Irate

Circumstances should never alter principles — Gertrude Chiltern in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband

When I started teaching, other teachers told me all sorts of horror stories about the crazy things they accidentally did in class.  Students had been hit in the head with yardsticks, glued to tables, burnt by science experiments, and other mishaps.  They laughed and assured me something like that would happen to me. Teachers have to talk all day and make it look natural and improvised.  Every once in a while the wrong word comes out, or the students respond in an unexpected or rude way and teachers immediately do and say things they regret. One never knows how a teacher will respond to the pressure of controlling a group of students. There’s a fascinating episode of This American Life that talks about this phenomenon in the New York City public school system.

But I was pretty sure I would avoid any of those traps. Before I taught, I had a job with a landscaping company, and like teaching, it was a place where people did some unexpectedly ridiculous things. I was pretty good at maintaining my cool in the face of tremendous opportunities for accidents.  It was pretty hard to get fired from this job… the company basically took anyone who was able to do manual labor and willing to do dirty jobs for little money.  Even with minimal requirements people still managed to get kicked off the job. As the company mechanic put it, “I can tell you stories about this outfit that make Caddyshack look about as funny as a funeral.” Can you separate the offenses that warranted dismissal from those that were ignored? The answers are below, and I’m not kidding.

1. Arrive two hours late…every day for three straight weeks.
2. Skip scheduled meetings about your salary and performance.
3. Slash a coworker with a screwdriver and draw blood, “to teach him a lesson.”
4. Pretend your mother has diabetes so you can claim you took her to the hospital when you really just slept in.
5. Go to sleep in the boss’ office, or behind the tool shed, or just in an open field beside the main building.
6. Explain to all the African American workers that taking off work for MLK Day is not “American,” because slavery wasn’t that bad anyway, so the civil rights movement isn’t really worthy of celebration.
7. Sabotage the equipment in order to prove to the boss that the other employees are not being careful.
8. Drive a truck over an eighty-thousand dollar piece of equipment.
9. Tell the boss his weight problem has convinced you that you might have a chance with his wife.
10. Threaten a supervisor with a mattock.
11. Urinate in front of customers.
12. Light several tools on fire.
13. Crash a tractor into a cement wall.
14. Secretly work a second job and tell the boss you’re doing the job he assigned you for after lunch even though you’re really leaving for that second job.
15. Throw trash at the customers.
16. Use leaf blowers to “play catch” by shooting golf balls at one another.
17. Drop a mower in a lake.
18. Intentionally drive company vehicles into other company vehicles.
19. Flip over three tractors in a week.
20. Tell the boss you’re going to drop acid since there’s not much going on today.
21. Threaten the boss’ children.

The amazing thing is only numbers four and fourteen resulted in the offender losing his job. The boss could handle anything except lying. I remember one time I got too close to a hillside and my riding mower went backwards down a twenty foot slope, cutting a gash in the grass.  I finally stopped by crashing into a log on the edge of the woods.  The boss didn’t worry about the machine at all: he just made sure I was safe, drove the thing back to the top of the hill and helped me get started again. He was on everyone’s side, even when they were being idiots. He was my model. When I started teaching I determined to be cool, calm, unconcerned, and in control. After all, I thought, every misbehaving student is merely misunderstood, right? High-schoolers are by definition works-in-progress. Can anyone say he wishes to be judged on how he behaved at fifteen? Each child would find understanding, through a firm but inviting leadership in my classroom.

In spite of this generous philosophy, like most new teachers, I was obsessed with classroom control and “being taken seriously.” I knew the wrong way to establish control was through being overbearing and maniacal.  Students should always believe in the foundational sanity of the course. I spent much of my first year in fear of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and being either misunderstood or loosing my poise and saying something purposefully cruel to get back at a misbehaving student.  What would happen if I messed up and said the wrong thing? I spent hours working on my lecture each night, crafting more and more detailed outlines of possible conversation branches, just to make sure I had a wise and appropriate rejoinder for every conceivable response a student could give to my questions.  I pre-wrote jokes, practiced topical anecdotes, shifting their details to match the literature we were studying, and crafted complicated dialogue trees so that I could bring every permutation of student response back to the point of the lecture without resorting to insults or looking like I was upset with the direction the class was taking. When my brother would come home on break from college, I would go bowling with him just to see him, but I brought my notepad and books with me.  I would adjust plans, and activities, practicing gestures and leaps in between rolls to see which of them would convey my meaning the most effectively.

My brother just looked at me weird and mocked my low scores.

But all that preparation didn’t work. In my second week teaching, I made my first huge blunder.  I was trying to explain the difference between abstract and concrete nouns to a 10th grade class.  I remember myself saying, “An abstract noun is a concept or idea.  It’s anything you can’t interact with physically…like…you can’t really touch…” And here, my frustration with forgetting the correct illustration manifested as a gesture, and with my right hand like I was hefting a bocce ball about hip high, I felt the word coming, like a sneeze, but was unable to stop it. “You can’t really touch…manhood.”

Pandemonium. That class didn’t learn anything for a week.  They giggled madly every time I opened my mouth.

As much as a teacher practices, he can’t really anticipate what things students will do in class.  How does one help a girl with literary analysis when she just arrived in the country three days before the semester started? She couldn’t even say, “I don’t have the book.” I didn’t know what to do when the kid jumped up in the middle of class and flung himself bodily off the chalkboard. I could barely respond when the fidgety kid in the front row got his hand stuck in his desk… except to laugh. What response is there when a kid asks, apropos of nothing, “What ice cream flavor would you choose to eat if eating it would certainly kill you?” What does one say to the girl who comes in on the review day before finals and asks, “Can your sister sing at my wedding?” She kept going. “It’s going to be a princess wedding at Disney World in seven years, and I need someone to sing ‘A Whole New World.’”

