The Art of Teaching Children, page 41
Soon afterward, Maurice’s teacher followed up with her own class discussion about the disease. She kept a watchful eye on her students to make sure that no one picked on Maurice. Once, after getting permission from Maurice’s parents, the teacher surprised Maurice by drawing two eyes and a mouth with black Sharpie on his sensor. He was delighted. After that, every few weeks when Maurice changed his sensor, he would ask his teacher to add a smiley face. Only she was allowed to draw one. Well, as you would guess, the rest of the children also wanted smileys like Maurice’s, so pretty soon most of his classmates had quarter-sized Magic Marker happy faces on their arms too. So did the teacher.
The following year, Maurice and his family moved, and he began attending a new school. His experience there was completely different. Maurice was bullied. Every day, kids pushed and hit him. They said that Maurice was sick and told the other children to stay away from him because they might “catch” it. Maurice was not invited to any birthday parties. At the new school, the principal never came into the classroom to talk about diabetes. Nobody reminded the children to be thoughtful to those who are different. Meanwhile, the teacher seemed to ignore what was happening. There was never any discussion about it.
One day Maurice’s younger sister told his parents what was going on. They hadn’t known, as Maurice had never mentioned it. After speaking with him, Maurice’s mom contacted the parents of the boy who was bullying her son the most. His name was Harrison.
Around this same time, without any prompting from his parents, Maurice decided to take the matter into his own hands. One morning, without asking his teacher, Maurice walked to the front of the classroom and announced, “Listen up, please.” Surprised, everyone stopped working. The teacher let him speak. “I have diabetes,” Maurice continued. He raised his elbow and pointed to the plastic circle on his arm. “And this is my sensor. I know it looks funny, but I need it for my disease.”
For the next couple of minutes, Maurice talked about diabetes and explained how his sensor worked. He invited his classmates to come up and touch it, just like his previous principal had done. After that, he opened it up for questions. As he took the questions, there was one he didn’t know the answer to. All of a sudden, a hand went up in the back of the classroom. Maurice was surprised to see whose it was. “I can answer that,” Harrison said. “My parents told me all about your disease. Can I answer it?”
Maurice nodded and waved Harrison to join him. Harrison walked to the front of the room and answered the question. When he started back to his seat, Maurice said, “No, wait. Stay with me.” And there the two boys stood side by side talking about Maurice’s diabetes. From then on, neither Harrison—nor anyone else in the class—ever bullied Maurice again.
’Twas the Week Before Winter Break
The week before winter break is one of the hardest of the year. Teachers everywhere are hanging on for dear life because it’s packed with holiday craziness. On top of your regular teaching, the week is chock-full of class parties, chorus rehearsals, holiday assemblies, staff potlucks, food drives, evening concerts, sing-alongs, extra band practices, get-togethers with buddy classes, visits to the senior center, ugly sweater contests, holly jolly cookie swaps, and covert trips to your colleague’s classroom because you’re their Secret Santa. By the end of the week, you will have gained ten pounds because for days the tables in the teachers’ lounge have been covered with boxes of donuts, bowls of candy, trays of fudge, and leftovers from the staff potluck and twenty-four class parties. By Friday, you will feel like a burned-out Christmas light, a broken candy cane, and an Elf on the Shelf that has toppled headfirst from his perch.
We’re all familiar with the famous countdown in Manhattan’s Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Typically, around a million people gather there that night. Well, there’s a much bigger December countdown, and that’s the one held by millions of teachers across the globe the week before winter break. During this week, every teacher in the world is counting down till Friday. We keep countdowns in our plan books, on our classroom whiteboards, and on the boards in the staff room too. All week long, the first thing teachers do when entering their classrooms is change the countdown. It makes us happy to cross out a 5 on the corner of a whiteboard and make it a 4, and so on throughout the week.
