One does not have to be smart in order to be lovable. In fact, I think, based on my years as a teacher and reputed smart person, being smart is actually a handicap to being loved by others. Some of the sweetest, most lovable students I ever met were the the special-education students who were mentally handicapped. I worked with them at times as a substitute teacher in 2006 and 2007. I also encountered them routinely doing hallway duty at Naaman Forest High School. They always said hello. They always smiled. Though they rarely knew my name. Some of them went out of their way to shake hands with me and ask me how my day was. I discovered along the way that teachers who worked with them on a daily basis tended to be nicer, more welcoming and friendly than other teachers. That simple enthusiasm and likability is obviously contagious.
I promise, doing the things that happy but somewhat stupid people do works when you have to deal with others on a daily basis. I know because I tried it. It took me several years to work past the foolish teacher-notion that you have be the boss and you have to be mean to get students to learn. You start trying to iron out bad behaviors by calling them out and shouting them down, which only leads to threats that have to be carried out, students sitting in misery in the principal’s office, parents calling with concerns or trying to boss and bully you, and more trips to the store for antacids and headache pills.
What actually works better is meeting the students at the door with a stupid grin on my face before class ever starts. “Good morning,” I say. “You are looking smarter than usual today. You must be ready to learn the most important lessons anyone ever learned.”
“Are we doing something in class today?” they always say.
“Of course we are,” I answer with my stupid grin, “wonderful things!”
When the lessons start and the class clown puts wasted sticky-notes on his eyelids and ears and tongue, I don’t get mad and tell him to straighten up or else. I tell him, “Something is different about the way you look today. Did you try a new hair gel or something?” When the others break up in giggles, I tell him, “Whatever it is, it makes you look good. You should wear it that way for every lesson you do.”
Sometimes you have to stop a serious consideration of themes in the Kurt Vonnegut short story from the Literature Book to take a serious wiggle-break. Students need to stand up and shake apart whatever stiff dead-parts they may have grown from sitting too long in one spot. Most of them shake their behinds. You know, the part they use for thinking most of the time.
You do these stupid things, and the students begin to love your class. They begin to love what they are reading. It is a simple, stupid thing… but so very necessary.
Of course you can’t cure all the dead-brains, jerks, and snarks this way. Some will never buy in. But it works with most. Kids will behave well for you if you love the stupid parts they all have in them. They will love you because you let them be stupid without serious consequences.
Now, I know there are many… some of them principals and teacher-evaluators who will be offended by me talking about kids being stupid. Some will mistakenly think I am insulting them. But I am not. I often need to make a distinction between the kind of stupid I am talking about here and the angry, hurtful kind that I prefer to call ignorance. That kind of stupid is the kind that makes Donald Trump, a person who actually knows better, call Mexican immigrants rapists. It is a different thing to do something stupid because you are unintentionally wrong about something, or impaired somehow (like me when my blood sugar is low), or valuing silly over accurate. Stupidity often can’t be helped. but when you demonize Muslims because you want to make political points with people who are angry and fearful and honestly don’t know anything about Muslims they haven’t heard from ignorant people, then ignorance means ignoring what you probably know is true anyway to do something that intentionally chooses not to make use of whatever useful intelligence you have.
So forgive me for writing a stupid essay about stupid being lovable. I can’t help it. I am just stupid sometimes.
Catch a Falling Star 
Why School Should Be Cool
I was a school teacher for thirty-one years, and in spite of the immense amount of brain damage that builds up over time, especially as a middle-school teacher, I think I know what we’ve been doing wrong.
We need to take a look at an education system where things are working better than they are here.
Now, I know you probably didn’t click on the boring video about school. Heck, you probably aren’t even reading this sentence. But I can summarize it and put it in easy-to-understand words. Finland does not have to educate as many poor and disadvantaged kids as this country does. The video gives five ways that Finland does it better, but all of them boil down to the basic notion that the country is more homogeneous and uniformly middle-class than ours is. Still, we can learn things from them.
The first of the five ways that Finland does it better is a difference in government. While U.S. governmental safety-net programs blame people who need food stamps for being lazy (even though some of them work 40-hour work weeks in minimum-wage jobs), Finland gives a huge package to parents of everything they might need as soon as their child is born. As long as the child is in school, the government does many things to support the family’s efforts to educate them. Imagine what we could accomplish here if we invested some of the vast fortune we give to corporations in subsidies into educating poor black and Hispanic children instead. Children have a hard time learning in school when they come to school hungry. If we could only feed them better, the way the Fins do, we would revolutionize our classrooms.
The second point the video makes is the biggest suds-maker every time I get on my teacher’s soap box. They don’t give kids homework and they only give them one standardized test when they leave high school. I have recently covered this topic more thoroughly in a post in which I was able to ridicule Florida governor Rick “Skeletor” Scott. (Boy, did I enjoy doing that.) But I won’t go into all of that again here.
The third thing is respecting teachers. In Finland they treat teachers with the kind of respect that they give to doctors and lawyers. How cool is that? In Texas, calling someone a teacher is an epithet. If a teacher is liked or even loved by their students, administrators are encouraged to keep a closer eye on them to figure out what’s wrong. Students are supposed to hate their teachers and sit all day filling out mind-numbing test-preparation worksheets. Imagine what it could be like if teachers weren’t the scum of the earth. They might actually have students convinced that learning goes on in their classrooms.
The fourth point is that Finland does not try to cram more and more memorized details into young brains so they can spit it all back out on a test. They take students thoroughly into the subject of study, and at a slower, easier pace. They dive deep into the river of learning instead of wade through the wide and shallow parts. All questions get answered. And by that, I mean, student questions, not teacher questions. The learning is student-centered.
Finally, the video states that Finland simply has fewer social ills in their country to get in the way of good quality education. But even though the work is harder in this country, the potential is really there to go far beyond what Finland is capable of. We have a natural resource that is totally untapped in this nation. We don’t develop the minds of a majority of our children in any meaningful way. And I can tell you from having done it, you can teach a poor or disadvantaged child to think. You can give them the tools for academic, economic, and personal success. You can make them into valuable human beings. But you should never forget, they are already precious beyond measure. We just ignore and trash that inherent value. So, the information is out there about how to do a better job of educating our children. We need to follow through.
Here endeth the lesson.
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