Even though I had the phone on silent, the call still woke me as the glowing screen lit up my room. I rolled over and ignored the phone. A good sleep the night before the first day of school was of greater importance than chatting with a friend from a different time zone. A few minutes later, the room lit up again. My friends rarely call and would never call repeatedly like this, so I peeked at the screen, saw the unfamiliar number, and set the phone screen-side down.
A minute later, I got a message: “Are you dead, sir?” Ominous question to start my thirteenth year of teaching. Part of me contemplated replying to the message with some quip like, “No, but if you interrupt my sleep again, you will be.” But mostly, I just stared at the message and heard Marcie’s matter-of-fact voice asking Peppermint Patty this. Now a month into the school year, I feel like this was the most fitting question to start the year. In many ways, I feel like I traded places with my students from this spring. Last semester, I was teaching middle school second-language students who couldn’t navigate the technology needed for online learning at all. After a semester, I had a folder of over a thousand screenshots I had sent to students to guide them through the cyber labyrinth. Now, I’m the one using a new system that my non-language learning students are marginally more familiar with. I constantly check for reassurance: “Can you see my screen?” “Can you hear me?” “Can you open this document?” Rather exhausting. And the students ask even more questions: “How many words are required in this paragraph?” “Can I read the car manual for my required outside reading pages?” “My wifi cut out; what did you talk about in the last half of class?” From that first ominous question, the questions have continued piling up. Fortunately, from my students last year, I learned the answer to every question: yes. (Occasionally, “maybe” is an acceptable substitute.) Me: What did Pinocchio do? Student A: Yes Me: Did you listen to the chapter or did you read the chapter? Student G: Yes Me: Why did the flying monkeys obey Dorothy? Student M: Yes Me: Can you see me? Students A-Z: Maybe (An exception to this “one answer to rule them all” is questions about lunch. How was lunch? Noodles.) Maybe I can try this ultimate answer with my students this week. At least, I can amuse myself with in the afternoon when I am tired after teaching to a screen for three straight hours and that ominous text message pops into my head again. “Are you dead, sir?” Maybe. Maybe.
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Teachers, both real and fictional ones, often work to create school cultures devoid of cruel teasing. In many ways, teasing is rejection, which we try to shelter our students from. But lately, dealing with junior highers contemplating the adults they will become, I’ve been mulling over whether we threw a baby out with the bathwater when we decided that rejection and teasing were completely bad. We laud difference so much in our topsy-turvy Enlightened culture that we have stopped considering whether the differences that students are teased for are worth defending.
Take for example a student teased for enjoying books. People questioning his decision should cause him to question his decision. Are they teasing him because he reads books, or because he traps people into listening to him recount the minutiae of a complicated plot? (Sorry for doing that repeatedly, Dad.) Reading is great, but having someone challenge him about it is also good, even if just causing him to establish what role books have in his life. Or what about the student who chews with her mouth open? Sweet, “nice” classmates will merely avoid her; others might complain about having to sit across from her without explaining why they don’t want to. Both behaviors will make her feel bad in the moment, but her poor table manners can alienate her if it persists into adulthood. Having a peer teasingly say, “Gross! I don’t want to see that!” once or twice could help her see a need to improve, which could save her from more rejection. People can change these behaviors. I think that’s where we well-meaning teachers lost sight of the issue. Jordan Peterson tells of a species of bird in which the male creates art to court the female. If the female rejects the male, he will destroy his art and improve it until a female accepts him. The bird doesn’t give up after one attempt; the bird doesn’t pout, defend his art, or call everyone else haters. He accepts the rejection and improves because of it. (This process of giving feedback to produce improved work is something we teachers are trained for, incidentally.) Students teasing others about things that they cannot change is wrong; students teasing others about things that they can change is an opportunity for growth, just like the bird’s art getting rejected, just a student getting a low score on a quiz. We could brush the rejection aside and assure the teased student that he is better than the bullies. Or we could talk with all students involved about why one group thinks the behavior is teasable and whether the teased student thinks that behavior is worth keeping in the face of rejection. If it is worth keeping, the discussion will encourage him and may challenge naysayers’ thinking. Last week, my roommate told me about her evening, which gave me a hint to my students’ future. She had gone to a party where a mutual friend tried to set her with a friend. As we hashed out the night, I asked, “Do you think you’ll see this—wait, is he a man or a boy-man?” Perhaps an odd question unless you, like my roommate and I, are a woman who has dated in the adultescence era. Even though the guy in question was a man, the question prompted a continuation of an earlier conversation: why are women just supposed to accept that many guys don’t become men until they are married with kids? Every church I have ever attended has a men’s group. Do they really just talk about the Bible and never apply it to practical moments of telling the boy-men how to become men? Do the older men really never come alongside the younger men and guide them into socially appropriate interaction? And if not, why aren’t they? Students check each other’s behavior through teasing. Adults seem less sure about how to address social ineptness. Most often, we ignore it, avoid the person, or complain about it to another person. A truly brazen person might tease the socially awkward person, but then reduce the truth by claiming it’s just a joke. A student doing something not normal in that social setting will have someone ask, “What are you doing? with the subtext of “That’s weird. Are you sure you want to do that?” I don’t think adults should behave like students, but I wonder what we are missing that we have so many stuck in adultescence. I remember my mother when, as a child, I hovered on the edges of her conversations, telling me to go away. She taught me that my behavior was not polite: either join the conversation or leave, but don’t stand there creepily watching others have a conversation. It’s easy to do that with your child; it’s hard to do that with a peer. But unless we step up and kindly say, “That’s not okay; try this instead,” they won’t have opportunity to learn. They aren’t learning from rejection. And unless we guide our students through teasing and rejection, they will become the socially awkward of the future. The man was desperate and cried out to the Teacher, “Lord, I believe.” And in honesty, he added, “Help my unbelief.” I memorized those words over twenty years ago, and they resonate with me even more now than they did then.
