Tag Archives: teaching

November 27, 2025 · 1:31 am

Islands of Identity

Island Girl2z

Who am I?

Why do I do the things that I do?

No man is an island.  John Donne the English poet stated that.  And Ernest Hemingway quoted it… and wove it into his stories as a major theme… and proceeded to try to disprove it.  We need other people.  I married an island girl from the island of Luzon in the Philippines.  She may have actually needed me too, though she will never admit it.

Gilligans Island

When I was a young junior high school teacher in the early eighties, they called me Mr. Gilligan.  My classroom was known as Gilligan’s Island.  This came about because a goofball student in the very first class on the very first day said, “You look like Gilligan’s Island!”  By which he meant I reminded him of Bob Denver, the actor that played Gilligan.  But as he said it, he was actually accusing me of being an island.  And no man is an island.  Thank you, Fabian, you were sorta dumb, but I loved you for it.

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You see, being Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island was not a bad thing to be.  It was who I was as a teacher.  Nerdy, awkward, telling stories about when I was young, and my doofy friends like Skinny Mulligan.  Being a teacher gave me an identity.  And Gilligan was stranded on the Island with two beautiful single women, Mary Ann and Ginger.  Not a bad thing to be.  And I loved teaching and telling stories to kids who would later be the doofy students in new stories.

But we go through life searching for who we are and why we are here.  Now that I am retired, and no longer a teacher… who am I now?  We never really find the answer.  Answers change over time.  And so do I.

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November 5, 2025 · 1:11 am

Writing Every Day

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These are volumes 3 & 4 of my daily journal that I have kept since the 1980s.

Writing every single day is something I have been doing since 1975, my senior year in high school.  It is why I claim to be a writer, even though I have never made enough money at it to even begin to think of myself as a professional writer.  I kept a journal/diary/series of notebooks that I filled with junk I wrote and doodles in the margins up until the mid-90s when I began to put all my noodling into computer files instead of notebooks.  I have millions of words piled in piles of notebooks and filling my hard drive to the point of “insufficient memory” errors on my laptop.  I am now 69 years old and have been writing every day for 51  years.

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There are days in the past where I only wrote a word, or a sentence or two.  But there were a lot of words besides the words in my journal.  I started my first novel in college.  I completed it the summer before my first teaching job in 1981.  I put it the closet, never to be thought of again, except when I needed a good cringe and cry at how terrible a writer I once was.  I have been starting, stopping, percolating, piecing together, and eventually completing novel projects ever since… each one goofier and more wit-wacky than the last.  So I have a closet full of those too.

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It would be wrong of me to suggest that my journals are only for words.  As a cartoon-boy-wannabee I doodle everywhere in margins and corners and parts of pages.  Sometimes the doodle is an afterthought.  Sometimes it precedes the paragraph.  Sometimes it is directly connected to the words and their meaning.

Sometimes the work of art is the main thing itself.

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But always, the habit of writing down words and ideas every single day takes precedence over every other part of my day.  That’s the main reason I am stupid enough to think of myself as a writer even though I don’t make a living by writing.

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But I did put my words into my profession too.  As a teacher of writing, I wrote with and to my students.  I did that for 31 years as a classroom teacher, and two years as a substitute.  I required them each to keep a daily journal (though they only got graded for the ones they wrote in class, and then only for reaching the amount of words assigned).  We shared the writing aloud in class, making only positive comments.  I wrote every assignment I gave them, including the journal entries.  They got to see and hear what I could write, and it often inspired them or gave them a structure to hang their own ideas upon.  And often they liked what I wrote and were surprised by it almost as much as I liked and was surprised by theirs.   Being a writer was never a total waste of time and effort.

So am I telling you that if you want to be writer you have to write every day too?  If I have to tell you that… you have totally missed the point.

