Nonsense, Drivel, and Balderdash

Growing up, it was always strange to see one of your teachers outside of school. There was something pathetic about seeing a teacher on the bus or subway. A high and mighty teacher, at the mercy of the transit system just like you. I took perverse pleasure at seeing them "humiliated" by normalcy. And yet at the same time, I hoped and prayed that they wouldn't spot me, because I knew that if they decided to approach me that I had to be polite or I would regret it the next day in class. Of course, now that I am a teacher, I am on the other end of this experience. I am the teacher that giggling kids are bumping into with their fake smiles. If I thought it was awkward was back then, it is way worse now. You would think that now that I am an adult, I would have the emotional and social tools to handle these sort of situations with more grace and poise than when I was 13, but I don't. The fact is, I go out of my way to avoid places where I might bump into my students. Wh...

George's test was using more red ink than I expected, but as I went over his answers, two things became abundantly clear: 1) George was going to fail the test; 2) I was perversely happy about it.   Maybe more experienced, mature, or just better teachers don't experience feelings like this, but I do. I never realized how many complicated emotional processes being a teacher carries with it.  You get emotionally invested after working all year long to teach your kids, to get them to care, and to turn their efforts into results. I mean, just minutes before grading George's test, I was barely able to stop myself from cheering in the middle of the coffee shop where I had set up shop when I saw that Tony had gotten an A on his final exam. Tony and George have been my most... challenging... students this year. My mentor teacher has told me that it will rarely get any worse than these two. They both demand an unreasonable amount of my energy and attention: talking, ...

Overheard in the school hallway: ( In awe at his sudden realization) 5th Grade Boy :   "Don't you realize? We are the kings of elementary school!"

While working through Call of the Wild with one of my 7th grade classes, I assigned a quick writing warm-up exercise to start the class: "Who is the toughest person you know and why?" The book deals with the protagonist becoming tougher as he encounters more challenges in the great white north. I paced the room while my students wrote, occasionally stopping to answer a question or two about the assignment. After a few minutes, I asked for volunteers to share some of their choices. "I think the toughest person is..." one kid shot out the name of a wrestler that he had seen on television, but his classmates quickly pointed out that he had never "met"that wrestler and therefore he didn't count as someone he "knows." "My older brother is mad tough," another kid piped up. "He can lift crazy heavy weights." "That's not tough! That's strong!" other students disagreed. "Same thing" "You know w...

My 6th graders scored low in their ability to recognize "Author's Purpose" on their recent English diagnostic test, so I have been tasked with trying to get them to think of writing as having an audience and an intent. While the goal is to get them to see why an author would include a certain paragraph, I am starting out by oversimplifying the three main reasons that anyone would undertake writing for an audience: to entertain, to inform, or to persuade. In the course of the lesson, we discussed Genre and how different types of writing often naturally lend themselves to favor one of those purposes. Non-fiction, I told them, is more likely to be purely written to inform than fiction would be, etc. Anyway, I had some writing excerpts on powerpoint and we were taking turns guessing what the purpose of those different types of writing might be. One example came up and it was something in the vein of "Thomas got up and looked out the window. The sun was shining and he had...

In a way, I expected a post like this one to come earlier in my teaching career, but better late than never. The names of my students and coworkers have been changed.  A couple of weeks back, I was in one of my 6th grade classes while the students worked in that productive disarray that characterizes middle school group work. As I walked past one of the groups, a sound caught my ear. It was annoying, so I followed it to its source: one of my 11 year old boys was making a loud humming sound. "Hmmmmmmmm" "Albert, please stop that. It is distracting." I said He looked up, laughed, and explained as if he were letting me in on the joke."I'm masturbating!" he announced. "Albert!" I exclaimed indignant, "That is extremely inappropriate! I don't want to hear those kinds of jokes in class!" But instead of the usual reaction of disgruntled shame that follows a reprimand, Albert just looked confused and hurt. "Why is it inappro...