Tag Archives: teachers

June 16, 2024 · 12:06 am

School’s Out…

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“School’s out for summer
School’s out forever
School’s been blown to pieces

No more pencils
No more books
No more teacher’s dirty looks

Well we got no class
And we got no principles
And we got no innocence
We can’t even think of a word that rhymes”

-Alice Cooper

Once again it is that day that every kid prays for… The last day of school.

My daughter doesn’t really get it, though.  She doesn’t really understand the sentiment of the poor misguided school girl named Alice Cooper.  Kids are supposed to hate school.  Their teachers are supposed to be witches and warlocks who live for creating misery in the lives of their students.  My daughter should know that already, since her mother and I are both teachers.  (I am retired now, actually… and I do miss making kids’ lives total misery.)  She is actually going to miss her middle school and all her middle school teachers.

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She was up late last night using air-dried clay to make dragon sculptures to give to each of her teachers.  Her art teacher was recently telling me about how wonderful she is at art and how wonderful she is as a student during a recent scholastic awards dinner.  In fact, most of her teachers only have good things to say about her work in middle school.  And teachers are supposed to hate kids and hate teaching, right?  They are supposed to only be in teaching for the paycheck, marking time until they retire, living lives full of bitterness and revengeful interactions with children.

O, I am guessing that I am actually the problem here.   I never felt the way teachers are supposed to feel about kids.  In fact, I… like kids.  Oh, no!  The secret is out.  I miss being a teacher.  I miss the kind of devotion you get from the kind of students who stay up late making clay dragons for you as a goodbye gift.

While I was a teacher, we were not allowed to be Facebook friends with students.  Society frowns on teachers getting too close to students.  But now that I will never teach again, or be in the same room with any of them again, I have been saying yes to students’ friend requests.  So, I am now going to share with you pictures of former students that they have shared with me.  Of course, I won’t tell you their names.  I don’t want to embarrass them by revealing that they don’t hate all of their teachers the way they should.

So, there’s photographic proof that once I actually was a teacher.  And I know that it probably also proves I didn’t do a very good job of making their lives miserable and making them hate me the way I should have done.  But I miss it terribly.  And I would work harder at being bitter and crabby if only I could go back and do it some more.

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June 8, 2024 · 12:34 am

Tiger Traps of Humor, Part 2

Skoolgurlz

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?”

Cool School Blue

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.

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June 8, 2024 · 12:31 am

Avoiding the Tiger Traps of a Humorous Life

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In point of fact, using humor in the classroom is one of the easiest ways I know to become a beloved and effective teacher.  But it requires skill.  It is like dancing barefoot in a mine field that is littered with pit traps for trapping tigers.  See how I linked the title to my opening paragraph there?  Kids in the classroom don’t… unless you make it funny.  Sometimes they want you to fall in the tiger trap on purpose even though there are punji sticks at the bottom.  They want to see what the consequences of the mistake really are so they are not surprised when they immediately make that same mistake.

So, let me tell you about a few of those tiger traps and how to navigate through them.

Poo-Poo Jokes

Yes, one of the unfortunate truths about humor in the classroom is that nothing is funnier to middle school and high school kids than references to sticky brown stuff.  (If that last statement made you snicker, then you know that it even goes beyond school.)   And it can be a devastating thing on fragile, fledgling egos in a school environment where boys will invariably stick a half-eaten chocolate bar in a back pocket on a hot day even though they are wearing khaki-colored jeans.  Over-reacting to a sudden fragrance from one of a number of volatile digestive systems packed into the same small classroom can completely empty the room and imperil the teacher’s job.  (Principals don’t appreciate unauthorized leaving of the classroom… so teachers need to quickly learn how to calm-and-continue in an unusually gassy environment.)  Of course, the girl leading the lemming rush out of the classroom under gas attack is usually the one who dealt it.  But you can’t point that out without crushing some young flower’s petals of self-image.  It is necessary to lay down fences of regulation at the beginning of the school year to regulate exactly how brown and sticky a bathroom joke can actually be before it traps you in eternal detention.