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October 11, 2025 · 1:46 am

Wielding the Big Pencil

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The guy holding the big pencil used to be me.   I know you are thinking, “But, Mickey, you are not a rabbit!”  Well, that’s true, but it is also true that the whole thing is a metaphor, and metaphorically I was always Reluctant Rabbit, pedagogue… teacher… the holder of the big pencil.  It is a writing teacher thing.  The best way to teach kids to write is to have them write.  And the best way to show them what you mean when you tell them to write is to write yourself.  You learn to read better by reading a lot.  You learn to write better by writing a lot, reading what you wrote, and reading what other people wrote, especially if those other people were holding the big pencil in front of the class.

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I was recently reminded by people who know me that once I held the big pencil in front of the class.  They both asked me, “Really?  You were a teacher?”

I suppose it is hard to believe when once you’ve gotten to know me, at least a little bit.  I don’t strike people as the sour-faced, anal-retentive English-teacher type.  I smile and laugh too much for that.  They can’t believe that someone like me could ever teach.

But over the years, I got rather good at holding the big pencil.  I learned, first of all, that anyone can be a good teacher.  You only have to be competent in the subject area you are trying to teach, and open to learning something new about teaching every single day for the rest of your life.

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Here’s something you have to learn about teaching to be any good at it: Discipline is not about making kids behave.  You can shout, stamp your feet, and hit them with a ruler and you will never get them to do what you want to them do.  It has to be about limiting the choices they have for what they will do.  Yes, one of those choices is to be removed from the classroom to go have fun sitting in the uncomfortable chair next to the assistant principal in charge of discipline’s desk, but the good teacher knows you should emphasize that they can either sit like a lump and imitate a rock, or they can participate in the activities presented.  And in my classroom, activities led to jokes and laughing and trying new stuff… some of it hard, but most of it easy.  Kids don’t end up having a hard time making the right choice.

Cool School Blue

Here’s something else you absolutely have to learn to be any good at it;  You have to like kids.  Not just the well-behaved teacher-pleasers, but also the class clown who’s too smart to sit still for stuff he already knows, the shrinking violet who is a wonderfully complex well of deep thoughts who is only a little bit too scared to actually speak in class and share her thoughts, and the dark snarky demon who is quietly plotting the next outburst that will make your life a living hell so he or she can spend time with their old and dear friend, the chair in the assistant principal’s office.  If you don’t like them, you can’t teach them, and driving dynamite trucks in war zones is an easier job.  It pays better too.

I often try to picture Donald Trump teaching English to seventh graders.  What a slapstick comedy that would be.  The man doesn’t know anything.  He is always angry.  And he hates everybody except his daughter Ivanka.  My fourth period class wouldn’t merely eat him alive, they would skeletonize him faster than a school of piranhas could ever hope to match.  And it might be entertaining to watch (assuming it was metaphorical, not literal).

And I sincerely wish I could hold the big pencil in front of class again.  It was the act that defined who I was and what purpose I had in life.  But it isn’t gone since I was forced by ill health to retire.  I held the big pencil for over two thousand students in the course of thirty-one years.  And I will always hold the big pencil in their memories of it.  It is a sort of immortality for teachers.

goopafootootoo

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October 2, 2025 · 12:14 am

Reading Twain for a Lifetime

mark-twain

I wish to leave no doubt unturned like a stone that might have treasure hidden under it.  I love the works of Samuel L. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.

I have read and studied his writing for a lifetime, starting with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer which I read for myself in the seventh grade, after seeing the musical movie Tom Sawyer starring Johnny Whittaker as Tom.  I caught a severe passion, more serious than a head-cold, for the wit and wisdom with which Twain crafted a story.  It took me a while to acquire and read more… but I most definitely did.  I took an American Literature course in college that featured Twain, and I read and analyzed The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  I also bought a copy of Pudd’nhead Wilson which I would later devour in the same thoroughly literate and pretentious manner as I had Huck Finn.  Copies of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The Mysterious Stranger were purchased at the same time, though I didn’t read them cover to cover until later during my years as a middle school English teacher.  I should point out, however, that I read and re-read both of those, Connecticut Yankee winning out by being read three times.  As a teacher, I taught Tom Sawyer as an in-class novel assignment in the time when other teachers thought I was more-or-less crazy for trying to teach a 100-year-old book to mostly Hispanic non-readers.  While the lunatic-inspired experiment was not a total success, it was not a total failure either.  Some kids actually liked having me read parts of it aloud to them, and some borrowed copies of the book to reread it for themselves after we finished as a class.

