It’s fair to say that a lot of events from my own school days have played a part in the development of my teaching style. For example, I was kind of famous in junior high and high school, and in college, and at church, and occasional days of staff development if I’m being forthcoming here, for falling asleep when I’m supposed to be paying attention. Now, I really don’t consciously try to do this. But I have the attention span of a gnat, so there you go. But now? If I have a kid nodding off in class? I don’t feel like I’m in any position to be critical. I totally get where that kid is coming from. Most of the time I’ll just let it go, figuring if the kid is going to fall asleep in school she or he probably needs to get in a little catch-up nap, and crashing for ten or fifteen minutes isn’t going to keep them from passing fifth grade. Been there myself, often.
But sometimes I can’t resist a little prank to wake them up, depending on who’s taking the nap and how well they can take a joke. Because after all, as anyone who has spent significant time watching me teach will attest to, I’m pretty much a goofball in the classroom. Which started very early in life.
When I was in 6th grade my reading group performed the play “St. George and the Dragon” in the school gym for the other classes, with a script that was only ten or twelve pages worth of illustrated text right out of our reading books; I suppose since we were the high reading group our teacher, Ms. Fischer, was looking for a way to challenge us with the truly minimal resources available in a tiny parochial school. The dragon’s speaking parts had been divided up into four roles: The head, the tail, the left paw and the right. The kids playing the dragon were covered with by a sheet during the performances, and would wave around a cardboard cutout of their assigned body part whenever they read their lines. I played the role of the dragon’s left paw.
Being stuck under the sheet with three other kids was pretty boring compared to the other kids, who dressed up as villagers and knights and such. And I’ll admit it, I was the kind of kid who wasn’t always shy about making my own fun when the chance presented itself. The conflict in the script involved the dragon taking over a village to eat all of the sheep, but when we found a stuffed pig buried in all of the random junk stored on the school stage we begged Ms. Fischer to let us change the script from sheep to pigs. She agreed to the edit before going back to the classroom to work with the other two reading groups. It’s important to remember she wasn’t actually there during the performances....
The narrator got to the part about the pigs being eaten and someone slid that stuffed pig across the floor to the dragon, then the left paw (me) grabbed it, pulled it under the sheet, and all the little kids would laugh. Our own joke! It worked like a charm! Problem was, I was now in possession of the pig for the rest of the show, and I lived with a dangerous combination of a non-existent attention span and a desperate need to make people laugh, so I don’t know why it surprised anyone when the pig started peeking out from underneath the sheet and waving to the audience. Every kid out there laughed big, and started watching for the pig’s next appearance at the expense of the rest of the play. I thought this was hilarious. The others in the reading group did not.
When Ms. Fischer returned to the gym between shows to check on things, it was obvious she had been tipped off about my improvising. Everybody tried to be the first one to tell on me. But she cut them all off and just made a generic point about how everyone needed to work together and do what they were supposed to for the play to work. Granted, she said this in a very stern voice and stared right through my soul as she said it, but that’s as far as my well-deserved discipline ever went. (On a side note, it was many years later when Ms. Fischer’s nephew actually turned up as a student in one of my classes. Thankfully he was much easier to deal with than I had been.)
Since I was let off the hook in such a big way, I now feel obligated as the teacher to pay off that debt sometimes when one of my students gets a little out of control. For example, we’ve got the little girl who really wanted to get called on but didn’t, and expressed her disappointment with a word I won’t use here. Everything in the room came to a holy grinding halt, and when I slowly turned around to make sure I heard her correctly I saw her eyes were already filled with tears. “We’ll talk about this later,” I said, and went right back to the lesson. I did talk about it later with the principal, who laughed harder than I’d ever seen before. I think the girl wound up getting one of the worthless token disciplinary slips we used, but I never gave her the verbal throw-down she was expecting and fearing.
And then there was the kid years later, a quick enough thinker to come up with a well-timed “That’s what she said” in gym class, even if it wasn’t appreciated by the phy. ed. teacher and got him sent to the principal. This was a decent kid who lived in dire fear of what would happen to him if he ever crossed a line so he wasn’t a trouble maker by any stretch, and he surely didn’t expect a trip to the office for a stupid offhand remark that was probably louder than he intended. He’d already gotten an earful from the phy. ed. teacher and the principal, so when he got back to me and I brought him in the hallway to talk, he was crying violently and fearing for his life. (Apparently I’m a pretty intimidating figure -- I don’t see it.) He was so surprised when I told him I wasn’t angry, he nearly stopped breathing.
“You’re not?” he asked with open confusion. “How come?”
I shrugged. “You made a mistake,” I said. “You weren’t trying to be disrespectful. You were going for the joke. You just didn’t put a lot of thought into the whole right time/right place thing. Which obviously it was not.”
He went back into the classroom, still amazed to have dodged the metaphorical bullet, and thanked me as he walked through the door.
I think he should have been thanking Ms. Fischer.
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