Even given practice and care, teachers can’t really prevent the wrong word from slipping out from time to time. Inevitably, a misspoken word resonates at a teenage frequency, and the whole class falls apart. One of my colleagues often tells a story about teaching 10th graders about the end of WWI. He was nervous about mentioning the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in front of fifteen and sixteen year-olds. He practiced and practiced. For days he concentrated on saying it quickly without cracking a smile or acknowledging the homophone, but during the lecture, he spoke and heard himself call the event the “Titty of Brest-Litovsk.” Mayhem ensued. Another colleague, after a student begged more time to answer a question by saying, “just gimme a sec,” responded, “I’ll give you all the secs you need.” There’s just no way to recover from that.

There are certain things a teacher can do to befriend and control a class.  Yelling really doesn’t strike fear into anyone.  It just surprises them. Eventually they stop being surprised, and then it won’t work anymore. Compliment the girls on their shoes and earrings.  They’ll be delighted and will instantly consider the teacher a friend.  Give the honors kids rubrics.  They’ll sense order, achievement, and planning, and then they will relax … a little. Talk to the standard kids about movies and music or ask them about their extracurricular events and they brighten up and listen to whatever follows that conversation. Basically the teacher has to convince the student’s that he’s on their side.  Then misbehavior will diminish, and work ethic will escalate.

The teacher will become IRATE if anyone steals his manpurse!

I’ve always been pretty good at this; everyone thinks I’m on their side. While this can be confusing during arguments at board meetings, it’s great during class. Sometimes I can tell the students have settled in because even though I am well over six feet tall and have a loud (sometimes angry) voice, they feel comfortable enough to tease me about my idiosyncrasies.  One student decided that if I was a tree, I’d be a birch… pale, skinny, and tall, and she presented a drawing illustrating this idea.  About five years ago, another student created a vocabulary presentation with a remarkable, cartoony portrait of me losing my temper. She was a slight girl, mumble-mouthed, her eyes perpetually focused on the corners of the floor, unless she saw a chink in someone’s armor.  Then her eyes darted back and forth, the edges of her lips pulled up, and she showed a gleefully pernicious sense of timing and friendly insult. When she presented the word IRATE, the students responded with triumphant cheers.  Her smile grew as big as her glasses. I had to admit it was clever.

Another trick for keeping students invested in the class is to find the most confident boy in the class and tease him. He wants the attention anyway, and the other kids will be delighted that someone is putting him in his place. It was this technique however that brought me my greatest disgrace as a teacher. For, as I have continued to teach, the thing that has really surprised me is not the occasional verbal slip up or the fact that poor behavior really does get me riled up. I’ve yelled at kids for harmless horseplay, collared people I mistakenly thought were fighting other students when they were really just breaking up fights, and otherwise embarrassed myself through excessively quick judgments, but it is my own propensity for senseless cruelty that unnerves me the most.

The fall of 2005 was the beginning of my third year teaching, and I was finally starting to feel like I was getting the hang of it.  I was rid of the morose, foolish, and cruel senior class as well as a jaded and supercilious group of freshmen from the year before. That year’s freshmen were refreshing: open, alert, and delighted at everything I said.  I swelled with self-assurance.  The first day, I asked a kid with pep to help hand out syllabus and then teased him for his height when he showed the boldness and self-confidence I had come to recognize as indicators of a good target for my technique.  He promptly sat down in an exaggerated huff and refused to hand out any more papers.  I didn’t think anything of it, and went on with a lessons about symbols in Beowulf. I actually think most people are short. It’s a synonym for “usual” in my mind, so the idea that this would upset him never occurred to me. But really the problem was deeper.  When a teacher mocks one kid, the others laugh, and I was happy to get their approval.

I continued to poke fun at this boy every once in a while, and he shot back fast and increasingly sharp-noted replies, which I grinned at.  In this class there were many bright students, but two of them were unusually capable.  One of them sat in the back of my class studying Old Norse while never missing a pronoun of the lecture.  Another made an observation the first week of class about the human capacity to “confuse causality and chronology.” They were imposing to grade, even as fourteen year-olds. But they responded with enthusiasm to my teasing other students. They cackled and roared at every snub or tweak I delivered to the other students’ answers, and soon I found myself playing to them.  Decent, thoughtful responses became targets for my sarcasm, and simple misunderstandings were openly mocked. One day, while discussing Romeo and Juliet, I again made a crack about the young man’s height, and the two other boys in the back leaned back till the front legs of their chairs tipped off the floor.  I noticed the young woman who had drawn the above picture was scowling at me.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t like it when you make fun of my friend,” she said.

When I looked at the little student I’d been mocking, I saw that he was crying. “I asked you to stop so many times!” he said.

It suddenly struck me that all my theories about making the class a welcoming place were nonsense.  I wasn’t really interested in making students feel welcome, or challenged, or interested, I was interested in showing off. It wasn’t a mistake, I had said exactly what I meant to say. For some unforgivable reason, I cared enough that FRESHMEN like me that I was willing to hurt one of them.  Even hitting him in the head with a yardstick would have been kinder. I finished the lecture in tears.

That class has grown up and graduated. The girl who called me out gave me a copy of her vocabulary project at graduation to remind me of the class.  I’m not sure if she knew what a bittersweet memory it would be. I hope she and her friend have forgiven me. I hate to think of what kind of teacher I might have become if she hadn’t spoken up that day. Her bravery saved my career.