So often my inner cynic doubts the value of what I do. As a teacher, I sometimes have only a semester with students. I feel like I teach so little course material in that time, let alone add anything positive about how to be human. Sometimes my heart hums with pride when I read a student’s essay and marvel at how far she has come. Then that cynic reminds me that before ever joining my class, that student already had an aptitude for writing and would have made progress with any teacher she had. At times, I find that thought comforting as the weight of my students’ success no longer bears down on my solitary shoulders. At other times, I’m left thinking, “Does it matter?” Even more disheartening is volunteer work. I’ve worked at camps many summers. I love summer camp. (One of my friends who recognizes my tendency to withdraw was surprised by my enthusiasm for summer camp, but yes, this withdrawal-prone introvert loves summer camp.) This last summer, I volunteered at a camp specifically for children who live in orphanages. The camp gives them a week of fun and love, urging the volunteers to advocate later for the children’s adoption. At the end of the week, it’s heart-breaking to put the kids back on a bus and send them back to a hopeless future (because in their country, they legitimately do not have a future). It’s easy to think, “Does it matter?” Does five days of camp really make a difference? I felt like Longfellow in his bleakest of Christmas lyrics, written from the brink despair. But then, he heard the bells ringing hope: “God is not dead; nor doth He sleep.” No bells pealing jolted me from my doubt, but sweet memories did. I had stable, loving parents, who also had stable, loving parents, who also had stable, loving parents. My teachers at both school and church were encouraging and invested in me. Growing up, I went to camp for only five days every summer. And twenty years later, I still remember people from camp, who, for a couple days or even a couple hours, took time to care for me. I remember guest lecturers in university, chapel speakers, regular customers at Donut World who brightened ten minutes of my Saturday morning shift. These precious memories are not of grand sacrificial acts. They are small, routine even. But do they matter? Yes. Most definitely yes. Last week, I had one of those teacher moments that I will waffle over for years: Did I do the right thing? We had a school-wide event in which each class had to present or perform something. My students had pushed back against my attempts to prepare them. And since the event was extra-curricular, I couldn’t assign homework or give a score to “encourage” participation. So, on the day of the event, our three-minute performance lasted about fifteen second (forty-five, counting the walk to and from our seats). As we waited for our turn watching other classes perform, my students’ embarrassment grew.
