I think I’m funny.

If I turn down a request to go to the bathroom, I also add, “But thanks for asking.” When a student asks to see the nurse, I say, “Are you dead?” If it’s time to go to lunch and I’m reading aloud to the class, I’ll work dismissal into a sentence from the book: “‘I have a job for you if you want’ lunch.”

(Yesterday a boy said, “I was scanning, trying to find out when you would do that, but you surprised me.”)

Maybe it’s clear why I enjoy seventh grade so much, other than the fact that I’ve never taught anything different: eight years of being around people with like maturity levels has freed me to be my quirky self.

Take this week.

One “authors’ organizational pattern” that I have to teach is “generalization.” I don’t really know what that means, so I made up an explanation for my students:

“How old are you?” I ask the person at the top of the name-card pile. In one class this week it was R–, a serene horse lover whose academic work ethic is rivaled only by her also-too-excellent friends.

“Uh, twelve,” she said.

“And what is your favorite vegetable?”

“Vegetable?” she blushed and smiled into her notebook. “Uh, I … don’t have one.”

“Did you say brussel sprouts?”

While she protested, I drew her in stick figure on the board, then “age 12” and then “Loves B.S.”

Chatter erupted.

In the name of further exciting the world about such organizational patterns, I told my students yesterday that it was National Cause and Effect Day. “It’s always the first Thursday after President’s Day,” I said, “and not many people know about it because I made it up.”

“It’s also National Streaking Day,” someone [incorrectly] piped up.

“Thank you, L–,” I said, and continued: “Now, to begin talking about this type of authors’ organizational pattern, we’re going to look at a few comic, umm, strips.”

I had to wait a bit to continue.

A bit later, between classes, I conducted my normal beat into the boys’ bathroom across the hallway, where, as usual, the usual suspects were hanging out and otherwise causing usual annoyances; this time a urinal was again continuously flushing to overflow.

I corralled all five of the boys in attendance before me.

“Who did that?” I asked in a very serious tone. “None of you, right? Not J–, not C–, not you, either, right? Well guess what, guys: I’m tired of this bathroom crap. Now go away.”

Not one cracked a smile; they scurried off.

On parent conference day, two parents told me they’d both graduated from my building when it was still a high school. Their son, I’d just told them, while not always on the ball, is bright, fun, and a good writer.


“Does it feel the same or different?” I asked the dad.


“The same,” he said. “It still sucks.”


A while later into my room popped two women, one nondescriptly obese and the other grey-haired and wearing a red shirt declaring “It’s bucking fun.” They looked dreary and rundown.


“What’s this with M– getting all these demerits,” the older lady demanded after telling me they were M’s mother and grandmother.


“She is a cheerful and smart student,” I said, and then explained her disruptive talking and noise making.


“Things is changed,” the grandmother continued. “We used to just get in trouble. Now they get demerits and demerits. It’s stupid. M hates school because of the demerits. She doesn’t want to come because of you and the demerits.”


“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “I hope her year improves. She has said that to me, too, that she really likes working with you around the farm.”


“She loves animals. We had a pig we just butchered; she’d whistle to it like a dog and it’d bark at her. Now we have five little pigs, and she’s got them to where they’ll put their front feet up on a ball, like this.”


I reached into the shelf tray where I’d just stashed M’s late, most recent essay about a virtue she wanted to gain, and said, “Here is an essay she wrote for me the other week; she wrote that she wants to be kinder.”


They looked the essay over and handed it back.


“And math is stupid,” the grandma said. “It used to be taught just math, but now they teach it so it’s stupid, and you can’t understand it. It don’t make no sense. You can’t help kids with it cause they explain it so different it’s stupid.”


“I think the math teacher is in his classroom now, too, if you want to ask him about it,” I said. They mumble grumbled and moseyed out.

Mr. CJ,


Z– told me there will no longer be any AR tests because you want the children to read because they want to.  I think that is fantastic!!!  Thank you for your desire to instill a love of reading in the children instead of limiting them to AR books with the outcome of taking a test.  I know that Z– and I have struggled over the years finding books he wants to read and the realizing there is no AR test.  It has frustrated me to tell him no to reading a particular book because there was no test.  So again, thank you very, very much!

It’s a dead giveaway when nearby students look at another student quietly occupied and then look at the teacher, so I walked quickly but stealthily back the center aisle, and now the offending cell phone user, who should have been reading his novel, has a three-day vacation from school.

Another giveaway is leaning one’s torso back or to one side, or maybe twisting one’s back uncomfortably, all the while looking down into one’s lap to tweet or text or do whatever; it works about as well as the proverbial ostrich’s hiding from the world by ducking his head into the sand and raring his rear.


It looks sort of like this…presidential example:

Yesterday and today I read most of Readicide by Kelly Gallagher.

I immediately decided both to ramp up individual reading time in class and never again to award points for reading. Instead, that individual reading time is for fun, graded (if at all) just for doing it.