marktwaindvd2006During my middle-school teaching years I also bought and read copies of The Prince and the Pauper, Roughing It, and Life on the Mississippi.  I would later use a selection from Roughing It as part of a thematic unit on Mark Twain where I used Will Vinton’s glorious claymation movie, The Adventures of Mark Twain as a way to painlessly introduce my kids to the notion that Mark Twain was funny and complex and wise.

I have also read and used some of Twain’s most famous short fictions.  “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg” are both masterpieces of Twain’s keen insight into the human psyche and the goofy and comic corruptions he finds there.

And now, retired old me has most recently read Tom Sawyer Abroad.  And, though it is not one of his finest works, I still love it and am enthralled.  I reviewed it and shared it with you a few days ago.  But I will never be through with Mark Twain.  Not only is there more of him to read, but he has truly been a lifelong friend.

 

 

Not Mark Twain, but still purty good…

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September 30, 2025 · 1:16 am

How Learning Takes Place

So many people in this society seem to think they know better how to do what a teacher is supposed to do than those people they actually pay tiny amounts of money to for doing decades worth of the job of teaching. “Drill and practice!” “Teach them to pass the sacred State test!” “They need to diagram sentences!” “Endless practicing of math problems like long division!”

I need to be clear about this. Those people who have never stood in front of a class of thirty to thirty-five kids who are immensely stupid with a criterion-referenced State test hanging over their heads and no help with the cannibals and criminals embedded in every class need to shut up and hear this;

You need to know WHAT TO TEACH, WHY THEY NEED TO KNOW IT, AND HOW THEY WILL LEARN IT!

Was that said clearly and loud enough? I wrote the important parts in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS!

By the time they reach second grade, they should all be reading at the second-grade level. Memorization of the alphabet, addition, subtraction, and multiplication tables should be reinforced, but pretty well mastered by that time. So, mere memorization skills need to be firmly in place, ready to move on to higher-order thinking skills.

In the third grade, they should already be moving on to applying reading strategies, like rereading, looking for main ideas, and interpreting compound and complex sentences (like this one.) Also, they should use the application of simple formulas in math, (2+3) x 5 = 25, and apply the directions in a recipe to the successful baking of chocolate-chip muffins.

By fourth grade they should be moving on to being able to think more abstractly, using deduction, inference, prediction of outcomes, and synthesis of ideas.

In fifth and sixth grades they should already be moving from concrete and literal thinking to abstract and metaphorical thinking.

The emphasis should not be on creating semi-competent minimum-wage workers at McDonald’s and Walmart. It should be on teaching everyone to think critically and be capable of complex problem-solving. They need to be capable of telling fact from fiction and evaluating their own conclusions and solutions to problems. In other words, they need to be ready to form unions, demand higher wages at Walmart and Dollar Tree, and tend to their own interests in the business world, just like no corporate CEO ever wants them to do.

What makes a fact a fact is that it can be verified as either true or false in a consistently repeatable manner. Every fact needs to be tested and retested. Even proven facts need to be doubted, re-proven, and even nuanced when new evidence or random anomalies occur.

Again, I hope I am being clear and loud enough to get the point across. This is the whole basis of the Scientific Method which you need to understand before we proceed to WHY THEY NEED TO KNOW IT in Part Two. That follows logically because we just finished discussing WHAT THEY SHOULD BE LEARNING.

