On Friday student after student excitedly asked if I could talk yet. I began to think that maybe they had enjoyed my lack of verbal prowess on Thursday. Or maybe they’d liked the cheesy adverbs cartoon.
But while I assigned plenty of classwork for my students Friday, I still wasn’t ready to talk, at least not much. I wore this sign, just to keep things out there:
In the words of one particularly ornery student whose accent would rival any Southern belle’s, “He’s like June Carter told Johnny Cash, ‘I can’t sing because I’ve got the laryngitis.'”
It’s true; I couldn’t even talk. Instead, I wore a little sign, “NO VOICE TODAY,” and planned accordingly: silent reading followed by a cartoon about adverbs followed by a book talk by the librarian followed by book checkout and silent reading time in the library. Talk about a cake day! I got a pile of grading done, planned ahead, and skimmed Newsweek, Smithsonian, and National Geographic.
When he saw me, my principal chuckled, “Too much cold air riding bike?” to which I couldn’t reply, “I haven’t even ridden my bike at all this week!” what with being sick and otherwise scheduled. I’m beginning to think that I’m sick because I haven’t exercised in the last six days. What makes matters a little more sobering is that in the coming week, too–Thanksgiving week, no less!–I probably won’t get to ride. At all.
Panic! Panic! Panic! Does this mean I have to go jogging? Panic! Panic! Panic!
I may need to take a sick day tomorrow.
I started coming down with the sore-throat-cold stuff last evening, but breakfast this morning seemed to put things right, and so after breakfast, I walked briskly towards my ride meeting place. I’d allowed fifteen minutes for the little trek, but six minutes away from our apartment, I saw a huge flock of birds headed over me. Remembering the months of childhood photos of me always–always–sporting an Orioles ball cap due to an unfortunate bird pooping incident, I reached into my bag for my hat.
It felt funny, for a hat, and in fact it wasn’t a hat. It was M’s keys and wallet, which she would need while I was gone. I turned around and speed-walked home. I ended up driving back down to the meeting place and getting there just in time.
This potentially poopy story actually has nothing to do with getting sick, or calling in sick. As I was thinking about calling in sick, though, I remembered Rick, with whom I mowed grass at a university one summer.
He was probably forty years old, and a very generous man. On my first hot day on the job, he bought me a sixty-four ounce Mt. Dew slushy. He also bought me a two-gallon water cooler, and lemons and sugar and ice, to make lemonade. “Work smarter, not harder,” he always said, although I would often find myself questioning his adherence to either option.
Anyway, towards the end of the summer, he met a woman online and fell head over heels for her. In fact, he drove most of the way across the country just to visit her. “Just between you and me,” he told me the week before, “I’m going to be out sick next week.”
Monday morning, sure enough, Rick was not there. My boss came out to where I was gassing up a mower. “Rick called in sick,” he said. “Left a message. Sounded like death. He’ll be out for a while, I guess.”
Now, out sick as I may tomorrow be–not my first choice, since not being at school is a whole lot more work than showing up–I need to decide how to order my students around. At the very least, I’ll post instructions on my classroom blog, for them to check and presumably follow. I’m tempted, too, to video myself giving the instructions and even reprimanding specific students for their predictably ornery behavior.
Or maybe I’ll just go in.
If it is anything, teaching is a chance to be around a smattering of smatterabilities. A sampling:
Often as I walk my class back from the cafeteria, I tap the shoulder of one student whose father died three years ago. Of course, since I’m in middle school, I tap her shoulder opposite me in hopes she’ll look the wrong direction to see who did it. She never once has looked in that wrong direction, however, and now she doesn’t even look. Instead, she asks me, “Do I need to call your mommy again? I have her number on speed dial.”
Back in the classroom and wholly unpredicted by (silly) me were some of the creative responses to the assigned spelling words from last week, which happened to precipitate these two sentences that more-attentive students might have giggled about before–or maybe after–writing:
Homework gaffs aside, however, I as usual have had to reach far into my bag of the bizarre to maintain student motivation. This week, my hot prize for responses to questions about Tom Sawyer, which I’m reading to all of my classes, was squirts of germ-x. I have a whole slew of little bottles of the stuff, courtesy of another teacher whose summertime employer Wal–Mart so generously donated them. “If you win, you get to sanitize your hands,” I told the class–and let me tell you, the grubby paws shot up.
And finally, I’ve gotten a kick this week out of my latest joke. With a sober look on my face, I tell students, “Unfortunately, due to bad weather [we’ve had no bad weather], school yesterday was canceled, and so the school board has decided to extend the school year two weeks further into summer. You might get out of school by July.”
Today I told that to another class I was supervising while their teacher was called away briefly, and one student looked at another with a look of appalled horror on her face. I heard her friend explaining that I had to have been joking since I’d said that we didn’t have school yesterday. “But we did have school yesterday, right?” she asked, still uncertain.
In situations like these it’s best that I turn away so that I don’t laugh directly in students’ faces; I don’t know how the rest of the conversation went.
But I was satisfied.
It was priceless, for a penny.
The 1876 preface to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer states that the story events took place “thirty or forty years ago.” “So,” I asked my third period students, “When did the story happen?”