“Miss Lane,” a student in my row leaned over to whisper while first-graders wowed parents by adorably existing on the stage, “do we have music to play while we’re up there?” “No,” I whispered back. “Your table was in charge of choosing a song.” Third graders trying not to get their feet tangled up in their costumes passed us as another student behind me leaned up: “Miss Lane, did you get music for us?” “No,” I replied. “It was your table’s responsibility. I don’t sit at your table.” Similar whispered inquiries about props and signs and such snaked up to me through every other class’s performance. To each inquiry, I reminded them of moments in our preparation when I had asked if they wanted me to order props or print signs, and they had assured me that they didn’t need or want them. (At the time, I had been tempted to order them anyway, but I didn’t think that would respect the students’ part in our collective decision-marking.) By the time we stood, my students were painfully aware of how their performance, or non-performance, would rank. Could I have sheltered them from the embarrassment? Yes. I could have stayed late at school for a week and cobbled together something to save face for them. I could have ignored their input in our collective planning and done what I thought was best. But I didn’t. Too often we shelter students from minor consequences trying to be nice. But Consequence and Failure are my students’ teachers, too, perhaps more than I am. In my first drama competition ever, I won. That elation at winning was wonderful and dangerous, and it was the best thing for my future in drama that I lost in the next competition. When I got home from the competition, Mom came into my room with a small gift and hug to celebrate. I burst into tears of shame. We talked, and I learned some important lessons that had nothing to do with drama and had everything to do with hard work, striving for excellence, and accepting that my best is not always The best. Failure was a good drama teacher: I won and lost again and enjoyed the experience each time. In case a squadron of lawnmower moms are outraged by my callousness at letting my students fail publicly, rest assured that after their fifteen seconds of fame, my class and I had a good talk back in the classroom. Like my mom, I helped Failure and Consequence do some teaching, discussing what they could have done differently and what other areas of life they exhibit the same potentially negative behavior so that they can avoid future shame and concluding with praise that they still have the courage to get up and perform even though they knew their performance wouldn’t shine. I’m still waffling on this moment. The funny thing about reflection is that whether something is a success or failure, I still end up asking the same questions: what worked, what didn’t work, what could I have done differently, what can I apply to future similar situations. I failed. My students who had helped me prepare for my audition were incensed.
“You should have gotten the part,” one student said. “No,” I replied, “the director chose the best person for the part.” “But you have a cold. He should have considered that.” “I could get a cold before the performance. Based on my audition, he made the right decision.” “But you worked so hard,” other students said. “And so did others,” I countered. “Hard work does not mean I deserve the part.” When I first asked my students to be a test audience for me, I thought I was modeling for them how to prepare for an audition or interview. I allowed them to see my nerves, my rough early audition, and later my polished audition. They saw the difference in my stages of preparation. They saw mediocre transform into quality. When they asked me the day after my audition if I had gotten the part, they did not doubt my answer would be yes. And that’s when I realized a lesson that they had never learned. The entertainment industry tells story after story of how hard work pays off: Rudy struggles with grades, tuition, and physical limits, but still has his moment in the end; in Save the Last Dance, Julia Stiles’s character struggles with a new school and the loss of a parent, working hard to be accepted into Julliard, and, in the end, she succeeds; even in the comedy She’s the Man, Amanda Bynes’s character works hard and is allowed to play soccer on the guys’ team. We tell our students that their hard work is what matters, but we don’t tell stories of people who work hard and don’t achieve their goals. These stories teach that hard work ensures success. Hard work has become a reason for giving a higher grade than was earned, an excuse for giving a position to an unqualified candidate, and a mitigating circumstance for any situation. Recently, I started watching Mayim Bialik’s YouTube channel. I wish I could share one of her videos with all my students and, more importantly, the influential adults in their lives. Mayim shares about a humiliating experience in which she failed. Not sure what take-away she was going to close with, I was surprised and relieved at what she said: instead of numbing the feeling and hiding from it, she thought over the experience and learned from it. As I listened to my students excuse away my failure, assigning blame to circumstances (my cold) and the director (he wasn’t “understanding”) and downplaying the others who auditioned (“You were better.”), I realized that my failure was perhaps the first time my students were seeing a story in which hard work did not equal success. Of course they were crying “foul!” They had never learned that sometimes hard work isn’t enough. Suddenly, the lesson I thought I was teaching was dwarfed by the opportunity to show how to fail. I had worked hard, I was thoroughly prepared, but someone was better. I had no regrets or complaints because my audition was the best I had to offer. And when my students came to our performance, I was glad that they could see the higher quality performance of the lady who got the part I had auditioned for. I can continue to work hard and continue to audition. And if I ever do get the part I audition for, my students and I will know it will not be because the director took pity on my hard work; it will be because I was the best choice for the part. Just as living abroad has changed my coffee habits (in case, you’re wondering: I have a legitimate way to blend the coconut oil into my coffee now, a happy development) and my writing habits, it has also changed my teaching.