Hurt-y Humor

There is the kind of humor that numerous comedians use as their fall-back style, that Don Rickles-esque “Your mama’s so fat that satellites can see her from space”sort of humor.  It is also a highly tiger-trappy sort of humor to use in the classroom.  Students don’t perform well after being the butt of slappy-face-style put-downs.  You don’t want to remind the kid in the back row of how he mixed up the words “pied” and “peed” in last week’s read-aloud right before taking the State science test that will determine his educational future and your next evaluation.  So how do you resist the urge to tell the snooty little cheerleader that just told you her mom is going to get you fired that she’s got a tail of toilet paper hanging down from the back of her skirt… when she actually does… and the football player she most idolizes is watching every move she makes with that big, tart and trippy tongue of hers?  You take pity on them, and remember that if you break them down into tears in front of their peers you are doing the same thing to them that Bully Bob Beegshout did to you back in high school.  Self-deprecating humor is far more effective at defusing a confrontation.  You get them to laugh at themselves by making them see themselves in the story you just told on yourself.  You can often make them laugh themselves right out of the bad behavior that way.  (Oh, and I didn’t point out the toilet paper, but you can wait until someone else inevitably does and karma can balance the universe in that way.)

So, now that I have rolled well past the 500-word goal and still haven’t used up the whole list of tiger traps, I suppose it is time to reveal there will be a follow-up to this post.

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May 9, 2024 · 12:59 am

Teacher-Wise

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!”

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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.)

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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.)

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April 20, 2024 · 1:02 am

Nerd Class

Skoolgurlz

Back in the 1980’s I was given the gift of teaching the Chapter I program students in English.  This was done because Mrs. Soulwhipple was not only a veteran English teacher, but also the superintendent’s wife.  She was the one gifted with all the star kids, the A & B students, the ones that would be identified as the proper kids to put into our nascent Gifted and Talented Program.  That meant that I would get all the kids that were C, D, & F in most of their classes, the losers, the Special Edwards, the learning disabled, the hyper rocketeers of classroom comedy, and the trouble makers.  And I was given this gift because, not only was I not a principal’s or superintendent’s wife, but I actually learned how to do it and became good at it.  How did I do that, you might ask?  I cheated.  I snooped into the Gifted and Talented teacher training, learned how to differentiate instruction for the super-nerd brain, and then used the stolen information to write curriculum and design activities for all my little deadheads (and they didn’t even know who the Grateful Dead were, so that’s obviously not what I meant).    I treated the little buggers like they were all GT students.  Voila!  If you tell a kid they are talented, smart, and worthy of accelerated instruction… the little fools believe it, and that is what they become.Aeroquest ninjas

Even the goofy teacher is capable of believing the opposite of what is obvious and starts treating them like super-nerds because he actually believes it.  I soon had kids that couldn’t read, but were proud of their abstract problem-solving skills.  I had kids that could enhance the learning of others with their drawing skills, their singing ability, and their sense of what is right and what is wrong.  I had them doing things that made them not only better students for me, but in all their classes.  And I did not keep the methods to my madness a secret, either.  I got so good at coercing other teachers to try new ideas and methods that I got roped into presenting some of the in-service training that all Texas teachers are required by law to do.  And unlike so many other boring sessions we all sat through, I presented things I was doing in the actual classroom that other teachers could also use with success.  The other teachers tried my activities and sometimes made them work better than I did.

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Yes, I know this all sounds like bragging.  And I guess it probably is.  But it worked.  My kids kept getting better on the standardized tests and the State tests that Texas education loves so much.  And Mrs. Soulwhipple was still the superintendent’s wife, but she did not stay a teacher forever.  She eventually went to a new school district with her husband.  And guess who they started thinking of when the question of who would be the next teacher for the nerd classes was considered.  That’s right, little ol’ Reluctant Rabbit… that goofy man who drew pictures on the board and made kids read like a reading-fiend… me.

