A couple of summers back I was toying with the idea of writing some kind of memoir about teaching, and even wrote a few posts in that direction to workshop some ideas about it. I honestly believe that most people outside of education have no idea what teaching is really like, and yet almost every person who ever attended school and saw teachers in action seems to have what they consider an informed, insiders opinion on the subject. It seemed to me a truly insider memoir would be a good way to illustrate exactly what it's like, both the good and the bad. There's still a good chance that project will find a life someday, though not anytime soon. In the meantime, I recently had a moment that brought back some vivid memories about my student teaching experience, so I thought I'd dig through some of those.
If you're curious, the moment was seeing the TV weather-folk get all worked up about measurable snowfall in the month of May, which we're currently expected to see. The last time this happened, according to them, was in 1991. The don't say it, but I remember it was on May 5th, because I remember how floored everyone was at the school where I student taught the morning it happened. I think it affected me more than most people at school that morning, since I'm pretty sure I was the only one who had an hour-long commute through rush hour traffic to get there.
My school was Snail Lake Elementary in the Mounds View school district -- in fact I just noticed that the pen cup sitting on my desk right now came from there. Snail Lake was right on the border between Shoreview and North Oaks, and the some of the students who came from North Oaks had no problem reminding the Shoreview kids they lived on the wrong side of the tracks. This meant that my students were getting dropped off every morning by their cardiologist parents driving Jaguars while I showed up in my 1983 Dodge Colt with a stereo that cut out whenever I made a left turn that was also fated to suffer a cracked engine block on the main road passing Northtown Mall before my student teaching was over.
I still remember a lot of things that happened there with remarkable detail, even two decades later, which I'm sure speaks to what a formative experience it was. The first day I was there with my cooperating teacher Bonnie in her 4th grade room, she had me put up my first bulletin board, and in my efforts to impress her with my attention to detail I probably used somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 staples on it. She had a dry sense of humor though, and took it in stride well. Bonnie was the person who taught me one of the laws of childhood friendship that I will still quote today when the situation arises: "When boys get into a fight, they'll take a few swings at each other and be friends again ten minutes later. When girls get into a fight they'll pick away at each other until someone winds up with an eating disorder." I'm still surprised today but how frighteningly close to true that turns out to be.
Snail Lake had weekly Treat Days in the teacher's lounge, but balanced it out with weekly staff meetings. There was an administrative intern there at the same time, and I remember that at the one meeting he was ever in charge of began with him playing Bette Midler's version of "Under the Boardwalk" all the way through, asking us to just sit there, listen, and think about summer time for the entire song, which was probably about four minutes. Things didn't improve from there. When Bonnie and I got back to our room, she kind of shook her head and muttered, "So, that was kind of weird." Not long after that Bonnie found out she was being reassigned from fourth grade to third the following year as the principal had decided to rebuild different grade level teams. I'd never heard of such a thing happening before. Seeing it happen there made it less of a surprise the first time I saw it happen at my own school years later.
I had a lot of fun there, which was made much easier by my university supervisor showing up maybe all of three times during the entire experience. We watched the Girls High School Basketball Tournament in the media center when Mounds View was playing. Each week the fourth grade teachers would take a few kids down the road to a nearby Dairy Queen during lunch. The kids were always talking about this incredible swimming pool they had in the Shoreview Community Center which was less than a mile from the school, and which I've now visited on more end-of-the-year field trips than I can count. I saw my very first CD-ROM in action when George the media generalist showed it off. The kids attended some lyceum that had something to do with technology, and even though I don't remember exactly what the purpose of it was, the presenters did say how twenty years in the future everyone would be walking around with telephones they would wear on their wrists like watches. As soon as that came up, every question asked in the following ten minutes was about what these phone watches would be like. I sometimes wonder how many of those same kids now have their own children who are walking around with cell phones in their pockets.
The biggest teachery thing I probably learned there was the difference between ability and effort. I remember talking to Bonnie about two girls who were both high performers: One would plow through every assignment she was given and would be up at one of our desks right away looking for the next thing she was going to do perfectly. The other one was a social butterfly who did well but was no standout in any manner. To make a point once, Bonnie asked me which one I thought would have scored higher on the district IQ test, and of course I picked the driven high-achiever. She dug out the files for both girls, and I was genuinely surprised to see that the social butterfly had actually scored about twenty-five points higher. "I'd take ten hard workers over one genius any day," she said. Twenty-two years and several hundred students later, I'd have to agree.