Because I am teaching language and my classes are three-four times the size I’m used to, I have students use voice recording technology frequently so that I can listen to them using the target language both in and out of class. At first, I just had them record themselves talking outside of class, but when one of my units was on having academic conversations, I realized that I could not hear each group discussion during class. So, I’ve adjusted and have them record conversations in class as well (not all the time—don’t worry: after a decade of teaching, I’m finally starting to admit my limitations. One teacher can do only so much with the time she has been given. To try to do more is asking for a mental break-down.) One of my habits as a teacher is to either daily or weekly reflectively journal on my teaching: Did this lesson go as well as I planned? What should I change for the next unit? Students J, P, and X did not understand; what different approach could they need? (Admittedly, this is the same journal in which I record my student funnies and insults.) As much as I journal, it’s still hard to detach my thoughts from the experience. Imagine my surprise when I realized that now I get regular glimpses of life on the other side of my desk. As I was listening to a recording of one student painfully delivering each word of his introduction, a burst of laughter in the background drowned out his voice for a couple seconds. I thought, wow, that other group is having some fun, but they are probably making it harder to Student D to gather his thoughts. Then I realized which group was being so noisy: it was the group I had briefly joined. That was my laugh. Oops. The voice recordings are a wonderful fly on the wall, allowing me to hear my class from all over the room. And since the technology choice I use is also social media, I regularly find pictures of myself posted, frozen at the front of the room in various unflattering poses with inexplicable facial expressions. The captions the students post to these pictures might be flattering (and appropriate for their culture): “my beautiful teacher” “my funny foreign teacher,” “My teacher—so cute!” But I see other students in the picture unengaged; I see the awful glare on the blackboard that obliterates my writing; I see the time stamp on the post! I’m not a fan of Robert Burns (my students each year get bonus points for identifying him as my least favorite poet), but this year has certainly been a “To a Louse” moment for me as every day I get to see myself as others see me. Startled by the ending of the recent film The Circle, I read some reviews to see what others thought. Naturally, one amateur reviewer led with “the book was better.” Now I want to read the book, which I didn’t know existed, not because it supposedly is better, but because I thought the story was intriguing enough to want to interact with it in a different medium.
As an English teacher, I love books. They are friends and teachers in ways that movies cannot be. But I tire of hearing the cop-out criticism: the book was better. Of course, it was! Film and print are different media with different strengths, limitations, and purposes. No one looking at a photograph of Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel would think of saying, “The Sistine Chapel is better.” Most of us cannot spend hours staring at Michelangelo’s work on the ceiling; the photographs are as close as we get to his work and allow us to see in greater detail than were we awkwardly craning our necks far below his painting. Similarly, movies based on books are retellings focused on parts of the story. I cannot begrudge a movie for not being a book. And a movie adaptation can complement its parent-book. That complementary relationship is why I love both the book and movie The Phantom of the Opera. The movie shows the kaleidoscopic whirl and grandeur of the opera house; the book explores the lonely torment of the phantom and lonely naivete of Christine. The film and movie do, in fact, tell different stories, but those differences enhance the essence of the narrative. I enjoy the film’s final musical conflict between the phantom and Raoul just as much as I enjoy the book’s climax with Christine’s dilemma in saving or destroying the theatre’s audience. Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (the first movie and book) is another complementary pair. The movie contains significant, but necessary, changes in the plot. Honestly, Lena’s introspective conflict in the book works only in print; introspection seems lifeless on film, so her story had to change for a different medium. Her character’s essence, however, is unchanged. And her story which left me unmoved in the book made me cry in the movie. In the opposite way, I cried through Tibby’s grief in the book (the first time I cried for a book), but I mirrored her deadness in the movie and remained empathetically detached. And then, there are the movies that are—dare I say it?—better than the book. I love teaching Little Women in my unit on Transcendental writers, but in the book, the differences in the March family are camouflaged by the more obvious differences of the era. The movie, crafted for a modern audience, captures what living based on Transcendental tenants looks like in a way that my students can grasp without my interrupting every chapter to give important information about the era. Certainly, some film adaptations are sloppy and add nothing to the narrative. Knowing this, my students goad me by praising the great movies Percy Jackson and Ender’s Game in the hopes that I will digress from our regularly scheduled activities to enumerate the movies’ flaws. But even when I bite their bait, we discuss not that the book was better, but how or whether the movie could include elements we thought were essential to the story. Oh, the power of early impressions. Frequently, I am reminded of the awesome power that teachers have, yet still I am amazed when a lingering, subconscious remnant from a lesson surfaces to my conscious mind. Last week is a marvelous example of this.