So, a new era began in Cotulla.  In addition to still getting to teach all the deadheads (because they weren’t going to trust those precious children to anyone else, naturally), I began teaching at least one edition of Mr. B’s famous Nerd Class every school year.  We actually assigned long novels and great pieces of literature for the kids to read and discuss and study in depth.  Novels like To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt were read.  We began talking about “big ideas”, “connections to the wider world”, and how “things always change”.  We began taking on ideas like making our world better and how to help our community.  Kids began to think they were learning things that were important.  We did special units on Exploring Our Solar System, The World of Mark Twain, Finding the Titanic, and The Tragedy of Native American History.  And we spent as much as a third of the year on each.  I am myself cursed with a high IQ and a very disturbing amount of intelligence.  I am the deepest living stockpile of useless facts and trivia that most of my students would ever meet in their lifetimes.  And even I was challenged by some of the learning we took on.  That’s the kind of thing that makes a teaching career fun.  It kept me teaching and meeting new students and new challenges long after my health issues made it a little less than sensible to keep going.  And if I manage to tell you a few Nerd Class stories in the near future, then at least you stand a chance of knowing a little bit about what-the-heck I am talking about.  So be prepared for the worst.  I am retired now, and have plenty of time for long-winded stories about being a teacher.

 

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January 26, 2024 · 3:07 am

Teachers Are Talking

Mr. McFlaggen, the History teacher and basketball coach, was talking to Mr. Malkin, the Art teacher, in the cafeteria while they watched over the seventh-grade monkeys as they wolfed down their nearly inedible pizza slices.

McFlaggen; What do you know about that girl Cindy Hootch? The kinda ugly one that is so quiet and never sits with anybody else at lunch?

Malkin; It doesn’t help to think of her as ugly, Flag. You should see her watercolors on newsprint. She has a beautiful soul. She’s very smart. And she won’t talk to you in front of the class, but one-on-one, she’s got a real way with words.

McFlaggen; The important thing is how smart is she? Can she tutor Math? Could she help my star point guard get at least a C in old Krautmeyer’s Math class?

Malkin; How do you see Claussen’s intelligence? Is your point guard capable of understanding her if she tried to teach him how to multiply fractions?

McFlaggen; Frankie is dumb as a rock. He really needs a way to cheat on tests so that he can stay eligible to play all basketball season.

Malkin: Stephanie won’t cheat. She’s smart and gets good grades. But she has had a good moral upbringing. Have you met her parents? They are church people, and good parents to their five kids as far as I can see. If you ask her, she will probably tutor him willingly. But success is not only up to her. Your basketball player will have to put in the work.

McFlaggen; Well, the problem is, there are really only two kinds of kids. There are the dumb lumps like Frankie that no matter what you do, you cannot get those kids to do anything to help themselves, even in matters of life or death. And then there are some kids you can force to accomplish anything if you just push them hard enough in the right direction. Kids like your little painter, Miss Hootch.

Malkin; I think you will find, coach, that there are definitely two kinds of teachers too. You have the kind who are convinced that all kids are basically bad and need to be shaped like a stone-cutter would, grinding away the parts that make them bad, and if the process fails, you throw the unfortunate kid on the worthless pile and leave them to their fates.

McFlaggen; Do you mean, Gray, that there is another kind of teacher? Aren’t we all like that?

Malkin: Ah, Don, there is another kind. Some teachers, rare I grant you, see all kids as good, the seeds of what they are destined to become. We only need to plant them in fertile surroundings, give them the attention they need, and allow them to bloom in the way nature intended. That’s what makes Stephanie Hootch such a beautiful blossom.

McFlaggen; You are such an Art teacher, Gray. A real romantic filled entirely with dog poop.

Malkin; Maybe so. But in the long run you will see who’s right about kids.