When emailing or texting our friends, especially another teacher, we will often include the countdown: “Three more days to go.” “Only two more sleeps.” “We’re almost free!” When we pass another teacher in the school hallways, we like to call out the number of days left till the first day of the break. We do this even if students are around. The children don’t get it, but our colleagues understand. Sometimes our messages to one another are coded. If a fellow teacher passes you in the hallway singing “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” you can bet she’s not referring to the holiday season. By the way, you will not hear a teacher sing “White Christmas” at this time of the year. The lyrics aren’t true. Treetops might glisten, but children don’t listen. And we don’t sing “Silent Night” either. All is not calm.
The week before winter break can feel like five days of full moons and Friday the Thirteenths. Your best-behaved students will start fooling around, and your quietest girls will become Chatty Cathys. Children who always hand in their homework will forget to do it. Between their sugar highs, the anticipation of vacation, and waiting for Santa, some of your students will start bouncing off the walls. A few days before the break, a colleague of mine sent one of his fourth graders to my classroom with a note that said “I’m sending Nathan over to bounce off your walls for a while.” Warning: If, in the beginning of this week, your kids are behaving, don’t buy it. It’s a ploy. They are luring you into a false sense of security and waiting to let loose by the middle of the week. Also, if you tell children that the light on the smoke detector or Wi-Fi box is really a camera with a direct link to the North Pole and that Santa is watching them, it doesn’t work. They won’t believe you. If you sing “All I want for Christmas is a quiet class,” this won’t work either. Kids just giggle.
To be honest, this crazy week isn’t all our students’ fault. Teachers contribute to the excitement. During this week, we give our kids holiday crosswords and word searches. We make snow globes out of baby food jars, dreidels out of craft paper, and reindeer out of candy canes and googly eyes. We wear Santy Claus hats and antler headbands while reading holiday books and singing songs about bells that jingle and snowmen who come to life. We sing songs about lighting the menorah too. We bake sugar cookies, build graham cracker houses, and take our kids on scavenger hunts for gingerbread men that we’ve hidden around the school. We invite parents in to talk about Hanukkah and, if we’re lucky, eat the latkes that they demonstrate how to make. We practice math with gumdrops and peppermints and reindeer noses (malted milk balls). We pull down the shades and let kids read by flashlight as a projected fireplace crackles on the screen. We perform edible science experiments with steaming cups of hot chocolate that we made in a crockpot to illustrate the three states of matter: solids, liquids, and gases. (The solid is the marshmallow that floats on top.) We decorate our classroom doors to look like giant packages and nutcrackers and winter scenes with slogans such as: “This class is only silent at night!” We ask children to write about what they would do if Santa got stuck in a chimney. The most common answers: “Tickle him,” “Pinch his rear,” and “Call 911.” Why do we do this during an already wild week? Because most kids love the season, and there is something truly magical about being with children at Christmastime.
When the last day before break finally comes, you will try your best to hold down the fort. You know not to teach anything new on this day. It’s pointless. You won’t win. Teachers can’t compete with Santa. On this final school day in December, your students clean out their desks and cubbies. You play Holiday Bingo, serve treats that the room moms sent in, and listen to your classroom get louder and louder as the kids empty their goody bags. You are grateful that they will go to PE or art so those teachers have to deal with them. When the children are away at these classes, you take down the December calendar, pass out holiday art to go home, and push down garbage cans full of paper plates, Styrofoam cups, and cupcake wrappers that were licked clean during the class party. In the afternoon, you turn out the lights and show your kids a movie. While they lie on the popcorn-covered floor watching A Charlie Brown Christmas, Home Alone, or The Polar Express in their jammies—because why not throw a Pajama Day in there too?—you sit zonked in the back of your classroom thanking God for Christmas movies. As the DVD nears its end, you look up at the clock. Your mouth stretches into a smile. In a short while, you will happily erase the large “1” written in red Expo marker on the corner of the whiteboard. Your countdown is almost over. Winter break is almost here.
Teacher Tired
Every year, I would teach my students that certain words have different intensities. Take rainy, for example. When it rains, it can sprinkle, drizzle, or pour. The same is true for happy. When you’re happy, you can be pleased or joyful or ecstatic. To be ecstatic, I’d explain, is much happier than to feel pleased. Tired is another example. Drowsy means a little tired, sleepy is more tired than drowsy, and exhausted is super tired. If you ask kids to show you pouring rain, they will pound on their desks. When they demonstrate how it looks to be ecstatic, they will jump on their chairs and cheer. If you say, “Show me exhausted,” they will collapse onto the floor and start snoring. Loudly.