So, bear with me as I continue to pontificate and elucidate things all good teachers know about teaching even if they only know it by instinct. I am going to be preachy and unkind just as stupid people who think they know the teaching job better than I do tell me about it constantly, only with a strong wind blowing in the opposite direction. I taught middle school and high school English for 31 years, taught every subject except foreign languages as a substitute teacher for three and a half years, and was both the head of an English department and a Gifted and Talented program for a good portion of the thirty-one years. I was even an ESL teacher for well over a decade, teaching English to non-English speakers. I am probably not as dumb as you think I am, and certainly as certain that I am right than any of the people who argue with me have any ghost of a chance of being.

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September 17, 2025 · 12:07 am

Telling Teacher Stories

My Art

Here’s a secret that is only a secret if you are one of the well-over-six-billion people that don’t know I exist; I loved being a public school teacher.  I taught for 31 years.  24 years of that was in middle school.  I taught more than 1000 different seventh graders.  And I loved it.

Please don’t reveal this secret to any mental health professionals.  I like my freedom.  And I am really not dangerous even after teaching that many seventh graders.  I promise.

But it has left me with a compulsion.  I confess it is the reason I write humorous young adult novels and why I continue to write this blog.  I have to tell teacher stories or I will surely explode.

I have to tell you not only about the normal kids I taught, but the super-brainy mega-nerds I taught, the relatively stupid kids I taught, the honor students, the autistic kids, the kids who loved to sleep in class, the classroom clowns that tried to keep them awake, the kids who loved my class, the kids who hated my class, the times I was a really stupid teacher, the times I achieved some real milestones for some wonderful kids, the kids I still love to this day, the kids I tried really hard to love, but…. (well, some kids not even a mother could love), the drug dealers I had to protect my class from, the kids who talked to me about suicide and abuse and horrible things that still make me cry, the kids I lost along the way, and, well, the list goes on and on but this is an epic run-on sentence and the English teacher inside me is screaming at the moment.

You get the idea.  Like most writers… real writers, not hacks and wannabees, I write because I have to.  I don’t have a choice.  No matter what it costs me.  And what do I have to talk about in writing except being a school teacher and the almost infinite lessons that experience taught me?

I loved being the rabbit holding the big pencil in the front of the classroom.  And that metaphor means, as crazy as it sounds, I loved being a teacher.

 

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September 5, 2025 · 12:12 am

Translating Texican

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I came to Texas from Iowa.  I was well-versed in how to speak Iowegian.  (I was, don’t-ya-know, and spoke it fluently, you-betcha.)

Then I arrived, fresh-faced and ready to change the world as a twenty-five-year-old teacher, and began working in a mostly Hispanic middle school in deep South Texas.  Dang!  Whut language do they speak?  (Yes, I know… Spanish.  But my students straight from Mexico couldn’t understand the local lingo either. South Texas Spanish and Castilian Spanish from Mexico are not the same language.)  I couldn’t talk to the white kids either.   It is possible to communicate with Texicans, but it took me years to learn the language.  It takes more than mere usage of “ya’ll” and “howdy”.

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You can probably see what I mean when you look at these fake quotes based on the things real Texicans actually once said to me.  Of course, I can be accused of being a racist by interpreting things this way.  Texicans are concerned that you understand that they are not racists.  They merely rebel against being “politically correct”.  Apparently the political-correctness police give them all sorts of unfair harassment about speaking their minds the way they always have.  I should note, however, that I had to use a quote from Bubba rather than Dave Winchuk.  Dave is so anti-political-correctness concerned that he regularly said to me things with so much racial heat in them that they would even melt the faces off white people.  Face-melting is bad.  If you don’t believe me, re-watch the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

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And to speak Texican, you must actually learn a thing or two about guns.  Yes, Texas is an open-carry State.  Apparently, Second Amendment rights are the most important rights in the Constitution.  My two sons grew up in Texas; the oldest is a Marine, and the younger is in the Air Force.  Guns are important to them.  I have those same arguments with former students, too.  I have learned to say the right things so that they will tolerate my unholy pacifist ideas about how the world might be safer if everybody didn’t have five guns in the waistbands of their underpants.  So gun-stuff ends up as a part of the Texican language I have learned to speak.