“The Civil War!”
“Worl…Wait a minute…World War I, or II or something?”
“1876!”
“Now hold on here,” I had to jump back in. The intellectual auras of their faces looked as dull as their answers suggested. I had to respond quickly to the persistent deficiency of seventh grade motivation.
Just then I remembered the sixteen pennies in my pocket, the remains of this morning’s homeroom electoral college activity. I removed my keys and said, “The sound you are about to hear is not my keys.” I stuck my hand into the pocket and shook the change around. “If you can tell me the answer, I will give you a piece of real money from my pocket.”
(I had to mention that the money was real because I routinely offer hundreds of thousands of dollars to whoever can answer my questions. That usually gets the hands raised pretty quickly, even though students are quick to assure each other that “he never paid me, and he’s not going to pay you.”)
“If the book was published in 1876, and the events happened thirty or forty years before that, when did the story events happen?”
A boy in the back raised his hand and hit the nail on the head: “1836.”
“To?” I asked.
“1836 to 1846,” he said.
“Exactly right,” I said, digging out a penny from my linted stash. I looked at it closely; it was from 1976.
“This,” I told the boy ceremoniously, “is a penny from exactly one hundred years after The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published. Congratulations!” I may be making it up, but I think I remember hearing circulate a collective gasp of awe.
The act was really too good to try only once, so in the next period I again offered a piece of real money from my pocket in exchange for the correct dates. One girl in particular appeared eager, and she knew the correct answer.
“Congratulations,” I told her, producing another penny. This one was much shinier; it was from 1995. “When were you born?” I asked her.
“1995,” she said.
“Well, congratulations again,” I said. “This penny is from the year you were born.” I handed her the penny.
She seemed excited, but another student said, “It’s still just a penny.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I’m taking this home and putting it on my door.”
Just priceless, I tell you.
Even the random, rather mundane moments of daily life deserve, well, illumination, even if such concocting of connectedness amounts to nothing more than recognizing spirited miscongruence.
Last week, after biking to school (my second time), washing up, and putting on my shirt and tie in the faculty restroom, I reported to my morning hall duty. As usual, I stood back to see the normal gamut of sleepy-student behavior at that time of day: boys insulting each others’ sports teams’ performance in yesterday’s games, girls overcome with emotion at seeing their friends again after their seventeen-hour separation, coffee-loaded teachers straggling towards their rooms.
It was one of these teachers (minus the coffee) who I noticed in particular. He had stopped at my classroom door one day, after news leaked that I was going to be riding my bike thirteen miles to school, to say, “You make me look bad, you know,” he grinned. “I live, like, just across the field from school. Less than a mile. And I drive.”
“Hmmmm,” I said.
“And you know what’s worse?” he continued. “My wife–she teaches here, too–drives, too. Separately. I should be so embarrassed,” he said.
“Yes, you should be,” I chuckled back.
So anyway, last week, there I was, attending my morning duty after my invigorating ride, watching but not hearing CNN through a classroom doorway, and here approaching me was this same teacher. We greeted each other, and as he passed by, I noticed his shirt collar buttons.
The fact that they were so nicely buttoned seemed really to stand out.
I finished my duty, conducted my first class, and then went to the bathroom where I realized that when I’d dressed myself after my ride, I’d forgotten all about my own collar buttons. Could that somehow have been why I noticed his?
Such connections do or don’t happen daily with students, too. Take Friday:
To help them brainstorm topics for their persuasive essays, I instructed my students to make a list of five to ten things that they are concerned about. “For example,” I told them, “I am concerned about how much soda people drink, the amount of TV that people watch, and our nation’s huge war budget.”
A few minutes later, after giving them time to scrawl their thoughts, I asked if anyone wanted to share what they’d written. One little girl in the back raised her hand.
“Yes?” I asked. “What is one of your concerns?”
“Mr. C,” she said, “Why do penguins eat their poop?”
She was dead serious, but it was all I could do to suggest that maybe something else on her list would be more appropriate for a persuasive topic.
Persuasive poop’s irreverent surfacing under the guise of persuasion hasn’t been my only recent foray into relatively meaningless free association.
At the church we visited on Sunday, the minister talked about the church being the bride of Christ. For emphasis, he had with him on stage a bridal gown on a stand. It was quite glamorous, really, a sleeveless, strapless, well-trained gown with a voluminous bodice, which at one point he patted almost affectionately, as if he thought it was out of place.
Right then and there, I decided that at the next wedding that M and I attend, I, not she, would accept the usher’s arm when we are escorted to our seats.
Wouldn’t that be just hilarious?
And random, too!
This morning, after weeks of waiting for the county to get around to mounting my SmartBoard, I emailed my principal to see if I could do it myself.
Now, I must admit that the long wait time for the installation was not entirely not my fault. After all, I’d forgotten–for about two weeks–that the principal was waiting for me to tell him just where the Board was to be located. He actually had to come ask me about it, ultimately, since I’d forgotten he was awaiting my word.
So when I emailed the principal this morning, I couldn’t just say, “I’m sick and tired of waiting. I’ll do it myself.” Instead, I wrote that I was “very eager” for the Board and “confident” that I could hang it myself. “I’m fine with that,” he wrote back.
