[This week’s guest blogger is Dan Meyer, a 21-yo student teacher who doesn’t know a quality faculty even when dropped into the middle of it.]
Not long after you begin student teaching (two days in my case), you’ll begin to notice something a bit…off, a little…askew, about your co-workers. Let me hasten your discovery along: they’re old.
Most were born old and they’ll all, without exception, die old. Most will be twice your age, and if that doesn’t feel awkward to you, be concerned.
These people, your “peers”, cling to every passing buzzword as if it is the rope that will save their very lives. They are the lumbering, aging Brontosauri and as you skip nimbly about their elephantine feet, please never forget: don’t show them up.
(yet)
There will be a time and place for their eventual extinction but until then, don’t ever forget that, though their feet are large and clumsy, they still have claws. And only the old lions hunt humans.
[This week’s guest blogger is Dan Meyer, a 21-yo student teacher from Sacramento who believes his tall frame will save him from this forthcoming school year.]
If you ever plan to be a student teacher, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is that you be six feet seven inches tall. Taller’s fine, but don’t you dare come up even a picometer short. When they ask how tall you are (and they will ask), tell them you’re seventy-nine inches tall and watch them freak out trying to work the math.
Walk around the outdoor campus, but don’t smile, don’t let your face betray anything. Let your height, your posture, do the talking. Your height says you’re strong, not the sort to be pushed around or screwed with. It says you’re going to run this class like a small nation and you’re not gonna let up until their GDP is up there with the U.S. of A. [kinda dating yourself there, brah โ ed.]
(Only half true, in my case, but please don’t tell the kids, okay?)
I was introduced as “Mr. Meyer” in second period — the algebra class I’ll be taking over in mid-October — but nobody believed it. We played a People Search game where you find someone who’s gone to Fiji, or has a twin, or aspires to interstellar travel. When they came to me for this or that, I told them to write down “Mr. Meyer” (“no s, two e’s, if you please”), but no one bought it.
So, in third period, when the punked-out cheerleader said, “Mr. Meyer, I didn’t get a handbook,” I was so taken aback I almost vomited. I mean, I may never forget this, the very moment I became my father.
You want weird? Weird is calling people twice your age by their first names but insisting that people four, maybe five years, your junior call you “Mister”. Fairly freaking, creepy-ace weird.
But I’m still a fraud, be sure of this, and there’s little doubt I’ll be arrested soon.
[This week’s guest blogger is Dan Meyer, a 21-yo student teacher from Sacramento who doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up.]
I forgot my lunch on the first day of school. My first act as a high school teacher โ just take the stupid lunch sack (which I prepared the night before) out of the fridge and put it into the Eddie Bauer messenger bag (which I bought the day before) โ and I blew it. This is a great sign. Confidence surges through my body, threatens to consume me.
I tried to navigate my way to Florin through Sacramento’s highway system, which by design is unnavigable by any being less capable than the Space Shuttle Columbia, and got lost only once.
I pulled into a lot marked “Faculty” and I looked around nervously for the angry parking guard until I remembered, holy crap, I’m faculty!
I’m not faculty.
It’s only a matter of time before I’m found out. The athletic director said “You look young,” within twenty seconds of meeting me, and it felt less like an observation than an interrogation. But I’m not worried about the teachers; it’s the kids that’ll be smelling blood in the water. They’ll see my scuffed shoes, wrinkled pants, and pre-freaking-pubescent face and they’ll see chum. Right now, I’m bloody fish chunks in a cast-iron bucket. On Monday, I’ll be bloody fish chunks bobbing up and down in the great blue beyond.
I arrived at the front office and met people (hi, hi, hi). The principal tried to recruit me for the basketball team and I politely, but firmly, declined.
I was led by a math teacher to the math faculty meeting where I met more people (hi, hello, pleasure). I met my long-term and short-term master teachers, [names redacted -ed]. One, an algebra teacher, was told that I was a new father; the other, a pre-calc teacher, was told that I was a woman. Both, ostensibly, got their information from the same person. Communication between Davis and Florin could be flatteringly described as “shabby.”
I’m leaving you people, leaving the continental U.S. for eight days, and leaving my laptop behind. What happens next is weird for me, but for the first time in this blog’s loooong history (happy first birthday, little dude) I’m giving the house keys and alarm code to a guest blogger.
I’ve known this guy for a while and he’s just begun student teaching. He’s outspoken, irascible, passionate (though rarely in the direction I’d choose), and, on occasion, a world-class d-bag getting high off his own product. In other words, he oughtta fit the program I’m running here like a glove.
He starts tomorrow. Depending on how this guest blogging thing works out, we’ll either try it again sometime or never ever speak of it again.
That was the opener. A member of our faculty began an address to the freshman class with that line the other day. A few kids held out and s/he said it again.
“When I talk, you listen.”
I imagine a lot of folks โ especially those who promote the equivalence of teacher and learner, who promote a perfectly democratic discourse โ will chafe at the authoritarianism of it all. Others โ Andrew Keen disciples mostly โ won’t mind.
Personally, I was unoffended. I don’t have much interest in a classroom (or society) where every voice carries equal weight, where experience and education merit no preference. That goes double in a gymnasium full of freshmen.
But I become particular and somewhat critical in the moments immediately after you’ve exploited your authority. In the five seconds after you’ve caught the attention of every freshman at your school (like the Labrador finally catching the car) you either lose it or keep it.
You lose it by leading with filler, by continuing, “Your teachers have talked a few things over in our meetings, which we have every month, and we’ve decided that certain issues face our campus, some which are more pressing than others, etc., etc.”
And they’re gone. Just gone.
If you want to keep their attention, to earn it, you let that silence sit for what screenwriters call a “beat,” essentially the length of one thought, and then you say, “Look, we need you in class, on time. You may not like this but here’s how we’re going to fix the tardy situation around here.”
One is filler. The other is content.
One is signal. The other is noise.
One abuses the strange power dynamic between teachers and students. The other respects it.
Practically Speaking:
Cut the first chapter of your book.
Lose the first paragraph of your essay.
Don’t introduce yourself at your conference presentation.
Open with a question or at least a big statement.
Don’t follow a joke with leaden, nervous laughter.
Personally Speaking:
In my classroom, if we’re in a work session and I need to talk to the class, to steer ’em somewhere new, I head to one corner of the whiteboard, my only serious place in the classroom, and say, “I need you back here in 5 … in 4 … in 3 …If kids are still talking after the countdown, I don’t give ’em any dirty looks or anything, I just write their names down and keep ’em after class for a minute.,” and whenever they quiet down I pause for only that beat and I immediately โ no filler โ offer them something meaty, succinct, and worth their while.
“If you fell out of an airplane, how long would it take you to hit ground?”
You can throw your back out, as I did for two yearsSneaking suspicion: the seed of all lousy classroom management is fear., imposing comprehensive rules and escalating consequences all to keep your students’ attention or you can just give them something worth listening to.
