Why Teaching Matters--Part 2

Where do we lead students? 
We may never know.
Drawing by Matt Mouser, former student.

AS ALL OF MY AVID READERS know (yes, I’m talking about both of you), I was a junior high and middle school teacher for 33 years. 

That’s right. I spent my life in the company of hormonal teens.  

So I learned to use some “unconventional” methods to keep students interested. Not that my lectures weren’t scintillating, I don’t mean. 

I hated wasting class time for any reason whatsoever; but if I thought I could keep kids engaged I was ready to try anything. One day, Susan -----, a lively, funny young lady, made the mistake of telling me class was boring. She was an exceptional student. If she said class was boring it probably was.  

I said we needed to liven up. 

Susan foolishly agreed. 

So, I picked up her books and threw them out a window onto the school lawn.

That woke Susan and everyone else up, even me. 

Another time, the homework paper of a top student floated off her desk and landed in the center of the room. (We had desks in a horseshoe arrangement.) I walked over to pick it up and had an inspiration. Saying, “Here, let me get that,” I placed one foot on the paper, grabbed to pick it up and ripped it in two. I stood there staring at half a paper in disbelief. 

“That was my HOMEWORK,” the owner of the dismembered assignment exclaimed. “What am I going to do now?” 

“I’ll give you an automatic A,” I replied, and the class roared and that’s what we did. 

IF I EVER WONDERED WHETHER these kinds of tactics were effective, the first great letter I received from a former student resolved the question. It came in the mail one day, after I had been teaching seven or eight years. 

Joey was bright and impossible not to like but his grades in my class and every other were terrible. He missed homework diligently. He missed five assignments. We talked. He missed seven more. We talked. He ran his string of missing assignments to twenty—thirty—headed towards forty, like Joe DiMaggio in reverse. 

Around that time, I hit upon the idea of fishing in my pocket occasionally and saying to my class in a game show announcer’s voice:  “You can win all the money (jingling sound) in this pocket if you answer the next question.” Sometimes I would pull out the coins and show them for effect. “This entire thirteen cents, one dime and three pennies, can be yours if you tell me who wrote the Declaration of Independence.” 

Every so often I offered “big money.” In morning classes one day I gave a dime to the first student able to name the first astronaut to walk on the moon. In every class someone could. So it took a few dimes to generate a little enthusiasm. I started offering fifty cents—a huge prize—if anyone could name the three astronauts who took part in the first moon landing mission. The letter I received explains what happened next and shows how much teaching can matter.

If you will, try and think back 5 or 6 years…In your history class I received the honor of having the most consecutive zeroes in your teaching career, I believe it was 32 or 37. In class I also received 50¢ for naming the two other astronauts that were with Neil Armstrong. And I will never forget your ability to throw erasers at pupils who were talking while you were conducting class, namely myself. I was one of the worst students in the junior high that year. Can you remember.

The reason I am writing you is... to say thanks. You made me realize that if I didn’t straighten my life out I would end up being a bum.

It took me 2 years after having you for history to realize you were right. After my freshman year at Loveland Hurst, which was a joke, I moved to Grant County, Kentucky. I figured I would start out with a clean slate and settle down. I started doing my homework, a first, right? Believe it or not I was well respected there. I found enjoyment in excelling in my school work. I almost majored in mathematics in high school. I received an award in my poetry class. Get this I Joey ----- was the only student to keep an “A” average in poetry class. I also got a couple of awards in Band. I have graduated high school this year and I am now attending the University of Kentucky. You will never believe what I plan to study, I am a pre-medicine student. You didn’t faint did you? I am doing fine in college and I want to repeat a humble thank you. It seemed that you knew I had the potential and tried to bring it out of me but I would not allow you. Thank you.

                                                             Your friend forever,

                                                 Joey -----

You see: teaching always matters.


P. S.:  If there’s any teacher out there who wants to copy my “big cash prize idea,” I say go ahead.  

I would warn you, however. NEVER offer $5 to anyone who can answer some question you consider hopelessly abstruse. When they do you will end up poorer and wiser.

Why Teaching Matters--Part 1

I've been retired from teaching now for three years and don't miss the grind.  I loved life in the classroom, but if you're doing the job right, the demands are unending.  So for a few blog posts, I'm going to try to explain why teaching matters.

It's not just academics, either.  You talk to the 14-year old girl, who has been lying about her age and seeing a 36-year-old man.  You listen to the boy, who is being bullied, and has been spat upon, and you go look up the bully, yourself.  You talk to the mom who doesn't know how to control her teenage daughter; and you tell her not to nag and berate.  You tell her to remember the words of Anatole France:  “The more you say, the less people remember.”

Good advice when dealing with teens.

For most of my career I taught American history.  Early on, I stumbled across a type of activity that seventh and eighth graders loved, and one at which they excelled.  We were doing a long reading on the famous winter at Valley Forge (which I wrote myself).  At one point the reading included this section:

Food was in short supply and soldiers were soon reduced to eating nothing but “fire cake,” a mix of flour and water cooked over a fire.

     Dr. Waldo [an officer in Washington's army who kept a journal] jokingly described the diet. “What have you got for Dinner Boys?” he asked the men one afternoon:  “Nothing but Fire Cake and Water, Sir.”  Again that evening he asked:  “Gentlemen, the Supper is ready. What is your Supper, Lads?” Once more they shouted, “Fire Cake and Water, Sir.”

