So you’re standing at the side of the gym chatting with one of the counselors during the winter sports rally when you hear, first slowly and then building, “Mr. Meyer! Mr. Meyer! Mr. Meyer!” ¶ Can anyone put a percentage on the number of times this ends well?
Category: anecdotes
Total 71 Posts
- drove to San Jose Municipal airport sometime around 04h00 PST;
- gate agent bumped me to first class just before departure, setting the whole trip up on a high shelf from the start;
- sneered back at the peasantry in economy seating seventeen times over the first twelve minutes of flight;
- read Andrew Keen’s anti-Web-2.0 anti-fun polemic The Cult of the Amateur 35,000 feet above Utah’s Great Salt Flats, agreeing with much of it, estimating the percent of unhappy edubloggers who read it to be somewhere around 35, finishing it as we taxied into Minneapolis-St. Paul;
- met my twin sister (last seen: 1.5 years ago) and two cousins (last seen: 10 years ago) in St. Cloud;
- was introduced by doting grandparents to each of St. Cloud’s 62,000 residents;
- was asked an awful lot about my job teaching math;
- saw in College-Aged Cousin diligence, industry, and some other virtues I cherish and covet;
- experienced an awful moment of clarity;
- realized I am and have been wasting my diligence and industry in a profession which, by evidence of how it pays its employees (by years and units), doesn’t care about hard work or industry;
- wrote a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle entitled “Obituary of a Fourth-Year Teacher” and CC’d my district;
- licked the stamp;
- called TMAO, asked him to talk me down;
- put the letter in a drawer;
- got flagged for one of TSA’s special security screenings on the flight back which seemed to fit the overall arc of the trip like a glove.
But they won’t find anything.
Rosalia showed up in my third period class a few weeks ago. She came from Colima. She speaks no English. (I’m woefully weak on my codings โ is she an L1 or an L5?) As a school, our diversity is primarily economic, not racial, leaving very little second-language support for your humble narrator, suddenly pressed into the service of bilingual education.
This hasn’t been a nightmare. This has, in fact, been one of the best parts of teaching for a coupla reasons:
- I speak Spanish. And thank god for that. Not well, mind you. I mean, you’ve met me. Linguistically speaking, I’m the rugby player who was built like an oak table in college but who went to seed after graduation. My Spanish is flabby but my fluency crosses a very particular threshold where she can easily teach me words I don’t know.
-
The other students love our new multiculturalism. And I’m so glad that worked out. It blows their mind somehow that I speak Spanish, as if they’d discovered some secret double life I’d been living without them.
For example, they were still chattering and didn’t notice when Rosalia came in, but two words into my instructions (“Cada día en esta clase, empecemos con la opener alla,“) and you could hear the ocean breaking on rocks twelve miles away.
I’ve never had to hassle anyone into being her partner whenever the work has required partners. Other students love learning new words in Spanish, which is kind of an easy stance to take when you’re in the linguistic majority but damn if Rosalia isn’t adventurous also, building her English vocabulary whenever possible.
- Modifications I make for Rosalia make my teaching better for the entire class. I speak slower. I gesture more. I use more pictures. I enunciate better. Etc. Etc.
Her sister sat in on class last week and today swapped in from her old math class (taught by a fella who speaks English and English). Both have started calling out answers during lecture, which is just a cool state of affairs.
Y’know how no matter how many Friday afternoons you experience in a lifetime, no matter how long ago you shoulda become inured to the joy of a weekend, it still thrills you? Halloween is like that for me, only several hundred miles in the other direction.
- INT. HIGH SCHOOL MATH CLASSROOM - DAY
- DAN MEYER, 25, tall, arms built like telephone poles, greets the last in a stream of costumed pimps, witches, whores, and stabbing victims.
- He stands in front of the class and smiles warmly.
- MR. MEYER
- Hey guys. Good to see you. Happy Halloween. I thought today we'd watch a Halloween video for the first half of class and then for the second I've hidden candy around the class for you to find.
- The class REJOICES.
- THE KILLER FROM SAW
- Sick!
- A CHIPPENDALE DANCER
- Really?!
- MR. MEYER
- Ha ha ... uh ... no. I do have a test for you, though.
- The class DESPAIRS.
Is Halloween international? Is there a country where I don’t hafta put up with this?