I have come to the conclusion that there is one form of tiredness even greater than being exhausted—and that is teacher tired. Teacher tired is the state of absolute and utter run-over-by-a-Mack-truck exhaustion that only teachers can understand. There’s no tired like it. How does it feel? When you are teacher tired, you know that your alarm clock will not be enough to get you out of bed in the morning. You’ll need an air horn. You feel like a laptop when the tiny battery on the upper corner of the screen turns red, alerting you that it has only 1 percent charge left.
There are different types of teacher tired: first-week-of-school tired and report card tired, conference week tired, field trip tired, and end-of-the-year tired too. Come May, you’d swear the month has sixty-seven days. I remember one student teacher I had named Ted. He had left the corporate world because he wanted to be a teacher. At the end of his first day of student teaching, Ted fell into a chair, shook his head, and cried, “I’ve never worked so hard in my entire life! I’m beat! How the heck can you do this every day?” I started to chuckle. The funny thing? Ted hadn’t even taught anything yet.
You can easily spot a teacher who is teacher tired. There are signs: when you notice a teacher sitting inside her car in the staff parking lot waiting till the very last minute before school is about to start to get out; when you eye a colleague trying to click open his classroom door with a remote car door opener; when you receive an all-school email from a teacher asking if anyone has seen a lesson planner, ID badge, coffee mug, or a stack of spelling tests; when a teacher posts a photo on Facebook of the two mismatched shoes she wore to work that day. If you are unable to see what’s wrong in the photo, you are teacher tired too.
There are other telltale signs: You look everywhere for your phone while having a conversation on it. You turn to your students and ask what year it is. You laugh yourself to tears at something that’s not even funny. When reading Charlotte’s Web to your kids, you use the exact same voice for Charlotte, Wilbur, Fern, Templeton, and the goose. You can’t remember your students’ names. You plan to get ahead over Thanksgiving break but end up binge-watching Netflix instead. You know the kids have seen The Chronicles of Narnia fifty times, but you show it anyway. You’re jealous of teachers whose school years end before yours. You brew a pot of morning coffee but forget to put the coffee in it. You put “WOW” stickers on your students’ papers upside down, so they all say “MOM.” When getting off the phone with a parent, you say, “Bye. Love you.” You stop at a McDonald’s drive-through and try to order breakfast from the garbage can. You play Teacher Tired Bingo at the staff meeting and win. The winning squares on your bingo card say: “Forgot how old you were,” “Lost your car keys,” “Misspelled a basic vocabulary word,” and “Still had snowflakes on your bulletin board in May.”
Teachers don’t get teacher tired just because of our crazy workload and long hours. There are other reasons. One is that teachers work at a high intensity level and expend an enormous amount of physical, mental, and emotional energy. We go two thousand miles per hour. This can wipe you out. And we are always multitasking. A teacher can answer the phone, tell a child how to spell a word, poke a hole in a glue bottle, and look into a student’s open mouth so he can show you where he lost his tooth—all at the same time.
Teachers tend to be big worriers too. We worry about parents, bosses, colleagues, and, of course, our students. We stew about observations, finishing report cards on time, and our kids’ spring testing results. All this worrying can keep us up at night. In fact, it’s hard for teachers to turn off their brains when they go to bed. If you could look into teachers’ brains when they’re trying to fall asleep, you’d see thoughts like this: I need to call Henry’s mom… Remember to cut more paper… I should make Stephanie a new name tag… Don’t forget to send the field trip notes home… I have to listen to Martina read… and What the heck am I teaching tomorrow? It makes sense that a lot of teachers have dark circles under their eyes. Jill says that a cosmetic company needs to come out with a concealer for dark under-eye circles and call it Teacher Tired. It’d be a hit.