We spent part of class discussing some of the tough vocabulary and then students were told to finish the reading that night. 

On the drive home that afternoon, I began thinking over more creative ways to use the material. Instead of giving a quiz, I decided to do a short skit to start class the next day. 

Now, when students filed in and took their seats, I explained that we would be having a “fire” in the center of the room and “soldiers” would sit around it warming themselves over the flames. We needed volunteers to discuss camp life. Hands shot up all over the room. 

Good start.  Students liked the idea.

The first group to act out the scene started slowly and it looked like the idea might fizzle. Then one of the boys took off a shoe and threw it in the “fire,” saying, “At least we’ll have something to eat besides fire cake.” His “comrades” nodded and rubbed their hands and looked dejected. A chronic complainer in class starred--as a chronic complainer in Washington’s army. 

In another bell, two volunteers set their shoes aside before the skit and plunked down beside the fire in stocking feet. After a few minutes, one keeled over “dead.” The other soldiers sniffed loudly, from cold or sorrow we knew not which. Then one of them tugged off the dead man’s socks and placed them on his frostbitten hands like mittens. 

A second exclaimed, “Dibs on his underwear!”

This brought moans and laughter from the audience and I knew we had stumbled onto something big. 

Once it became clear that classes enjoyed doing skits we began experimenting. But it was the suggestion of a young lady in one of my morning classes that sent us digging deeper into this rich lode. I was still a young teacher at the time and Lisa was one of Loveland’s rare minority students. Her grades were fair at best, and the girl could be a pain if she disagreed with your teaching methods.

Still, Ms. ----- knew how to think.

One day she approached my desk. We had just started a unit on the South in the years before the Civil War. She bent close and whispered:  “I think we should do a skit about slavery.” 

Normally, I might have steered away from the topic, lest we seem insensitive. Lisa’s enthusiasm, however, altered my thinking. The two of us whispered back and forth before settling on a “panel discussion” involving slaves and slave owners. Lisa volunteered at once to play a slave. When we explained her idea there were plenty of volunteers. John, who liked to argue with Lisa anyway, agreed to play her master. We picked a second “master” and explained that none of her slaves would be present for the skit. Then we selected two more “slaves.” They would be from different plantations and their owners would also be absent. 

This gave variety of perspective.

In years to come thousands of students took part in all kinds of skits and it was often subtle touches that made their performances great. In Lisa’s case she wore a blue bandanna round her head and adopted a field hand’s manner of speech. She also ran the kind of chain you use to secure a dog in your yard round her wrists and through her belt loops and jingled it whenever John claimed to be a “good master.” John picked up on every cue and threatened “trouble” when they returned to their plantation. Lisa refused to be cowed, saying if he beat her “like always” she was not afraid. 

At some point, John insisted slaves sang in the fields because they were happy. Lisa objected and said music lightened the load of sorrow bearing down upon their souls. She sang a few verses from a Negro spiritual and explained their hidden meaning to make the point. 

This panel discussion--the brain-child of one creative young lady--was the first skit we ever did intended to last the entire period.

Lisa and four classmates held center stage for forty-five minutes and all five earned A’s.

Of course, young teachers enter the classroom believing they can save every child.  And today politicians who couldn’t save a kitten stuck in a bush insist this miracle can be achieved on a national scale. 

(See:  No Child Left Behind.)

If you plan to survive in teaching, however, you must divest yourself of this delusion or prepare for prolonged bouts of depression. You must try to save every child. That you must do. You must assume there is potential in every head and do everything in your power to tap it. But you must be ready for failure.

You are a teacher.

Not a magician.

When I first met Conan, near the end of my career, he had already been held back twice. In other words, he had a reputation for failure. A tall, thin kid, he favored Gothic clothing, and on first glance appeared to be the kind of character who might cause discipline problems. As it turned out, he rarely did homework and his test scores were low. But he was quick-witted and funny and had a maturity (partly based on age) that gave him the edge in discussion. I sensed he’d be a natural in skits and encouraged him to join a group preparing a presentation on Pilgrims and Indians. 

The day of the skit when everyone else was ready, Conan insisted he needed more time. My heart sank. I thought he meant he hadn’t studied. No, he said, he needed time to dress. I sent him to the restroom. Five minutes passed. We sent a scout to find him. The scout returned. 

No Conan. 

I was starting to wonder if he might have skipped out the back when an old lady in a full-length black dress and white lace collar, gray hair pulled back in a bun, entered the room. Granny sported blue-tinted hippie glasses. 

For the next forty minutes Granny was as good as anyone I ever saw in a skit. He (she?) knew why the Pilgrims went to Holland in 1609, before they came to America, and why they left, what weather was like when they arrived on these shores, and cackled as he explained. Sometimes he stumbled over answers, but only in character, as if memory was fading with age. He said he was shocked when the natives mooned the settlement. (That's a little know story involving the Pilgrims, not something we usually talk about on Thanksgiving Day.)

And he said it like he meant it.

Once he hiked his dress to show a little Pilgrim ankle and called out in my direction:  “Hey, baby, give me a call!” His classmates were enthralled.

When the bell was about to ring we ended a minute early so I could tell everyone what a wonderful job they had done. I singled Conan out for praise. “How many think Conan deserves an ‘A+’?” Every hand went up and we awarded him a perfect score by acclamation.

It wasn't standardized learning, of course--and it didn't mean Conan's personal problems and troubles at home had suddenly evaporated. 

Still, for one day, the young man had reason to feel proud.