Teaching with Tim

I usually ignore holidays in the classroom.  Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter-all of these come and go in Room 311 without much fanfare.  But Halloween is different.  Maybe in part because of my abiding love for Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe, I have always gone all out on the 31st.  This year I carved a pumpkin with my journalism elective, had a Halloween history candy quiz with homeroom, and taught Poe all day with my 7th and 8th graders… as the true master of Horror himself: 

Okay, technically that’s an Edward Scissorhands wig, and last year my principal said I looked more like Borat, but the costume was still pretty popular. 

 I taught “The Tell Tale Heart” and for the warm up I asked students, “If you murdered someone, where would you hide the body?  Why? Explain in 4-5 sentences.”  I admit that this question would never appear under the heading “age-appropriate writing prompts for middle school students,” but I’m going to justify myself by saying that it was a good lead-in question for a story involving a corpse hidden under the floorboards.  Plus the students took to their warm up sheets with unusual gusto, explaining how they would burn the body, chop it into tiny pieces, hide it under Juan Soto’s bed so that everyone would blame him, tie a barbell to the foot and throw it into the ocean, feed it to their dogs, eat it themselves-virtually anything but “That would never happen because I wouldn’t murder someone.”  I explained to them afterwards that this was actually the correct answer, so I couldn’t be held responsible for encouraging their homicidal tendencies. 

Speaking of which, while we were sharing out the warm ups during one of my eighth grade classes, a normally quiet student gave a long, detailed answer that included chopping the body in half and putting one part in an abandoned field north of Pasadena and the other in a drainage ditch near the railroad tracks in Riverside.  Silence hung thick in the air for a few seconds after he finished reading.

A moment that should have been even more awkward, though, came later, when I had to deliver discipline while wearing eyebrow makeup and a fake mustache.  One student, I’ll call him Gilbert, had skipped homework detention two days in a row, so I held him after class.  I sat across the desk from him and delivered a long diatribe that involved injunctions about being responsible, staying focused, and making his parents proud.  He took it seriously and nodded throughout, wide-eyed.  It only occurred to me after he left that he could have completely broken my nerve if he had so much as smirked at the absurdity of it: this cartoon creature with wild black hair and makeup lecturing him on responsibility.  I am convinced, though, that the irony did not even occur to him.  The image of me he had in his mind–the stern-but-fair teacher/authority figure–was so strong that it seemed to shine straight through my makeup.

This version of myself that gives finger-wagging lectures on character sometimes still seems like a caricature to me, a costume even more ridiculous than my Edgar Allan Poe get-up.  Wasn’t it just ten years ago, to the day, that I was dropping pumpkins off a bridge with my friends to watch the seedy orange explosion at the bottom? (In spite of a Seattle Police Department sign promising a $250 fine for doing just that.)  I guess this incongruity is just part of the shared charade that takes place in any classroom.  Because some of the kids, too, are playing a role.  They pretend to be innocent and studious while I’m in earshot, but I know that they see movies like “Super Bad” and “Saw V” on the weekends, and some of the conversations I’ve overheard in the halls wouldn’t even make it to HBO uncensored.  I remember seeing Gilbert (of the wide eyes and the yes-mister-I’ll-do-better) working on a computer in the back of the classroom once.  He was having trouble with the internet, and I overheard him exclaim “What the f–k is wrong with this thing?”  I should add that he didn’t say this to impress his friends, or with the self-conscious glee of trying out a bad word for the first time, but completely naturally, like a balding father with his head under the hood of a broken-down Ford.  He owned that bad word.  Still, I appreciate that he never would have said it if he thought I could hear. 

During my first year of teaching, cursing and open defiance were fairly regular occurrences in my classroom.  I remember visiting the classroom of another teacher, our department chair at that time, and not even recognizing one of my homeroom students because her manner was so much different-it was as if, in his classroom, she were suddenly several years younger.  She raised her hand eagerly when he asked the class questions, and she sat up straight in her seat instead of slouching like she did in my room.  In my room, she chewed gum loudly and greeted almost everything I said with the words “Nah, Mister, I ain’t gonna do that.”  Yet in his classroom she seemed totally different, just short of angelic.  I’m happy to report that I can now command enough respect to get students to put on this kind of act-to disguise their baser natures.  We’re all playing our roles-they’ll play the respectful, hard-working students if I’ll play the competent, stern, well-prepared teacher… a role I wasn’t completely prepared to fill two years ago.  Shakespeare was right that life is a stage, I guess, but Polonius’s “to thine own self be true” requires certain caveats.

That’s about it, but I wanted to share three quick things that have nothing to do with any of the above before I end this installment:

1) I saw Marilynne Robinson (author of Pulitzer-winning “Gilead”) doing interview with Stephen Greenblatt of the NPR radio show, “Bookworm,” at the L.A. Library. The conversation was fascinating, and it prompted me to start listening to old episodes of “Bookworm” online. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, you might really enjoy these David Foster Wallace interviews. Powerful stuff.

2) My journalism students created podcasts of their most recent issue of “Eagle News”. If you’re a fan of hard-hitting news and fearless journalism, they’re here.

3) Obligatory rumination on the weather: L.A. didn’t get the memo about Fall starting, apparently. It has still been sunny and 80+ non-stop. That may sound great, but I don’t really like it. Maybe I’m just a dour, grumpy Seattlite by nature, but I find it almost insulting, like the city is lying to you about the nature of life. I’m looking forward the holidays, when I’ll be back in a city with weather that is more… practical.  A climate with an implicit understanding that life is not all moonbeams and sunshine.  But best of all, of course, will be seeing all the family and friends I’ve been missing.