Tag Archives: teaching

October 2, 2024 · 12:20 am

Monkey Mathematics

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(colored pencil, pen, & ink – entitled “Math Monkey” – by Leah Cim Reyeb (my name backwards))

It has been said that if you have an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters, and unlimited time, they will reproduce all the works of William Shakespeare.  Not only that, they will produce every other work of literature in every language on Earth that has ever been written… and that ever will be written, for all time.  Not only that, but every version of Hamlet that has one misspelled word, two misspelled words, three misspelled words… and so on to infinity.

I was having an argument recently with a boy from Brazil who insisted there was no God and Creator.  He claims to be an agnostic, but argues like an atheist.  He was trying to “save” me from my erroneous belief that there is an underlying intelligence and purpose to all of creation.  His intentions were good, but he failed to convince me before sailing off back to Sao Paulo.  Alas, I am unrelentingly still convinced that I am not wrong, as he apparently believed all school teachers are by definition.  Yes, it is written that way in the teenager’s guide to life, the universe, and everything.  “Teachers are clueless and only teach you the wrong stuff” – page two hundred and three, in Chapter Twelve, Adults are Always Wrong.  And, of course, I’m blaming it on the monkeys.  It’s always those danged monkeys and their typewriters.

I tried to explain that the whole infinite-monkeys thing is based on flawed math.  After all, math was invented by enraged Greeks who danced around naked in caves worshiping circles, squares, and right triangles.  Pythagoras must’ve really hated school kids.  He gave them all this froo-frah to learn about whole numbers, integers, algebra, and geometry and stuff, and then threw in theorems and equations to give them something to mind-numbingly practice at their desks in Math classes until they were no different from infinite-monkey typists. 

If you take a pile of bricks up to the top of a mountain and then throw them off, even if you throw them an infinite number of times, how often will they actually land in the configuration of the Parthenon?  …And the Parthenon with one brick out of place, and then two bricks, and …wasn’t the gol-danged Parthenon carved out of marble, not bricks?  If you believe all of reality is based on random chance, then you obviously are figuring that out with infinite-monkey math.  I’m not saying the Theory of Evolution is wrong.  That is ordered and principled in ways that fit Occam’s Razor and is probably just as correct as the Theory of Gravity (which we don’t fully understand, either, yet we don’t go flying off into space with each rotation of the Earth).

“Wait a minute!” screams the head monkey.  “Are you saying you believe in Evolution, or in Creation?”   (I am constantly hearing nearly-infinite monkeys screaming that nowadays.)

Shoot, I think both things are true.  You can’t deny what science offers proof for, fact or theory.  Yet, God speaks to me and comforts me, even though he doesn’t actually answer prayers.  The evidence of God is in all that he created, including the process of evolution, the monkeys, the typewriters (well… man-made is made by God too if he created man with inventive capabilities, right?), and even the voices in my silly head that I interpret as God talking.  Am I guilty of Infinite-monkey math?  I try not to be.  But I also try not to argue with Brazilian teenage agnostics about the existence of God.  Oh, well… can’t win ‘em all.

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October 1, 2024 · 12:15 am

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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September 29, 2024 · 2:11 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 27, 2024 · 12:28 am

Things You Probably Ought to Know about Mickey

As Mickey’s go, the one who is writing this is a moderately interesting example of the breed.  Still, there are things you probably ought to be made aware of.  A sort of precautionary thing…

First of all, this particular Mickey is an Iowegian.  That means he comes from Iowa, the State where the tall corn grows.  It is a prime reason why his jokes are corny and his ears have been popped (oh, and he does actually have two, unlike the picture Paffooney where only one is showing).  His fur is not actually purple.  If anything now, it is mostly silver-gray.  But the Paffooney is a magical portrait, and purple is the color of magic.  He has a goofy, and sometimes fatal grin.  You may not be able to prove that he has ever actually grinned someone to death, but it is likely he could always dig somebody up.

Another irrefutable fact about this Mickey, unlike many many Mickeys, is that he used to actually be a public school teacher.  He taught the little buggers for thirty-one years, plus two years as a substitute teacher.  He did twenty-four of those years in middle school… twenty-three of those in one school in South Texas.  His mostly Hispanic students managed to teach him every bad word in Spanglish… err, Texican… err, Tex-Mex… or is it Taco Bell?  Anyway, they taught him every bad word except for the word for cooties… you know, piojos.  He learned that word from an old girl friend.

