[This week’s guest blogger is Dan Meyer, a 21-yo student teacher from Sacramento who won’t realize how good he had it until several years later.]

Every day I come to student-teach at Florin High School with something to write. Be it a movie review, a letter, or a movie script, I always have something to speed up the interminable – my two hours of observation. I finished three reviews (of admittedly variable quality) in only five days. Boredom makes me strong, gives me a reason to write, makes me prolific. But today I’ve got nothing so I’ve resorted to writing about having nothing.

Two Periods Later

Strangely, for the first time since I’ve been here, it wasn’t an issue. First period trig was doing group work and help was needed all around. I got on my knees besides Arielle’s desk and fell like a rock back into my old rhythms. It felt great to be doing something … finally.

See … and maybe I should just post the whole thing so I don’t forget … but we’ve been talking in EDU 275 about classroom management – how we get the little blighters to fall in line and learn. My theory, which has got me branded as a maverick by my cohort, is that if I can make these kids believe that I’m cool, they’ll follow me to the end of the Earth. Today my stock rose several points with that class, which won’t hurt come winter semester when I take over.

[This week’s guest blogger is Dan Meyer, a 21-yo student teacher from Sacramento whose crackpot consumer-driven theories on classroom management will eventually get him dragged in front of the dean.]

When you’re going to take over a classroom from a teacher, to split the kids from their mother, it really helps the transition if they aren’t altogether attached to him. Often times, it’s a crap shoot. My short-term teacher laughs at his own jokes and tries to talk “jive” with his kids. I can’t imagine them tying a yellow ribbon at his departure. I suspect they’ll be pretty ambivalent about me too (for reasons that are obviously out of my control; it’s first period and they’re sluggish [and ’cause you suck, don’t forget that one -ed]) but at least they’re not in love with this guy. Don’t set yourself up to follow a hard act.

My long-term assignment is a hard act. She nails the balance between mother and teacher and some of the kids would happily distract a bull elephant for her. This is hardly an ideal situation for me, but thankfully it’s not beyond repair.

The only solution is to be really cool. That’s the currency in high school, after all. Every one of their actions is taken in the direction of mimicking those who are cool. The social rites of these kids aren’t all that enigmatic; just be someone they’d buy clothes from and you’ll be able to sell them math, history, and home economics.

Spreading lies about your master teacher, general slander, posting all over campus the photo you took of his Christmas-party binge drinking when you said there wasn’t any film in the camera, those are all viable alternatives, but they should probably be avoided. They’re evil, and kids can smell evil as quickly as they can fear.

Short of being cool, at the very least make sure you’re less uncool than your master teacher. Keep your head down and your mouth shut. Crack a stupid joke inside of the first week and you may as well trade your chalk in for a hairnet and start life anew shoveling Beetloaf onto plastic trays. Don’t talk. Don’t smile. Mystery will accumulate about yourself like debt on a Visa card. These tricks are obvious, but no one (least of all me) will say that they’re easy.

[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 – 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.