McFlaggen; So, where’s this Hootch girl now? I need to push her into tutoring my player.

Malkin: She’s there, blooming next to Vice Principal Wiggan.

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January 7, 2024 · 1:34 am

My School-Teacher Soapbox

It has been more than a semester now that I have not been a teacher.  I am missing it mightily.  I even miss the yelling and screaming, the name-calling and the crazy-eyed threats against life and limb.  And that’s just me.  I miss what the kids always did too.  This was driven home to me as I tried to move my middle child from one school to another.  We were hoping to get a bit of a break on his placement.  He is a gifted child with a penchant for bizarre and long-lasting obsessions.  He has a talent for building huge, monumental structures in Minecraft.  He is very computer-nerd and history-wonk.  (Yes, I know those are not pure predicate adjectives, but I am a retired English teacher and just don’t care any more.)  I was hoping they could overlook his burnout/blowout eighth-grade brain meltdown from the previous year and give him the chance to be a ninth grader for at least half a year.  No.  Arbitrary rules must be obeyed.  (That isn’t even how she said it.  More like, arbitrary rules MUST be obeyed).  That meant of course that he has to continue to repeat the mindless indoctrination of year number 9, (eight numbered grades plus K), (And Pre-K, come to think of it.)  Make that year number 10.  No high school yet, though he is more than mature enough, intelligent enough, motivated enough, and sweet-natured enough.  We are not loving and forgiving people.  We are strict and by-the-book people!  Forgive me, Lord.  I am writing my own book.  (In more ways than one.)

This is what we are doing wrong in Education;

1.   We are putting people in boxes.  (Little people.  Kids mostly.  We are calling those boxes things like ADHD, Special Education, trouble-maker, learning disabled, emotionally disturbed, disobedient, truant, and “in need of alternative education”… here meaning kid-prison.)

2.  We are sealing those boxes with heavy-duty red tape.  (Read special or remedial classes as waste-baskets for keeping the rabble and the riff-raff out of the good teachers’ hair.)

3.  We are routinely handing those boxes to the box-bangers and package manglers.  (The semi-incompetent teachers who have discipline problems because in teacher college nobody tells you what to do with the kid who sits in the corner and sings to himself instead of paying attention, or the girl who gets out of her seat every time the teacher turns his back to go flitting around the room like a bumble bee going flower to flower (except that it is a more hormonal attraction and goes boy to boy); or the competent teacher like me who incurs the principal’s disfavor for having classes that always make noise and are given such classes in boxes as a punishment because that kind of principal is too limited in intelligence to understand that those kinds of boxes are not really a punishment if you merely take a moment to examine the treasures they contain.)

4.  We keep the boxes air-tight so that no oxygen or light gets in.  (To suffocate learners under piles of worksheets and endless drill and practice is murder.  We are killing the precious learners with boring stuff and teaching them to be zombies who all act alike and hate learning because their brains are rotted masses of goo.)

This is what we must do instead;

1.  Open the boxes up again and thoroughly mix the contents.  (The rich suburban parents will resent the heck out of having their precious honors student sitting in class next to the poor black kid from the projects, but studies show that both kinds of learners do better when they are mixed together.)

2.  Notice, we don’t need two any more, because learners are already distributed to different and diverse boxes based on what they individually need and want to learn about and have talent for.  Groups should be more like the Shakespeare-loving group or the talkative-socializing group or the Tinker-toy builders group or the vampire-literature-writing group and less like groups of kids all the same color or all the same culture or all the same age.

3.  All the teachers need to be trained to handle all the possible… no, make that probable problems that may come up in the classroom.  Every classroom needs a proven veteran teacher and an enthusiastic young apprentice teacher.  Neither one should have to face the evil hordes alone.  And most important of all, any teacher who doesn’t love working with kids (and doesn’t love the kids in a way that will not lead to a prison term) needs be utilized in some way other than as a classroom teacher.

