In December, a student gave me a gift card to a nearby sandwich shop. It was used. He didn’t care about the balance and neither did I. It was an irreverent Christmas gift, a tiny act of care from a student too cool for caring. I appreciated the gesture, naturally, but had no idea what to do with it until a few days ago.

It was lunchtime and I put it on a shelf somewhere just off the beaten classroom path. I circled my lunchtime crowd and asked them, “how do long do you think it’ll last before someone takes it?” We took bets, bragging rights for stakesFor the record, I take bets on everything. During our dimensional analysis unit, I’ll tell ’em Randy Moss ran the 40 yard dash in 4.25 seconds and take five bets on how fast that is in miles per hour. Easy, superficial, easy method for pumping them up for the work. Did I mention easy?.

If you guessed 24 hours, you’d have every reason to crow.

It kind of kills me how slippery my stuff is around here. Students take everything. Compasses, calculators, and rulers, in particular, have a shorter shelf life than whole milk.

That fact wedges me awkwardly between two competing interests. On the one hand, I want my stuff to remain my stuff for maybe a semester or two.

On the other hand, the obvious solution here (some kind of check-out system) is completely antithetical to my classroom game. My classroom is the place that it is, in large part, because I keep time-hogging administrative details to a few minutes daily and, as much as possible, I keep them out of my students’ line of sight.

eg:

I don’t dedicate a regular time slot to attendance. I don’t dedicate a regular time slot to homework review. I rarely pass back work – just assessments and only while they’re occupied by something interesting.

I feel strange wasting even small units of time. I draw up the next day’s highlighted problems the night before in Keynote and have them ready to go at a click of my remote.

Total time saved: maybe thirty seconds per problem, but all these measures taken as a sum make me, like, the richest teacher I know.

ie:

If I want to host a classroom spitball session on strategies for surviving a 47-story fall, or show Vampire Weekend’s awesome little music video, or mention in passing last year’s most popular baby names, or all three in the same period, I don’t worry about falling behind my colleagues or missing year-end benchmarks. I have hours in the bank.

I can’t speak with much precision for how my students feel about all this but I try to imagine this classroom from their perspective, a classroom which actively excludes boring self-sustaining details and instead pushes engaging moments into all available space, even the margins.

I’m working hard at it. I want this class to be the best paced and most engaging math class they’ve ever taken, even if it’s really, really poorly stocked.

I’d been compiling a post over the course of this school year entitled “Albums I’ve Played For My Classes (And Not Pissed Them Off)” which would cover ground you can probably predict. But then my first semester surveys came back and, like, five kids, responding to the question, “What about this class would you change for next semester?” wrote:

Don’t play lame music.

And I scrapped the post.

Well, that was awkward.

To set it straight, I was blogging back when blogs were written on paper and called “journals” (it’s an old-person thing – don’t worry about it) and maintained a pretty detailed record of that spectacular admixture of ignorance and hubris called “student teaching.” Those posts were a copied-and-pasted time capsule from five years ago, from a very different timeAnd if those were the posts I included, imagine the horrific self-incriminating garbage I left out. Please stop imagining now..

So. As much as I appreciated returning home to all the well-wishes and encouragement and assurances that, if I only stuck it out, teaching would get better … um … well I can’t even begin to phrase a response. “Thanks,” maybe. With one eyebrow upraised.

And as much as I’m glad that dude’s stint here is over and as much as I want to totally disavow his technique, attitude, and face, he and his commenters raised some worthy issues:

On Young v. Old

In response to 21-yo Dan’s blatant aversion to age & experience, Laelia (nee Nancy Sharoff) responds with some ageism of her own:

Oh honey, one might refer to your post as the result of the ‘innocence of youth’, however, in your case we might need to adjust that phrase to the ‘ignorance of youth’. FYI – I’m more than twice your age. We too face a dilema – that of how to deal w/ those still wet behind the ears, those that trip over their own feet, those who believe that the ‘truth’ resides only within them, those who have not learned the lessons that history has taught (that what goes around, comes around), oh wait….I must be talking about some of my peers – those 20-somethings.

She seems to have missed the mark with her nine-month prediction of my retirement (sigh … see first paragraph) but her comment (and my dumb, younger cousin’s post) points out the awkwardness of 60-yos and 20-yos working side-by-side under equal rank. Can another job claim that kind of weirdness? What do we do with thatOld people, be the teachers you want young people to become. Young people, give ’em a second look. (But not a third.)?

On Being Cool

Though my attempts to convert social currency into learning outcomes died a strange death several years ago, they morphed into something best described by TheInfamousJ’s comment:

My students respect my personality and I respect theirs.

….

I discovered that the best thing is not being cool, but asking them to teach you how to be “with it”. If you mean it, it shows them the kind of respect that you want them to give you … and they do (although sometimes with ‘kids these days’ you don’t recognize it as the respect you are used to seeing).

I’d add detached, dispassionate discipline to his confident, sincerely-interested teacher, all of which, taken as a sum, seems kinda … well … cool? … no no NO … I will not go down this path again.

On The Whole Thing

Thanks, everyone, for not asking the obvious question: what kind of self-obsessed loser guestblogs for himself?

Thought about you once today. Hiking Diamond Head. 271 steps. Wondered about slope, rate of change, what would happen if each step was a coupla inches longer, etc. Then realized where I was, who I was with, and pushed you right outta my head. ¶ Be good.

• 3:45PM PST: A student body leader passes 38 numbers out of a hat. I’m #17.
• 3:58PM PST: 16 people have selected (and occasionally stolen per the rules of the game) cookie cutters, Christmas ornaments, barbecue sauce, lamps, etc, etc.
• 3:59PM PST: I go for the smallest gift. Organic soap called “Kiss My Face.” Regift potential: high.
  
• 4:10PM PST: Will Winkler, whom students, faculty, and parents refer to by the single letter “X,” steals my soap.
• 4:12PM PST: Given the choice between some awesome known commodity and the unknown, I’ll almost always select the unknown. It’s a sickness. Stepping past a leopard-print umbrella and a Johnny Cash collection, I open up Richard Carlson’s best-seller Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff – and It’s All Small Stuff and finally understand regret. Regift potential: nil.
  
• 4:30PM PST: There are five gifts left on the table. One of them is mine.
• 4:35PM PST: There are three gifts left on the table. One of them is mine. I begin to worry.
• 4:37PM PST: There are no more takers. Everyone has a gift. Two are left and one is mine.
  

  I blame my colossal TA Katy’s homemade wrapping paper which featured angler fish a little too prominently for the faculty’s tastes, I guess.

  Sucks for my colleagues. There was a Utilikey underneath those angler fish. Yeah. That’s right. A little combo pocket knife / screwdriver / bottle opener that collapsed into a key and which could’ve been yours had you only looked past the scary wrapping paper.

  There’s a metaphor there, I’m positive, but no way I’m gonna spend my time sniffing it out. ‘Cause that’s small stuff. And I don’t sweat that anymore.