The point of it all is, language is a fascinating thing that grows and changes and warps and regresses.  I love it.  I try to master it.  And the mistakes I make usually sound purty funny.

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August 26, 2025 · 12:05 am

Stoicism for Teachers

I will attempt to share with you now a bit of hard-earned Stoic wisdom learned not from Greek philosophers, but from long years worth of trying with all my power to teach anything at all to twelve-and-thirteen-year-olds. Bear with me, I am not crazy. I am a retired middle school teacher.

*No matter how naturally gifted you are with teaching skills, you have to learn everything about teaching the hard way, trying and failing repeatedly until you get it right, or until the students kill and eat you.*

*The only person whose behavior you can control is you yourself. Student behavior is chaos.*

*While you can’t control student behavior, you can use your behavior to corral attention and lead them towards something that resembles civilized behavior. (But learning how to corral those little piggies can take forever.)*

*You will want to do everything “the easy way” because that is the only way you can reach classroom goals in a reasonable amount of time. Of course, it takes practically no time to learn that there is NO EASY WAY!*

*Most teachers rely on drill and practice, and this is why there are so few excellent teachers. Drill and practice is the most effective way to teach students to hate the subject you are trying to teach.*

Students quietly studying, a thing no students in real life actually do (except for the fact that some of the pages in his textbook have obviously been torn and folded on the left side of the book to conceal love notes.)

*Students learn best in a “Laughing Classroom” where they talk to each other, activities are creative and sometimes loud, and learning becomes fun.*

*Many principals consider “Laughing Classrooms” to be a good reason to punish or dismiss a teacher.*

*Good teaching is a subversive act. Only the people who are supposed to teach or learn really want it to take place in most schools.*

*All of your students will misbehave at one time or another. Some only briefly and very mildly. Others for an endless period of time that you hope ends short of murder.*

*When a student misbehaves and you have to take them into the hallway to yell at them and/or murder them, you secretly tell them that you believe in them, describe the behavior and why it disappointed you, and then describe what they should have done instead. Follow that by asking them if someone else needs to get involved, parents, principal, police, or executioner, or if they would like to go back in the room and try again.*

*Your worst students are the ones who need you the most. You better learn somewhere along the way to love past the ugly.*

*Nothing you will ever do in your career will beat reaching the unreachable and teaching the unteachable. I pray that you will get to experience it at least once. And no one but you and that student will ever know about it.*

Now you can go be a school teacher and be all Stoic like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. And there was no secret code for anything evil in that last one. If you ever experience it, you will know then what I am talking about. Not everything you are proud of doing in life has to get a gold medal on a stage to be worth doing. But if you are a teacher, you already know that.

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August 20, 2025 · 12:08 am

Being Old Enough to Know Better…

I am the man from the Setting Sun,

Come to the future to deliver the past.

What does that even mean, that silly little two-line poem I wrote twenty years ago?  Am I not old enough to know better than to create a snippet loaded with goofy contradictions?  Apparently not.  But I am old enough to deliver the past.  I have been around long enough that I remember when President Kennedy was assassinated.  I saw Neil Armstrong take that “small step for man” on the surface of the moon.  I have learned a number of lessons from the past.  And as a writer, I can deliver those lessons in the form of stories.  I was born in a different century.  I have been around for more than half of one… approaching two thirds.  I have collected all kinds of wonderful things in my goofy old brain.  And make no doubt about it, with six incurable diseases and being a cancer survivor since 1983, my Sun is about the set.  So, I have a mission, to open the eyes of people who are too foolish to avoid listening to what I have to say, or to read what I have written.

