to the finished book.
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