4.  Every classroom is a laboratory and every teacher is a creative and daring mad-scientist-type intent on trying new things and only re-doing things that really work well.  Forget this nonsense about standard curriculum goals and common core curriculum.  Those are only buzz words for suffocating learners and being too lazy to think on your feet in the middle of the every-day classroom battle in the on-going War on Ignorance.

Now you see… I have all the answers and I know everything.  The only mystery is… why don’t more people listen to me?

Tabron

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December 30, 2023 · 3:19 am

A Mr. Holland Moment

Life is making music.  We hum, we sing to ourselves, movie music plays in our head as the soundtrack to our daily life. At least, it does if we stop for a moment and dare to listen.   We make music in many different ways.  Some play guitar.  Some are piano players.  And some of us are only player pianos.  Some of us make music by writing a themed paragraph like this one.  Others make an engine sing in the automotive shop.  Still others plant gardens and make flowers or tomatoes grow.  I chose teaching kids to read and write.  The music still swells in my ears four years after retiring.

The 1995 movie, Mr. Holland’s Opus, is about a musician who thinks he is going to write a magnificent classical orchestra opus while teaching music at a public high school to bring in money and allow him time to compose and be with his young wife as they start a new family.

But teaching is not, of course, what he thought it was.  He has to learn the hard way that it is not an easy thing to open up the closed little clam shells that are the minds of students and put music in.  You have to learn who they are as people first.  You have to learn to care about what goes on in their lives, and how the world around them makes them feel… and react to what you have to teach.  Mr. Holland has to learn to pull them into music appreciation using rock and roll and music they like to listen to, teaching them to understand the sparkles and beats and elements that make it up and can be found in all music throughout their lives.  They can even begin to find those things in classical music, and appreciate why it has taken hold of our attention for centuries.

And teaching is not easy.  You have to make sacrifices.  Big dreams, such as a magnum opus called “An American Symphony”, have to be put on the shelf until later.  You have children, and you find that parenting isn’t easy either.  Mr. Holland’s son is deaf and can never actually hear the music that his father writes from the center of his soul.  And the issue of the importance of what you have to teach becomes something you have to fight for.  Budget cuts and lack of funding cripples teachers in every field, especially if you teach the arts.  Principals don’t often appreciate the value of the life lessons you have to give.  Being in high school band doesn’t get you a high paying job later.

But in the end, at the climax of the movie, the students all come back to honor Mr. Holland.  They provide a public performance of his magnum opus, his life’s work.  And the movie ends with a feeling that it was all worth it, because what he built was eternal, and will be there long after the last note of his music is completely forgotten.  It is in the lives and loves and memories of his students, and they will pass it on.

But this post isn’t a movie review.  This post is about my movie, my music.  I was a teacher in the same way Mr. Holland was.  I learned the same lessons about being a teacher as he did.  I had the same struggles to learn to reach kids.  And my Mr. Holland moment wasn’t anywhere near as big and as loud as Mr. Holland’s.  His was performed on a stage in front of the whole school and alumni.  His won Richard Dreyfus an Academy Award for Best Actor.  But his was only fictional.

Mine was real.  It happened in a portable building on the Naaman Forest High School campus.  The students and the teacher in the classroom next door threw a surprise party for me.  They made a lot of food to share, almost all of which I couldn’t eat because of diabetes.  And they told me how much they would miss me, and that they would never forget me.  And I had promised myself I would never cry about having to retire.  But I broke my promise.  In fact, I am crying now ten years later.  But they are not tears of sadness.  My masterwork has now reached its last, bitter-sweet notes.  The crescendos have all faded.  But the music of our lives will still keep playing.  And not even death can silence it completely.

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October 27, 2013 · 9:06 pm

Teacher! Ooh-Ooh! Teacher!

