Insecurity Called Out

For the second time this year my principal called me out of my room. He was chuckling again, as he was not so long ago when he told me I couldn’t beg. But this time the charge caught me off guard:

“I received a call from a parent,” he said, “who said that their student was distracted during a test because you were singing.”

Now, at times I do sing out in class; sanity breeds boredom, I believe, especially in a middle school classroom. But during a test? Did I really?

“I don’t generally make it a practice to do that during tests, but it’s possible I did, although I don’t remember. I don’t suppose it was more than a line,” I said.

“She said it distracted her. It’s alright if you sing when it’s part of a lesson, but not during tests.”

Only sing when it’s relevant to the lesson? What about congratulating students on turning in late work or doing something nice by singing lines from “The Wind Beneath My Wings”? What about easing the early morning classroom doldrums with eye-roll-inspiring outbursts of select lines from “His Eye Is On the Sparrow”? What good is torture, anyway, without music?

I managed to move on to another topic with the principal–how I plan to approach the article about positive relationships at my school that I’m writing for the local newspaper’s educational insert–but all day I continued to seeth at what I later reasoned was my principal’s own teeth-cutting insecurity manifested in boss-man directives that instead could simply have been a polite, “I just wanted to let you know of the parent’s concern; try to keep it in mind.”

I’m still learning to show that sort of graciousness in my classroom, too, no doubt. Not long ago, only a week after he’d asked me in the halls, “Mr. Jacobs, is there space in your class?” a student known for being extremely disruptive and problematic was transferred into my largest class. From the second he entered my room, he tried to seize control of the classroom.

“Mr. Jacobs,” he called out, “I have to go to the bathroom. What are we doing? I need a pencil. Hey, can I borrow a pencil?”

It was no mistake that his assigned seat was the closest to my desk, where I could sit on him with very stern and direct instructions that did succeed in shutting him down quite efficiently but left me wondering how I could replace suppression with respectful rapport. It took me a couple weeks, but this Friday I think it started happening when, during a quiet work time, he started talking across the room.

“J, come here,” I ordered. He rose from his desk and walked the two feet to mine and stood there with–as had proved typical–his dark eyes misted and forehead troubled. I was ready to launch into a “don’t speak in my classroom, young man” lecture as a followup to the “no talking, no getting out of your seat without my permission” instructions of the day before, but what came out instead was, “Please be mindful that I would like all of my students to work quietly during this time.”

“Okay. Sorry,” he said.

Problem solved (for that day, anyway).

But even if I am picking up gracious leadership, not being a bit crazy just won’t do, with herds of twelve-year-old students stuck in a small classroom. I tried to be especially mindful the rest of the week.

For a “quiz” after studying homophones, students wrote paragraphs using incorrect homophones, and then exchanged papers to make corrections. Building on a strategy I’d recently learned about, I had them switch papers by standing along the edges of the room and constructing either paper airplanes or snowballs (most students’ first choice) out of their paragraphs.

Then I stood in the middle of the room and said, “This is the only time in your preschool, kindergarten, elementary, middle, or high school, college, post graduate, and doctoral studies that you’ll be told to do this: Throw your papers at your teacher.” I covered my head and cringed while snowballs and paper airplanes lightly pounded me. (Then they each had to find a snowball or plane that wasn’t theirs to read and grade.)

“Can we do that again?” one student asked.

“Can we use books next time?” said another.

Later a student asked, “Mr. Jacobs, May I please go to the bathroom? I have an eyelash stuck in my eye.” She pulled her bottom eyelid down so I could see.

“Just lick it out,” I said, turning back to my computer.

She gave a little toe pounce there on the floor, and said emphatically, “But my tongue’s not long enough.”

Still later we began a study of utopia and dystopia in literature by reading Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron,” in which the genius boy and beautiful ballerina leap “like deer on the moon,” defying the laws of the land as well as gravity and motion to kiss a TV station’s thirty feet high ceiling. I asked for a volunteer in each class to demonstrate; in each class someone had the insanity to volunteer yet failed miserably with mild kissing noises and feeble jumps.

And we all chuckled.