When I show videos in my classroom I use an old VCR atop my newer DVD/VCR combo because, as I without premeditation informed our technology resources teacher, the new VCR makes “dirty noises.”

Yesterday morning, in the presence of another teacher, she said, “I’m still chuckling about your dirty noises.”

“She told me about it,” said the other teacher, also laughing–”and [the assistant principal], too.”

“You’re the topic of the lunchroom,” the techie said.

I hung my head in (albeit mock) shame as I left the room, but only until she added, “You, of all people!”

My current morning hall duty station puts me in direct contact with much of my school’s sixth and seventh grades population even before the school day begins. Yesterday, with my new glasses firmly serving their own duty, I became keenly aware that students were not ignoring me as usual but were looking a second time before regaining focus on the floor tiles, slight smirks on many of their faces.

A colleague passing by said, “You look like a different person.”

“Nice glasses, Mr. J,” a few students said to me.

“You look really good in those,” said another.

The comments continued throughout the day. It was similar to after I had my ears pierced: the whispers of “glasses” circulating around me were corporeal.

“Hey, those look nice,” said my dandy colleague who has so far remained true to his dubbing 2012 the Year of the Three-Piece Suit. “Are they Ray-Bans?”

“Uh, that sounds right,” I said. “I think so.” (Later I took the glasses off to check the brand name on the side, but I couldn’t read the print without them on.)

“Nerd,” said another student. “Where’s your pocket protector?”

“Are those your permanent ones?”

“Take the glasses off. You look weird.”

“I liked your old ones better.”

O, the agony of seventh grade. I’m just glad I’m not in middle school!

While perusing the employment application for a local religious school to which I am not applying, I found that applicants are required to write “I agree”–or a short explanation for why they don’t agree–beside each of a couple dozen items from the church group’s statement of faith, including:

We place our hope in the reign of God and its fulfillment in the day when Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. He will gather his church, which is already living under the reign of God. We await God’s final victory, the end of this present age of struggle, the resurrection of the dead, and a new heaven and a new earth. There the people of God will reign with Christ in justice, righteousness, and peace for ever and ever.

and:

We believe that Jesus Christ calls us to discipleship, to take up our cross and follow him. Through the gift of God’s saving grace, we are empowered to be disciples of Jesus, filled with his Spirit, following his teachings and his path through suffering to new life. As we are faithful to his way, we become conformed to Christ and separated from the evil in the world.

Taking the cake, though, is the proclamation We commit ourselves to tell the truth, to give a simple yes or no, and to avoid the swearing of oaths… particularly since at the end of the form is a signature line following this:

If employed by ___, do you promise to give this work priority, to labor faithfully, to exemplify and promote the principles and standards held by this institution, and furthermore, would you agree that at any time you should find yourself out of harmony with the guiding principles and philosophy, you would frankly acknowledge the same and relinquish your position without prejudice….?

Promise? Couldn’t someone of conscience just say, “Sure”?

I’m not quite as concerned about the working doctrines of the public school system, which have been state standards and No Child Left Behind requirements. These I am glad to see changing; they are, apparently, flexible with the times, not quite as hell or heaven bent.

And I’m glad that my disregard for some current habits doesn’t have negatively eternal ramifications. Recently two parents of two of my most stellar students stopped by at different times during a parent conference day, curious:

“Could you explain, please,” they each asked me nicely, “the benchmark test score that ___ received the other week?”

“Oh yes,” I said cheerfully. “All of my students did poorly on that test, and it’s my fault. I thought it more important to spend more time on some other things rather than what was on the test.”

This was extremely true, in fact–I actually hadn’t even looked at the test ahead of time.

“You mean you didn’t teach to the test?”

“No, I guess not,” I said. “But don’t worry; those scores had little impact on grades.”

They both seemed relieved; one of them joked, “Someone’s going to report you.”

I wasn’t too concerned, especially since even being reported for following my conscience would be far better than having a private-school God scowling over my shoulder for not agreeing quite rightly.

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.

“Mr. Jacobs, who do you think will win the Super Bowl?” asked my homeroom students. “The Giants or the Patriots?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never really been into soccer.”

“It’s not soccer–it’s football!” they protested, their mouths dropping open while they whispered to each other, “You mean he doesn’t even know–?”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, still. I’ve never really seen the point of running around while bouncing a ball and trying to throw it through a little metal hoop.”

One girl in particular could barely close her mouth enough to stare at me intently and ask, “Are you serious?”

I confessed that I wasn’t, but since my classes had just read Roald Dahl’s Television–and I am convinced by every word of it and preached to them accordingly–I just might have been able to play it up a little longer and had them all believing in my weird out-of-touchedness.

