A couple months back I received this praise in the local paper:
The investigation into the case began … when an English teacher walked into a boys’ bathroom to find three boys hitting another boy. The teacher stopped the fight and reported the incident to the principal, who referred the case [to law enforcement officials]. … In the case of the beat-in, it was an alert teacher who sparked the gang investigation. “He knew something wasn’t right. He reported it immediately,” [a law enforcement officer] said.
I do have a touch of the cop in me; it’s at times one of the roles educators take on, for better or worse, along with medic, mom, dad, philosopher, stand-up comedian, scapegoat, expert, friend, hero, dust bag, secretary, dictator, custodian, architect, dart board, and more.
But even if I put on a grumpy philosopher face in my classroom, I’ve at least tried to make my policing friendly. On morning gym duty I’ve taken on the role of making sure all 200+ of the sixth graders, upon their dismissal from their post-bus, pre-school holding tank–the gym’s left-side bleachers–exit through not all eight of the possible doors, but just one measly door. This has helped alleviate the congested, barreling-herd recipe for disaster that had been happening every morning as the little twits raced along the sidewalk toward the sixth grade wing.
The majority of them have cooperated, but only the majority. There remain a few to submit to my reigning authority.
Dillon, for example. Early on during my gym duty tenure, he scooted across the gym to flee out another door, all the while looking over his shoulder to see that I was watching him. I pulled him aside the next morning.
“Listen, Dillon,” I said. “I admire your independent spirit. But I do need you to obey the rules.”
“Okay,” he said, and a couple days later as he walked by me he even tapped me on the shoulder, a sure sign, I thought, of his undying gratitude and admiration for my respectful honoring of his terrificness. (Since then he has steadily regressed to his old ways.)
And then there was Scotty. He liked to duck around behind me and escape through one of the many undesignated doors, so one day I called him over to me before everyone else was dismissed.
“Hey Scotty,” I said. “I’ve been having trouble with people going out the wrong doors. I need you to stand here in front of these doors and make sure they go out this door instead.” That lasted tolerably well for about a week (although he quickly developed the habit of ducking out of the door he was guarding before his work was finished).
In the immediate, glowing aftermath of establishing that plan with Scotty, I ran across Christian, another boy wont to run, laughing uproariously, out the wrong doors, in the office. I’d seen him in in-school suspension before, arguing with the teacher, and here the boy was, waiting for a principal, so I didn’t figure another stern admonition would do any good. I tried a similar Dillon tack with him. That helped for a week or so, but he’s up to his old tricks again.
Just to show that I’m not only a door monitor, this week I received some new praise, in the newspaper’s B-section, front-page highlight of different students about to compete in the regional spelling bee. My student slated for competing had said that her favorite subject was language arts:
I’ve always liked to read and, although in past years I haven’t enjoyed the subject so much, this year I have a fantastic teacher who makes the subject extremely fun.
She is one of several impressive writers and intellectuals on my roster this year. Another one–you might remember him from this word study–asked me yesterday if he could read the Bible for independent reading points.
We had just read and listened to Genesis 2 and 3, which I decided was necessary after students wrote responses to several questions about Robert Frost’s Nothing Gold Can Stay:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
One of the questions students could write about referred to the Eden line, but only a handful of students chose it, including one who mentioned something about Mary being kicked out of Eden and another who said that Frost must have really loved Eden and been really sad when she died. (The boy who will now be reading the Bible for a grade had written about it, too, but he even wrote LORD in capital letters.)
So I explained to each of my classes that, whether or not they or I value the Bible for religious reasons, it’s important to know the stories in the Bible in order to understand literature’s many allusions to it, and then we dove in. As I’d experienced before when reading Bible stories with them, every last one of the students was rather riveted.
It was extremely fun.