A despicable thing about him… (you know despicable, right?  It’s that word that Sylvester the cat always uses) is that he actually likes kids.  That’s just not normal for someone who teaches them.  Teachers are supposed to hate kids, aren’t they?  But he never did.  It is true that he yelled at them sometimes, but he never did that because he hated them.  He did that only for fun.  And he actually apologized to kids sometimes when they got into behavioral trouble, because he said it was the teacher’s fault if kids are bad, and, besides, the kids are so surprised by that, that they forget all about the behavior and can be flammoozled into acting good.

The last and most wicked thing you need to know about Mickey is that he cartoons up a storm sometimes.  He loves to draw everything that is wacky and weird.  He has more goofball colored pencil tricks than a Charles Shultz and a Dr. Seuss rolled together in a sticky lump with a George Herriman stuck on top in place of a cherry.  He steals ideas and techniques from other artists and steals jokes from comedians, undertakers, and random juvenile delinquents.  He also puts together lists of wacky oddball details that don’t quite fit together and weaves it into purple paisley prose (somewhere in this whole messy blog thing he has also defined purple paisley prose and how to make it… in case you were curious.)

So there you have it.  The Truth about Mickey.  The sordid, simpering, solitary facts about Mickey.  The straight poop.  (wait a minnit!  How did poop get there?  Not again!  I thought I had cured that!)

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August 7, 2024 · 12:04 am

Why School Should Be Cool

Cool School Blue

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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July 2, 2024 · 1:18 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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June 29, 2024 · 12:21 am

Terry Pratchett, the Grand Wizard of Discworld

image borrowed from TVtropes.com

image borrowed from TVtropes.com

I firmly believe that I would never have succeeded as a teacher and never gotten my resolve wrapped around the whole nonsense package of being a published author if I hadn’t picked up a copy of Mort, the first Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett that I ever encountered.  I started reading the book as a veteran dungeon-master at D&D role-playing games and also as a novice teacher having a world of difficulty trying to swim up the waterfalls of Texas education fast enough to avoid the jagged rocks of failure at the bottom.  I was drinking ice tea when I started reading it.  More of that iced tea shot out my nose while reading and laughing than went down my gullet.  I almost put myself in the hospital with goofy guffaws over Death’s apprentice and his comic adventures on a flat world riding through space and time on the backs of four gigantic elephants standing on the back of a gigantic-er turtle swimming through the stars.  Now, I know you have no earthly idea what this paragraph even means, unless you read Terry Pratchett.  And believe me, if you don’t, you have to start.  If you don’t die laughing, you will have discovered what may well be the best humorist to ever put quill pen to scroll and write.  And if you do die laughing, well, there are worse ways to go, believe me.

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Discworld novels are fantasy-satire that make fun of Tolkien and Conan the Barbarian (written by Robert E. Howard, not the barbarian himself) and the whole world of elves and dwarves and heroes and dragons and such.  You don’t even have to love fantasy to like this stuff.  It skewers fantasy with spears of ridiculousness (a fourth level spell from the Dungeons of Comedic Magic for those fellow dungeon masters out there who obsessively keep track of such things).  The humor bleeds over into the realms of high finance, education, theater, English and American politics, and the world as we know it (but failed to see from this angle before… a stand-on-your-head-and-balance-over-a-pit-of-man-eating-goldfish sort of angle).

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Terry Pratchett’s many wonderful books helped me to love what is ugly, because ugly is funny, and if you love something funny for long enough, you understand that there is a place in the world even for goblins and trolls and ogres.  Believe me, that was a critical lesson for a teacher of seventh graders to learn.  I became quite fond of a number of twelve and thirteen year old goblins and trolls because I was able see through the funny parts of their inherent ugliness to the hidden beauty that lies within (yes, I know that sounds like I am still talking about yesterday’s post, but that’s because I am… I never stop blithering about that sort of blather when it comes to the value hidden inside kids).

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I have made it a personal goal to read every book ever written by Terry Pratchett.  And that goal is now within reach because even though he is an incredibly prolific writer, he has passed on withing the last year.  He now only has one novel left that hasn’t reached bookstores.  Soon I will only need to read a dozen more of his books to finish his entire catalog of published works.  And I am confident I will learn more lessons about life and love and laughter by reading what is left, and re-reading some of the books in my treasured Terry Pratchett paperback collection.  Talk about your dog-eared tomes of magical mirth-making lore!  I know I will never be the writer he was.  But I can imitate and praise him and maybe extend the wonderful work that he did in life.  This word-wizard is definitely worth any amount of work to acquire and internalize.  Don’t take my convoluted word for it.  Try it yourself.

borrowed from artistsUK.com

borrowed from artistsUK.com

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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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