But they probably already believe that anyway.

My morning gym duty partner greeted me yesterday with a philosophical question. “Why do you teach? Someone asked me this weekend why I teach, and I couldn’t come up with an answer.”

I laughed. “The money. And I’d really have to hate it to give up the schedule. But we need some snow.”

“That makes me feel better,” she said. “The teacher in the classroom next to me said he enjoys preparing students to be good citizens who will shape the world. He was serious, too.”

I gained clarity about my motivation as the day progressed, and I began introducing the next “agreeable task”–writing an essay–with my newly found personal awareness: “You know, students,” I said, “Someone asked me why I teach. The answer is that I know of no other job where I can inflict so much psychological damage.”

From the mutterings a student’s voice emerged: “I’d believe you if you’d tell me what all those big words mean.”

That was in my last class of the day, an understandably restless bunch who need to be up and about. They were a bit excited right then because I’d just promised that if they behaved well for the remaining thirty-five minutes of class, I’d take them to the faculty bathroom to see the promotional hand-washing poster demonstrating one of the persuasive techniques we’d just reviewed.

They really worked hard to behave, with that promise, and when one student ventured (veered, more like it) off task, another student hissed to him, “Sit down, or we won’t get to go on the field trip to the bathroom!”

“Is it a boys’ or girls’ bathroom?” someone wondered.

“It’s both,” someone else answered.

“Actually, teachers aren’t ‘boys’ or ‘girls,'” I said. “We’re ‘men’ and ‘women.'”

At the appointed time we herded down the hallway, and I opened wide the tiny room’s door displaying the poster that “appeals to plain folks.” Then we returned to class.

“That was fun,” I overheard. “We should do more field trips.”

An email to all school division employees this morning from a teacher at the vocational center declared, “The Restaurant Careers Class is demonstrating the butchering of a hog today. You may join the live stream by clicking on the following link.”

Under the signature was referenced Philippians 4:13, so I looked it up: “I can do all this through him who gives me strength.”

Later came this followup email: “We are having some technical difficulties with the stream. Hope to have it worked out shortly.”

Hmmm. I’m glad my lesson plans weren’t based on that.

For a while, there, the prosecuting attorney hadn’t yet emailed me back, and the sheriff hadn’t yet shown up with a warrant for my arrest, so my fate was pretty much in limbo. I was a bit anxious.

But let me explain.

After Christmas break, in response to a gang “beat-in” that happened in my school in November, my school’s faculty gathered for a gang awareness training. The four members of the area’s gang-fighting police task force had come to show us pictures of local tagging, drawings to look for, and patterns of behavior to note. Watching the presenting officer pace like a caged tiger was unnerving, but the content of his lecture was even more so.

He showed us how gang signs make it into mainstream media, like in this photo (note the hand “c”):

(And later, feeling all sleuthy, I found a Sureños hand sign on this album featured on NPR.)

Of course we saw pictures of gangsters displaying their guns and showing them off to very young children, too, and video of a real beat-in. It was sickening stuff, for sure; one teacher commented to me later that gangs are “pure evil.”

“Yes,” I said. “But at least it’s obviously so.”

I don’t know that he caught the nuance of my take on evil; I’m sometimes so caught up my own failings that I don’t have time (or occasion, thank goodness) to worry about gangs.

Not that they haven’t been on my mind since back in in the fall, when my school made local news headlines after a twelve-year-old boy was arrested for leading the alleged beat-in.

“Fears of gang violence are at an all-time high,” one TV reporter had said in her coverage of the news, a statement way overblown if not entirely untrue. Shucks, I am the teacher who broke up the beat-in, which had happened in the bathroom across the hall from my classroom: “Boys, stop–and go to class.” In fact, I hadn’t even known what I’d interrupted was even related to the much-publicized gang incident until a week or two later, when I received a subpoena to testify against the arrested, alleged beat-in leader.

I headed off to the court lobby on the appointed day and read from David Copperfield until the gang task force came out and told me the case had been continued, and then I went on my merry way to Lowe’s.

As I drove down a one-way street through town, I saw a boy wearing ear buds approaching on his bike from an alley. I guess he knew he was crossing a one-way street, so he only looked for cars in one direction, but it was the wrong direction. I slowed when I first saw him and easily stopped before we would have collided, but when he saw me he started and then mouthed, “Sorry.”

I would’ve hated to end a young person’s pleasant ride, even if the crash and burn would have been mainly his fault.