As part of a July 4th celebration, we were singing “America, the Beautiful.” I had no trouble singing along until we got to the chorus. Everyone else plowed boldly into “America, America, God shed His grace on thee.” But I couldn’t keep singing because I had suddenly reverted to the lyrics we learned in third grade: “am, is, are, was, were, be, being been, have, had, has, do, does, did.” And of course, I couldn’t finished there. I plowed through the rest of the auxiliary verbs list. (Fortunately, this was done in the quiet of my mind, so there were no witnesses to my rather Pavlovian response to the music.) We sang three verses of the song; not once did I make it through the chorus without practicing my verbs. (In case you were curious, the same thing automatic recovery happens with the songs I learned for the fifty states, the presidents, the prepositions, and the books of the Bible. For all that, I don’t know the song for how a bill becomes a law, but I still know that process in sign language since that’s how I memorized it for my freshman government test. I’m starting to realize that my brain is still full of data that I am not using; why hasn’t it dumped it yet? I need that space for other things.) I’m running into this same problem with my language studies this summer. The pneumonic devices I used to help myself remember my vocabulary are becoming intrinsically integrated into how I use the language so that now I cannot say, “I like coffee” without sounding like a robot, nor can I say “I have no husband” without sounding lost and forlorn. Those sound cues extend to experience outside the classroom, too. When I hear the soundtrack to Rudy, I’m mentally driving through Wisconsin to college. When I hear John Williams Summon the Heroes, I immediately find myself back in Atlanta for the summer Olympics. As I was walking out of church a few weeks ago, I heard a swarm of cicadas, and I thought I was back in Asia. (Of course, loud power tools sound the same as cicadas, so every Monday morning when I hear the neighbor’s lawnmower, I also think I’m back in Asia.) While I’ve certainly heard those sounds many times and in many places, they have become intrinsically intertwined with each other in my memories that I cannot think of one without the other. Hmm, the power of those sounds is so great that my mind got so absorbed in this idea that I forgot that I sat down to write about a completely different topic. I guess this was a successful sobremesa then. Teaching is hard. But as hard as teaching is, I think being a student is harder.
Recently, I began reviewing my grad school textbooks and notes to consolidate them. (Yes, I realize how absolutely nerdy that makes me sound. I long ago accepted that I enjoy being a nerd.) As I reread the first chapter, I added, copied, and discarded notes from my original notebook. When I finished and compared my original notes and my new notes, they were completely different, and, sadly, the new set of notes (not the old set) actually reflected that I understood the material. The old set showed that I didn’t know what information was noteworthy. Even some of my definitions were wrong! I remembered how lost I had felt in those early classes, taking notes that (now) demonstrated how much I misunderstood. In teacher school, we were told that good teachers continue learning. At the time, I thought that meant that teachers kept learning about their subject and how to teach. When I started my masters, I realized that perhaps learning anything new helped me as a teacher because, as one of my students explained, then we understand a student’s perspective more. So, this summer, I’ve started learning a new language and remember anew what it feels like to be a student, to be the one in the room who doesn’t have the answers. When I struggle with a concept, my teacher assures me that I will understood it, much like I do for my students. But on my new side of the desk, I know how absolutely lost I am, and I wonder how my teacher can possibly think I’ll make progress. I get frustrated when I get answers wrong not because I didn’t understand the vocabulary words, but because I didn’t understand the question or the directions. I get overwhelmed when I see how much material I still have to learn and how little I have learned. I get discouraged when I miss the same question for the third time that lesson (something I sometimes wondered whether my students were doing on purpose). On the flip side, everything is new, so each word mastered is a major victory (unlike later, when full sentences or, gasp, paragraphs become the yardstick). So, yeah, teaching is hard. But the struggling of learning is perhaps harder. According to Lady Bracknell, an engagement “should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant.” I think that good-byes should come as a surprise, too. An impending End tends to overwhelm experience; even when we know that we still have X numbers of days until the End, we can’t completely ignore that it’s coming. So instead of actually savoring the normal moments, we pressure ourselves to create Special moments and miss the actual Lasts.
In one of my creative writing classes, we had to write a parody of a poem that starts with “On the last day of the world.” As I brainstormed for that poem, I started with grandiose plans for that final day. But in the end, my poem was a celebration of normal life, much in the spirit of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a day that is special because it is. This has been a week of saying good-byes for me, starting with telling my students that I would not be their teacher next year and ending with my final concert with my choir. A large part of me pressured myself into sentimentality: “This is my last X,” “Aw, this is my last Z.” But most of me just wanted to let those good-byes go unsaid and slip away into the night. Beyond saying good-byes at Ends, routine good-byes should also come as a surprise. This May has been a long Bad-bye, a text-book case in my argument that the end of the school year should be a surprise for all students. Imagine a May with no “The year’s almost done; why are we still doing work?” The students and teachers would have to stay focused because we wouldn’t know when the last day would be. With the same delight as a snow day, everyone would get a call one morning: “Good morning School XXX parents and teachers. Today starts final exam week.” Yep, it would be amazing. Um, to clarify, this isn’t my subtle way of saying that I’m done blogging. After a week of Bad-byes, I doubt that I could blog good-bye today. |
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