I saw The Sound of Music starring Julie Andrews in the Cecil Theater in Mason City, Iowa in 1965 when I was not yet ten years old.  I heard the song My Favorite Things for the very first time on the old black and white Motorola TV set in the clip I posted at the start of this post.  Kukla, Fran, and Ollie was a puppet show I never missed on Saturdays if I could help it.  In a world before video games and computers and even color TV, kids still had priorities.  And my world was definitely a world of imagination.

Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Moose

Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Moose

Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, and then as Daniel Boone

Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, and then as Daniel Boone

Paul Winchell with Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff

Paul Winchell with Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff

                                                                              So, what kind of knucklehead must I be to think younger folks would want to know about any of this stuff from the time of dinosaurs and black-and-white TV?  I write books that are basically genre-breakers and about way too many different things to make sense to adults.  As a result, I classify myself as a Young Adult novelist, a writer for children… but not the beginning reader kind, or the early chapter-book kind… the kind like Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Light in the Forest, or Dicey’s Song.  I write books about what it was like to be a kid in the past… the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s… last century.  And I have some knowledge and expertise in this area because I was one of those teachers during that time period that got to know the kids in my classes.  I made the horrifying mistake of actually talking to kids, asking them about their lives, and listening to their answers.  I talked about all manner of things with all manner of kids… brilliant things and stupid things… with dumb kids, smart kids, smelly kids, charming kids, and the kids everybody else hated.  You know… I did all the stupid mistakes that teachers who have no earthly idea how to do discipline would do, and got those kids to learn to behave at least halfway like human beings by being somebody they trusted and respected and… on rare occasions… believed.  Right now I am working on Snow Babies.  It is set in 1984.  And I hope to be good enough of a Sunset Man to be able to deliver it to the future.

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August 18, 2025 · 12:17 am

Mickey Mouse Club Music

Today’s essay was inspired by Annette Funicello’s Facebook page.  I was marveling at how a teen idol and Disney child star could have such a large following and leave such large footprints on social media when she is not only all grown out of her child-stardom, but is actually quite dead.   I, however, who am technically still alive, work very very hard at this author-self-promotion-thingy, and I hardly make any headway at all in the ocean of the internet.  So, I did what I always do when faced with the imponderables of this writing life.  I drew a picture.  I drew Annette naked.  Well, that’s not entirely accurate either.  I put clothes on her because, well, young-adult-genre authors don’t always have to think like a teenager.

annette

You see, I am not mad at Annette.  And my hormones no longer control the other things that once made me deeply regret the fact that Disney never let Annette appear in movies in a bikini, even in the movies that were not Disney movies.  When you’re twelve, there are different priorities than when you are 68.  Hormones don’t do all of my thinking any more… at least, that’s what I tell my wife.

And part of what I still love most about Annette is the music.  The Mickey Mouse Club was always about talented kids.  They could sing and dance and play the drums, and they were as easily professional quality as many of the adults… and cuter to boot.  Talented children have been a significant portion of my life.  As an English teacher in middle school, I taught kids that were Annette’s MMC age.  I taught them how to write and how to read, and occasionally I had to find other talents to promote and help those kids become winners in the great game of life.  And, it may be cruel to say it bluntly, but some kids are downright ugly.  Not merely ugly in terms of what they looked like, but how they acted and how they thought and how they felt about things.  Racism runs deeply through children who’ve been taught thoroughly by parents before the teacher even meets them.  Sometimes you have to dig around really deeply in the black pits of their personalities to find something bright and shiny enough to put the spotlight on.   But it is always worth it.  ALL CHILDREN HAVE TREASURE BURIED INSIDE THEM.  And it deeply hurts that too many adults in every community can’t be bothered to dig for it.

Annette in DLandn

I grafted a background on my picture of Annette to stress the fact that she is not naked in my picture.  She was a very public figure and a good portion of her personal treasure was that screen personality that showed through and sparkled in every role.  My favorite Annette piece is the movie Babes in Toyland, which I saw for the first time at Grandma Beyer’s house in Mason City on her color TV.  The songs from that movie still play in my dreams.

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