I retired four years ago after a forty year career teaching English/Language Arts. I still study. I am taking French classes and listening to French speakers on television and CDs. Although my family’s ancestry is French, they spoke a Louisiana dialect of French, much like Canadian French.
This week I began my fortieth piano lesson. Although I played flute and piccolo in middle and high school and can read music, this effort is one of the most challenging of my life. Playing different notes and different rhythms with each hand and reading treble and bass clef at the same time is very difficult. I played my first jazz piece this week, and I thought the synapses in my brain would explode.
Do I miss teaching? Yes, I miss the daily dialogue with young people. I miss their candor, enthusiasm, intelligence, sincerity, and those teachable moments. I miss seeing their faces light up when I asked their permission to read their PROSE MODELS [excellent, well thought out writing assignments] to the class.
I miss my classroom: the painted ceiling tiles, the Mardi Gras masks, the comic strips students created, their poetry, web pages, song lyrics, their original music and lyrics, and plays that represented their interpretations of literary works we studied.
I believe that every student has an individual intelligence. Some are left brained and mathematically or technologically gifted; some are right brained and creative or musically inclined; some are gifted creating with their hands, and many think out of the box. Those talents are gifts, and I made every effort to give students opportunities to improve their grades by creating EGOs [extra grade opportunities]. A student who had difficulty conceptualizing a literary work on a writing assignment, one who had extreme test anxiety, or those who had stage fright when speaking to their classmates had opportunities to demonstrate their individual intelligences.
My teaching experiences were exciting, memorable, and frightening. I taught in fourteen schools in three states, moving from one to another to gain experience and expertise.
During my first year of teaching, I was assigned to teach in a rolling classroom [a trailer]. As I walked around the room helping students to conjugate verbs, I fell through the floor. My students raced to help me. I calmly told them to return to their seats and to continue conjugating the verb PLUMMET. I managed to climb out on my own, dust off my ensemble, and resume teaching the lesson.
My first effort to adjust to a new school was to gain the trust of the custodians who felt alienated from educated professionals. They fed me invaluable information about other faculty members and school administrators. They offered to help me after school on the days I worked late into the night. They told me stories about student transgressions. Bruce, the head custodian at a high school, stuttered. I asked him how he liked his job. He told me that one afternoon when he cleaned the bookkeeping room after school, he heard strange noises near the computers. He haltingly told me that two students “were ri-ri-ri-ridin’ that train.” I didn’t understand what he meant until I heard that song lyric on the radio. I was quite certain that cleaning classrooms was not his greatest challenge.
In the seventies, I taught in a high school where no classrooms had interior walls, an experimental educational theory pilfered from California educational gurus. Classrooms were bordered with green chalkboards mounted on wheels. On the other side of the chalkboard, a drama teacher dressed in leotards lay on the floor to demonstrate breathing techniques to her students. She told them to BREATHE. My students heard the word BREED. Every male in my class asked to observe the class next door. I reminded them that drama was a very difficult, enervating, strange elective.
I was assigned restroom and hall duty between classes in the same school. I smelled an odor like burning rope emanating from the girls’ restroom. I walked in, checked each stall, and realized that students had been smoking something funky. I summoned the principal who told me that unless I saw students with a lit cigarette in their possession, he could do nothing. He noticed the odd smell and asked custodians to remove the ceiling tiles. They found a huge stash of marijuana hidden in the ceiling. Now I knew why some of my students’ eyes were glazed and bloodshot and why they told me they were starving.
One year our senior class glued all the classrooms doors shut so no one could gain access. Another time they hid mice in a school closet and released them during a class change. I stood on top of my desk and gave students permission to do the same. Another year they stole the Ronald McDonald figure from a local McDonald’s and placed it on the school roof. Innocent pranks.
The year I taught American Literature, I reviewed Hawthorne’s THE SCARLET LETTER. After leading students in a discussion of important symbols in the work, I rolled down the movie screen then walked to my desk to retrieve my copy of the text. The class’ raucous laughter befuddled me. I turned to look at the screen and someone had taped a picture of a scantily clad, buxom model to the movie screen with the name HESTER PRYNNE written in bold letters on the image. I remarked that had Hester Prynne looked like that, she would have been drawn and quartered. My education professors did not teach a strategy to deal with that situation.
I could write a book about my exciting teaching experiences. If I were asked to advise a beginning teacher, I would say that a sense of humor is essential. If you care enough to make students laugh and you laugh at yourself, you will establish a climate of trust in the classroom. Humor is a universal language.
