A student asked to see the school nurse today for a rash on his arm. He was back soon, with a smiley-faced note: “Unknown tubular skin disturbance. Possible amputation required.”

“Class,” I said soberly, putting down The Wind in the Willows. “We have a problem we need to deal with. We need to amputate C’s arm. C, come up here and lie down on a desk.”

He came up and lay down on the floor.

“I need a sharp cutting instr…. Oh, here are my keys and my nail clippers,” I said. The rest of the students began flocking forward.

“You hold the keys here,” I said to another student, placing them in his hand right above C’s arm. “I’ll push them down with my foot.”

The excitement that tensed the air as I lifted my foot over the keys was answered, when I then merely stepped onto the floor beside the arm and reached down to retrieve my keys, with chuckled groans of convincingly real disappointment.

Immediately after I rearranged the seating assignments for three excessively talkative students, another excessive talker pointed towards one of his talkative friends and asked if he could be moved “over there.”

“No, but thanks for asking,” I said quite kindly.

“Oh, you’re welcome,” he replied.

***

“Please speak into the microphone,” I said to a student who had approached my desk.

“That’s not a microphone. That’s a pencil,” she said.

“No, it’s a microphone. Talk straight into it, please.”

“I will not. It’s a pencil.”

“Okay then. What do you need?”

“I was wondering–“

“What? I can’t hear you without the microphone.”

“I WAS WONDERING–“

“I STILL CAN’T HEAR YOU. PLEASE USE THE MICROPHONE.”

***

As I was sitting at my desk and students were “walking the circle” (“It’s a square,” they keep insisting) to get their blood moving and pick up a copy of The Wind in the Willows, one student came up to me and lightly touched the top of my head.

“See, he’s not totally bald,” she said to her classmates. “He has some hair up there.”

It was a beginning-of-the-school-year, budget-crunched, Get-in-the-mood, teachers! pop psychology of nothingness event: local motivational speakers.

I’d heard the husband “entertain” before at a company meeting, an appearance during which he alluded to my dour expression; this time he told many of the same jokes but was also joined by his wife.

And they won me over. Well, she did, anyway. Especially at the very end, when she talked about her ongoing battle with a cancer that, I learned just the other day, is now unstoppable.

(Speaking of cancer, one of the activities they led involved writing a famous person’s name on a name tag, and putting the tag on someone else’s back. That person, then, had to figure out who was on the tag by asking only yes or no questions. I turned out to be Marilyn Monroe–got it in three questions, with the help of a hint–and the colleague who wore my tag was Lance Armstrong. “Am I a male?” she asked another teacher. Then, “Am I an athlete?” And then, “Does my sport involve a ball?” That did it.)

Three highlights from the speakers and the discussions they organized:
…Everyone has a story–to write or be written. Each of our lives is a story.
…Each person needs to ask, “Who am I? Why do I matter?”
…Middle school teachers are more concerned with students than with content.

Speaking of budget-crunching, the bulk of another kick-off in-service for all of the county’s secondary English teachers was led by a central office student intern who hasn’t yet student taught. That afternoon’s only redemption was the bittersweet irony of my ride: I carpooled with the coordinator of last year’s “our school goes green” campaign…in her huge SUV.

One of my English-teaching colleagues has a cousin with a published work of surfing fiction, a book I agreed to read with an eye towards approving it for school use so that his cousin can come talk to our students.

But there’s a problem. The book’s, well….

As another author–I did some snooping–wrote in a critique of the publishing company, “When I read my first PublishAmerica book my feelings were a blend of embarrassment, anger and disbelief. The writer had obviously worked hard to put the story together and it had the makings of an entertaining read. It reminded me so much of my own first and only attempt at writing a novel – abundant clichés, suspect word selection, contrived scenes and wooden characters existing in a plot that lacked cohesion. It was in fact a story barely at the first draft stage, complete with spelling and grammatical errors. How could an ethical, self-respecting publishing house allow this to happen, I wondered?”

My colleague’s relative’s book really does have an interesting story line, but otherwise it’s a sinker (sorry, had to cast that out there) that I’d be ashamed to use for anything more than editing practice even in a classroom full of students who write summer memories essays about riding “fairest wheels” and “sudways” and going to “barbara shops.”

How do I break that to my colleague?

My middle school is one of only two within an hour’s radius that made AYP last year. Believe me, we’re proud–but not unaware of how closely we squeaked by.

See, to make AYP each year we have to reduce our state test failure rate by 10% from the year before. For example, if last year 80% of our students passed the state tests, then this year 82% would need to pass in order for us to achieve AYP.

According to my principal, at the end of last year we were one failure too many. That one failure would cost our school status and esteem and, well, AYP–and so the administration sat down with the documents to see what they could see.

And they saw…a test-failing student who had been suspended for 21 days. Since the law states that any student who misses school for 15 consecutive days is therefore un-enrolled in school (and since any new students or re-enrollees after October don’t count), that one failing student’s test score did not count towards our overall “success” rate.

Which means we made AYP.

The moral to the tale? Suspend potentially failing students for at least 15 days.

This is one of many passages that I find inspiring from Frank McCourt‘s Teacher Man:

He paused and looked at me. Mr. McCourt, you never liked me, did you?

Never liked you, Bob? Are you joking? It was a joy to have you in my class. Jonathan said you drove the gloom from the room.

Tell him, McCourt, tell him the truth. Tell him how he brightened your days, how you told your friends about him, what an original he was, how you admired his style, his good humor, his honesty, his courage, how you would have given your soul for a son like him. And tell him how beautiful he was and is in every way, how you loved him then and love him now. Tell him.

I did, and he was speechless and I didn’t give a tinker’s damn what people thought on Lower Broadway when they saw us in a long warm embrace, the high school teacher and the large Jewish Future Farmer of America.