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I have the privilege of being a public school teacher.  Or maybe I should use the word “cursed”.   It is no easy thing to be a teacher in the modern world.  Regressive State governments like Texas mandate that teachers do more with less.  We have to have bigger classes.  We have to show higher gains on State tests.  We have to do more for special populations based on race, disability, language-learner status, and socio-economic status.  Of course, we give money to private schools to be “fair” to all, so a majority of the well-funded and advantaged students are removed from the public school system, even though studies show that their presence in classes benefits everyone.  When the majority of students are low-income in a single classroom, even the gifted minority perform less well.  When higher-income students are at least fifty per-cent of the class, then even the low-income and learning disabled make higher gains than the minority gifted in the first example class.  So, there’s my triple-downer bummer for this post.  You might think that I would agree with Republicans in this State that the lower classes are not worth investing in.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

The fact is, my fondest memories from thirty-one years as a public school teacher come from the downtrodden masses, the poor, the oddballs, the disadvantaged, and even the truly weird.

Okay, so here’s the funny and heart-warming part.  I have a Hispanic English Language Learner right now who looks at the beard I have grown and calls me, “my friend Jesus”.  I have to constantly remind him that, “If I were the son of God, my son, then I would be using lightning bolts for discipline a little more often.”  He grins at me and answers, “Yes, my Jesus.”  He’s a sneaky sort, more dedicated to games and messages on his i-phone than learning.  He is more into working with the girls in small groups so that he can come out appearing much smarter without putting out very much actual work.

I remember one particularly challenged boy who didn’t talk in class at all.  He could make sounds, however.  Constantly during classes with this student in them, there would be numerous “meows” and birdcalls.  Grunts and groans and whistles would fill the air.  Most of the noises came from him.  The ones that didn’t, came from those who imitated him.  It reached a point that I was having to teach a classroom full of Harpo Marxes .  When asked about it, he claimed he had a sore throat all the time and just couldn’t talk.  Many of his teachers thought he was merely sabotaging class so he wouldn’t have to do any work.  But just like when you put a harp in front of Harpo, this boy had hidden talents, and just was not being engaged on his own level.  He was really quite bright if you could learn to communicate with him in Harpo Marxian.

I had another student who read all the existing Harry Potter books forward and backwards, and inside out.  He even looked like the actor who played Harry in the movies, glasses and all.  He was treated like a radioactive being by his classmates, and although he was charming and funny and had a natural talent for manga-style drawings of people, nobody seemed to treat him like a friend. (The paffooney picture I drew for this post was inspired by him.)    He was a jovial loner.  I was able to tap into his natural abilities for the Odyssey of the Mind creativity contests we participated in during the early 2000’s.  I helped him find nerd friends who also knew all the words to the Spongebob Squarepants theme. 

I have a Chinese girl in class who shared the Spongebob boy’s fascination with manga-style art.  She’s a different bird all together.  She gets my jokes and thinks I am funny.  But she never laughs.  She never even cracks a smile.  She is so careful and complete in every assignment that it is very nearly painful to watch.  Grades are serious matters to her.  If her grade drops from 100 to 98, she wants to audit the teacher’s grade book to find out why.  She does everything in class in beautifully crafted Chinese writing, and then translates it all word-for-word into English.

I owe my teaching career to kids like these.  When I started my career in 1981 for $11,000 per year, I was employed by a school that had total disciplinary meltdown the year before.  I had to deal with hostility, impossible behavior-modification tasks, fire crackers in the classroom, student fights, bullying, and a language/cultural gap wider than the Grand Canyon.  That first year, I was planning to resign at the end of the year and try to figure out what else I could do with my life when a small Hispanic boy with a Scottish family name came up beside me on the playground one March day and said, “Mr. Beyer, I hope you know you are my favorite teacher.  You are the reason I liked school this year.”

I didn’t let him see that there were tears in my eyes.  I told him something about him being my favorite student.  And I gave up thoughts about giving up.  I lived the next thirty years of my career for him.