When schools moved to distance learning during the pandemic, teacher tired took on a whole new level. As teachers faced the daunting task of figuring out how to teach their students from home, countless new challenges were thrust upon them: How do I use the new technology? How do I ensure that my students are learning? How do I teach my own children who are at home while I’m working? How do I get a classroom full of first graders to find a page in their practice books during a Zoom meeting? Organizing a space shuttle launch would be easier.
Those who taught during this time claim there’s normal teacher tired, and there is 2020 teacher tired. 2020 felt like ten years in one. During the shutdowns, a friend of mine arrived late to her virtual staff meeting on Zoom. She told her colleagues that she’d fallen asleep. Everyone just nodded and smiled. They understood. When teachers finally returned to their regular classrooms, many of them had to teach both in-class and remote learners simultaneously. Double the work. Just take the simple act of taking attendance. Suddenly teachers had to keep track of those who were fully face-to-face, students who were fully remote, those who were being quarantined, kids who were waiting on Covid test results, and those who were just absent. All day long, as teachers worked in masks that fogged up their glasses and slid down their noses as they spoke, they wiped down classrooms, disinfected devices, tried to keep students six feet apart, reminded kids to wash their hands, and gave lessons on mask wearing: (1) “Do not eat them”; (2) “Masks go over mouths, noses, and chins—not mouths, noses, and eyes”; and (3) “Your mask is not a feedbag. You are not a horse.”
Being teacher tired is one of the reasons that so many teachers drink crazy amounts of coffee, or as Jill likes to call it, “lesson planning juice.” Teachers need it to survive. One morning before work, I was in Starbucks ordering a coffee when I looked out the drive-through window and noticed a long line of cars. I commented on it to the clerk, and he said, “Ninety percent of the people in that line are teachers.” I let out a laugh. “And,” he added, “you will never hear any of them ask for decaf.”
I experienced my worst case of teacher tired my first year of teaching. I was twenty-three and still living at home with my parents, who lived close to the school. As many new teachers do, I was spending every night at school burning the midnight oil to get ready for the next day. One afternoon I drove home for lunch and decided to grab a quick nap on the sofa. It was 12:10, I had to pick up my third graders at 12:45, and it took less than five minutes to drive to work, so I could grab a few minutes of shut-eye and get back to school in time. Well, it didn’t take long till I was out like a light. When I opened my eyes, I turned to look at the clock, then bolted off the couch. It was 1:05! Panicked, I jumped into the car and raced to school. I dashed to the blacktop, but my students weren’t there. I ran into my classroom. Empty. Then I poked my head into Mrs. Smith’s room next door. Thank goodness! She’d brought my kids into her classroom and was showing them a movie.
I went back to my room and tried to calm down, when suddenly my principal (Frank) walked in and shouted, “Where were you?” Here it comes, I thought. I’m going to get fired. I’d left the children unattended for who knows how long. “I’m sorry,” I said, almost crying. “I’m so sorry. I went home and took a nap and fell asleep and—”
Frank put his hand up. “Never mind that. We were worried that something happened to you. Thank God you’re okay.” At the end of the day when I was excusing my kids, Frank was back in my classroom. As soon as the last child was out the door, he told me to go home and forbade me to come back till the next morning.
I know the dictionary says that a teacher is a noun, but I definitely felt more like a verb. Verbs are action words, and teachers are always in a state of action. All day long, we give lessons, correct papers, read stories, kick copiers, clean messes, love children. Our jobs are a thousand verbs put together. What we do is do. To define myself as a noun—as just a person, place, or thing—put me in the same category as a glue stick. And that just didn’t feel right.
Being a verb is tiring. It’s tiring to give lessons in multiple subjects every day. It’s tiring to remind children all the time to say “please” and “thank you” and to not interrupt. It’s tiring to monitor playgrounds and cafeterias and bus stops. It’s tiring to manage squabbles when kids come in from recess and to follow through if children break the rules. It’s tiring to email and call parents, to lean over small furniture all day long, and to mark hundreds of papers every week. It’s tiring to be creative, motivating, firm, challenging, enthusiastic, and engaging all day long too.