In my daily homework email, I noted the cancellation of the book points requirement and stated, “READ BECAUSE YOU WANT TO.”

A parent wrote back, “I love the fact that you just said ‘READ BECAUSE YOU WANT TO.’ L– certainly does!!!! Thanks.”

(In an unrelated email, another parent made my day by writing, “C– says that you are an AWESOME teacher!! I hope there are more of you next year!!”)

And I’m going to scrap those units I’d planned about sentence fragments. Who cares about sentence fragments!

And when I teach the state test prep group twice a week after school starting in March, I’m going to read a book with them. It will be fun, not drudgery.

I kept L after class on Thursday to tell her, “You were great in class today. Thanks!” It’d been a pleasant surprise; she’d been an annoying whiner and lazy as all get-out for several weeks.

“Yeah, my mom said she’d get me some tickets to a concert if I bring my grades up.”

Friday morning before class I pulled her aside again. “I’m calling your mom after class today if you are as on task as you were yesterday. You’re weirding me out.”

L grinned; not two hours later, her mom sounded glad to hear from me.

I hate missing school, planned or unplanned. Taking a sick day is a anti-plague in itself; the thought of leaving my yelping whiners in the care of some unknown, probably rather untrained and certainly underpaid Substitute with lesson plans painstakingly clearly written and plenty of office referral forms is enough to send my heightened fever plummeting to all-time lows.

But over the past week I took two and a half days off, and lo and behold, just like M said would happen, the world didn’t end.

I almost thought it did, there for a bit yesterday and today. My Wednesday sub left a note for me, which I found sorting through my desktop Thursday morning: “I was surprised that not a one said the Pledge of Allegiance. I was told that you told them they don’t have to. I explained they should do it out of respect. They thought it is a big joke.”

“Guys,” I reminded my class of my expectation, which we see and do together daily. “I don’t say the Pledge for personal and religious reasons; you are certainly welcome to if you want to, but you are not required to. But let’s all stand and at least be quiet out of respect.” We all did, as usual, and no student, as usual, recited along with the principal on the public address system.

A couple hours later in a team meeting, another teacher reported that she’d checked in with my sub on Wednesday and she was fine, “although,” and here the teacher gave me her all-too-common hairy eyeball she tries to disguise as overwhelming concern, “she was understandably upset that your class wouldn’t even stand for or say the Pledge.”

“Yeah, I talked to them about that,” I said.

“We can’t make them, though,” the civics teacher said.

That night I looked it up: Yup, in 1943 the Supreme Court ruled that public school students can’t be required to say the Pledge–but I found no highest-court ruling that gave that same protection to public school teachers. Some sources suggested that teachers were considered exempt along with their students under that same 1943 ruling, and that some lower courts had ruled to that end, but I lacked certain documentation.

I thought about writing down the ACLU’s phone number, just in case.

I thought even harder about doing that when after this morning’s Pledge the principal announced that the school was starting a new Pledge procedure: Starting next week, the person making the morning announcements would start the Pledge, and then each classroom teacher would lead his or her class in saying it.

He’d found me out, apparently, was incensed, and was on a witch hunt. Next week, I just knew, he and the other administrators would come to my room to observe “just for the heck of it,” and there I would be, not saying the Pledge. That would be insubordination, I was sure, and my lovely family and I would be homeless in no time flat.

I thought fast. “You know I don’t say the Pledge,” I told my class. “Would anyone like to be in charge of leading it next week?”

Nothing but apathetic stares.

While my students exacerbated their Friday-morning brain cramps, I stewed and steamed a while to myself. Could I add a few words to make saying the Pledge bearable to me? I figured “I (really wish I could) pledge allegiance…” might do, as would “I’m required to say that I pledge allegiance…,” but finally I decided I just needed to speak straight up with the principal.

And during my planning period, I did. “Do you think I might be able to receive a waiver from the new Pledge procedure?” I asked. “I don’t say the Pledge for personal and religious reasons.”

He was exceptionally gracious and understanding. “If no one in your room wants to lead it, standing in silence during that time is fine,” he said. “I won’t ask you to do anything you’re not comfortable with.”

Is there such a thing as principallegiance?

I exchanged letters with students today on this first day back from our five-day Thanksgiving weekend. I wrote a flowery note about break always going by so quickly and spending time with family and the fact that “being on break also gave me time to think about the time I get to spend with each of you: almost 90 minutes every day for an entire school year. That is a LOT of time! I want each of those days to be meaningful, for my sake and for your sakes. I hope that as we continue the school year we will be able to show appreciation and respect for each other so that we can end the year satisfied.”

Here is the response from one of my last-period students: “I went to my aunt and uncle’s church this weekend and during sunday school we had to fill out this paper that said on certain day we had to do something nice for someone and on thursday it said you had to be nice to the teacher you have last in a day of school. I hope it snows Wednesday and we get out of school because that will be very hard to do.”