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June 17, 2013 · 9:41 pm

Welcome to the Monkey House (Unfortunately, not by Kurt Vonnegut)

In my effort to create a proper field guide to all the critters and flitters and animals you find in the modern schoolroom, I can’t neglect to talk about the Monkey House.  I was, after all, a middle school teacher for 24 of my 30 years in teaching.  One simply cannot take that many blows to the back of the head from spit-wads and other assorted classroom projectiles without going a little bit ape-happy.  (I once knew an eighth grade science teacher who liked to use the ape-happy expression to describe student behavior.  But he didn’t actually say “happy”.  He substituted the magic s-word.  It is magic because no matter how many times the teacher hears, or over-hears, or gets assaulted by that word in the classroom, the teacher can never say it himself… It will make him disappear… permanently.  I know it’s true.  It happened to my friend the science teacher.)  Sorry, I digress sometimes.  Too many spit-wads to the back of the head.

In the Monkey House, especially the seventh grade version of it, there are certain essential behavioral characteristics that you have to be aware of.  First of all, and with malice aforethought, the monkeys like to throw poop.  Now, I don’t mean that literally… (Although in one case I remember about fourteen years ago…  No, wait, I don’t really want to go back there again.)  It is only in the figurative sense.  The monkeys have big monkey eyes.  They see everything.  And what they see, they will TELL you about… in all capital letters.  If your fly is open, especially if you’re the teacher, they will tell you about it, loudly, “YOUR FLY IS OPEN!” at precisely the same moment that the gung-ho lady principal and the curriculum director with the scary glare walk in together to view this innovative teaching style they’ve heard so much about in faculty lounge.  In a Texas Monkey House like the ones I’ve taught in, kids will tell each other to be quiet in the rudest possible way in the loudest possible voice.  They say it Spanish, which of course, both the principal and the curriculum director spoke as their first language.  They say it in words that literally mean “shut your dog-mouth”.  And they add the magic p-word in Spanish for good measure.  (The students will all tell you that the magic p-word really just means “stupid person”, but to translate it more accurately, it means “one who routinely thinks only with that body part that only boys have access to”, or possibly, “your brains are full of poop!”)  And they don’t only throw their poop out of their mouths.  They can also fling it with fingers, especially that one magic finger, but also in rude gestures, using both hands, the elbow, and even throwing around gang signs that can get you killed in the wrong parts of San Antonio or Dallas.

The second behavioral characteristic in the Monkey House is the ability to be the dumbest dumb monkey in the classroom.  Nobody wants to be smart.  That is the kiss of death.  Bullies beat you relentlessly throughout the school day and for the rest of your natural life (as short as that will probably be) if they learn that you are a smart monkey.  Even the girl monkeys adhere to this rule.  To be smart makes you a “teacher’s pet” and a potential stool pigeon.  To be smart makes you radioactive, and likely to get anyone around you killed as well.  A smart girl will never have the necessary boy friend because what boy wants to hang around with a girl that knows too much and can probably out-think him?    A smart boy had better keep his head down, and in the classroom, his hand down.  The universal truth is this… the big monkeys EAT the smart monkeys.

The third, but most important characteristic in the Monkey House is that somebody has to love the monkeys.  Monkeys don’t thrive in a pack, or left to their own devices.  They don’t just live in the Monkey House at school.  Their home life is just as crazy.  The monkeys at home throw just as much poop, and they also EAT the smart monkeys (all in capital letters… truly).  Somebody has to be willing to talk to the monkeys, to learn their language… to deal with them one on one.  They need somebody to understand them and sympathize with their horrible monkey lives.  Somebody has to show them how not to be a monkey… even if they’re one of the big ones who eat other monkeys.  Monkeys have value.  They make you laugh and they make you cry.  (Sorry.  I didn’t mean to make you cry too.  You weren’t ever a monkey, were you?)  So you teach in the Monkey House and the principal doesn’t fire you for having no proper classroom discipline and for having monkeys who misbehave, because if the principal is any good at her job, she realizes that you are the kind of teacher who loves the monkeys and the monkeys need you.

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