A month later, I again entered the courthouse. Would I even be called to testify? Should I be nervous? I’d testified in custody hearings before, summonsed by parents who believed that if I agreed that their child was not doing his homework, he’d be better off changing homes. The most recent time was the most embarrassing: not until I was actually testifying did it occur to me that it would have been a good idea to review my parent contact notes. All I could say when the attorney asked me if “Mom but not Dad” was in frequent contact about school work was, “Well, I’m not sure. Maybe.” How incompetent that made me feel!

For this gang beat-in trial, like all of the other times I’d been called to testify, I had been prepped in no way, other than when I introduced myself to the prosecuting attorney, who asked if I’d heard the boys say anything about gangs when I broke up the fight. I knew my answer to that question–No–but mainly my recollection about what I’d seen was not very clear. I decided that I would testify based on my initial beliefs regarding what I’d seen, that the accused and another boy were both throwing punches at the victim, even though I’d heard from the principal the next day that the arrested boy had claimed he was not the one punching.

It’s probably a documented dilemma for a witness in court: my desire to be definitively helpful outweighed any personal acceptance of the fuzziness and indecipherability of my memory, and when I was asked if any of the accused boy’s punches had landed on the victim, I said I believed so, yes.

I was soon excused and found myself driving down the same one-way street again on my way to drop off some tools at a friend’s house. However, I was so distracted by fear that I had mis-testified–I realized suddenly that I couldn’t have seen any of the accused boy’s punches land: I was behind him as I’d entered the bathroom–that when I reached the stop sign at the end of the street, I very nearly pulled out in front of another car. Assuming that the cross street was also one-way, I’d forgotten to look both ways.

Of greater concern to me was that I maybe had mis-influenced the accused boy’s destiny. In my state’s criminal laws regarding gangsters, just being a member in a gang is not illegal. However, committing any sort of crime–like a beat-in–in the name of the gang means that a gang member can be charged not only for the beat-in, which would likely be classified as a misdemeanor, but also for a felony of gang participation. In short, if the accused boy did not actually land any punches on the victim, that would perhaps spare him a conviction of assault which, more importantly, might mean he would also avoid being tagged a felon.

I knew what I had to do: I went back to the courtroom. Luckily for me, just leaving the courthouse was a member of the gang task force.

“What happens if I need to amend my testimony?” I asked him. We headed back up the the courtroom, and while he entered to convey my testimonial adjustment, I continued reading Dickens; soon he came out and told me I was again excused.

But I still didn’t rest easy. How could I be sure that the gang task force officer accurately conveyed my message to the right people? How was I to know that I hadn’t totally ticked off the judge and prosecuting attorney wasn’t now on the “Most-Wanted Perjurers” top ten list?

To make matters worse, I was about to begin a term of jury duty: Would I find myself on the jury in my own perjury trial?

There was only one way to find out: put my confession in writing. The next day I emailed the prosecutor to “clarify” my realized mis-testimony. It wasn’t until the next day, though, many hand wringings later, that I received a thoughtful, gracious, and detailed reply that alleviated all of my fears of the student’s unfounded conviction and my arrest for perjury.

As for the student, barring other pending court actions against him (I’ve heard there are things in the works, but I don’t know anything about them), it’s not entirely impossible that he’ll be returning to my school, since the gang charges in this case were dismissed. If indeed he is now clear, he awaited trial in juvenile detention for two months without founded cause.

That would be a crime.

After we got our ears pierced, M and I thought maybe I’d better check the school dress code for teachers, lest I was headed for termination just for my fun. I didn’t find any prohibitive wording, but I was still apprehensive about feedback from my principals–and eager to hear what my students would say.

It took about five seconds for the buzz to start. As I unlocked my classroom door to let students in, I heard whispers of “earrings.” Throughout the day, girls seemed more prone to extensive commentary, although one boy with a major stutter pointed to his own pierced ear and grinned and several others offered, “Nice earrings.”

One girl–she races lawn mowers–asked, “Why did you get your ears pierced?”

“I guess I felt like it,” I said.

“That’s awesome!”

Another walked into class and said, “Nice bling.” I laughed, and she said, “I planned that; I heard.”

In her assigned “letter to the teacher,” one student wrote, “You don’t seem like the kind of person who would get his ears pierced.”

“What kind of person would?” I asked her.

“Someone in a rock band.”

And student I know from summer school but don’t teach now came up to me while I was on hall duty and said, “Oh, that’s disgusting.”

“What is?”

“You have your ears pierced.”

“So? Yours are pierced.”

“But I’m not a guy. Guys with pierced ears are disgusting.”

I smiled and didn’t tell her that my daughter’s sentiments aren’t very different.

Only two of my colleagues asked me if they’d just not noticed before, or if the piercings were new. My principals, perhaps fearing a sexual harassment or discrimination lawsuit, have said absolutely nothing.