Two hours later, during my planning period, my shadow–a college student “exploring education” with me for the first time–and I bustled down to the custodians’ office and rustled up a drill, some screws, and a two-by-four abandoned by a building crew months ago to sit in the way of the lawnmower man, who was thrilled to pawn off the board to me.
At lunchtime I found a moment to start screwing things up, onto the wall. I measured, marked, and was just about to drill when in walked–guess who–the county’s SmartBoard installer man.
I now have a mounted SmartBoard that works wonders and was installed with grace and dignity.
Being a teacher is about enjoying quirkiness, which crops up everywhere.
A student with whom I have never before spoken walked past me today as he was leaving another classroom. “The difference about twins,” he informed me, “is the time when they’re born.”
Today, too, I graded spelling homework, which included one student’s definition of rodent: “a animal type usally not seen very often unless its dead on the side of the road.”
Then, at the end of the day, I dismissed class by saying, “Enjoy your evening, because when you come back tomorrow I’m going to make you as miserable as possible.”
“Yeah, right,” said one boy. “You always say that, and you never do.”
What kind words.
Depending on how you look at it, I’ve had a tremendously successful day.
That’s not to say that M didn’t bemoan my computer-glazed look every time she passed, or that N spent none of the day clinging to my chair looking imploringly up at me while I neglected her diaper. But at least I was having a pretty good (at least okay) time–and completed preparations for a “persuasive techniques” unit that’s going to be a lot of fun.
Looking at sample magazine ads, Super Bowl commercials, and presidential campaign ads isn’t everyday fare for my English students. Indeed, this unit is part of a broader paradigm shift for me, one born out of necessity, since I’ve already taught basically everything there is to teach in seventh grade English, and the school year is only one ninth of the way through.
My new tactic is that instead of teaching English–a rather boring thing, when you think of it–I’m going to teach whatever strikes me as interesting. Of course, in the process of learning about whatever, I’ll make sure that important literary concepts are being absorbed by my little childers. In this unit, for example, aside from comprehensively and captivatingly covering all elements of one entire state standard, students are also going to read a nonfiction article about campaign ads and read the newspaper while they clip examples of facts and opinions.
I think it’s a great new approach, except that I refuse to commit my every Saturday to spewing forth tremendous lesson plans.
To make myself feel a little better about today’s endeavor, I did some math: I spent probably 8 hours preparing what will perhaps take a total of three hours to teach. Since I’ll teach it to all three of my classes, I’ve now prepared for 9 hours of class time. I’ll probably end up with a few hours of grading the resulting work produced by students, which means that all told, this unit will have sapped over 10 hours of my personal time in exchange for only 9 hours of classroom time.
Now, this seemed a horridly depressing preparation-teaching time ratio, until I considered that I have 58 students. This means that my 10+ hours of personal time will become a total of 174 hours of student work time.
And that doesn’t sound too bad.
My brilliant and eccentric student W weeks ago promised to bring a strawberry rhubarb pie “on Monday.” On the following Monday, when I asked him about it, he said, “I didn’t say which Monday.”
As it turned out, our last day of school materialized this past Friday. He walked into my room with something in his hand, but as I looked at it, I realized that it was no pie.
“Here, Mr. Jacobs,” he said, bringing it to me. It was an aluminum foil helmet, held together by black duct tape. Outcropping from the helmet were a paper plume, a braided orange dreadlock, a blade or flag or something, a chin strap (again, aluminum foil and black duct tape), several curly alpaca locks in different colors, and, on the back, a baggie (“Contents: Hair-free head”) to which were attached several homemade buttons, including one stating that “Children are the only thing on Earth you can take with you to Heaven.” The sign on the front says, “Mr. Jacobs’ Teaching Crown of Ninja.”
It was a hot day, so I could only wear in for short spells, but I put it on every time I went out in the hallway. One secretary said, “That is beautiful.”
In honor of it being the last day, I gave a small “concert” for “interested” students (the rest could go outside and play in the steamingly hot sun). One girl kept pestering me: “Write a song about me!” Another one chimed in, “No, write one about me, just me!”
“Let me think,” I said, and sang another song or two until I found an angry country song that I wrote long ago called “Cold, Cold Heart.” I sang that for them in a very angry, growling sort of voice. They seemed satisfied, if put-out in a good-natured way.
Aside from the teary goodbyes (and yes, there were many, many end-of-the-year tears, shed even by tough boys who were reassured by their female counterparts that “real men cry”) and the teaching crown, a student gave me a really nice goodbye note (click on it to make it large enough to read).
(The “lifesize Llama” she refers to was a huge picture she helped to draw to help advertise our spring festival booth, where students could donate towards buying a llama for Heifer International. She drew a little “llamamometer” on it to keep track of the money, which turned out to be enough for nearly 1.5 llamas.)
At the end of the day, I put on my crown, gathered up my guitar, and stuffed the note into my pocket, and headed home, happy about summer and emotionally exhausted, both.
And far from disappointed, too. Strawberry rhubarb pie? I can make one of those myself.
