I want my class to be playful. My students may be teenagers, but my hope is that there is still plenty of space for play in our classroom. To that end, many of my lines are self-deprecating. I make fun of myself a great deal. The teacher isn’t perfect, I say. We all make mistakes and we can all laugh at them: see, I can do it, too.
The joke everyone knows is my inability to understand sports. I get them confused all the time, “Baseball? Is that the sport with the little white ball and the stick?” After the student nods, I add, “Right, and they hit it into a small hole and wear lots of plaid.” Well, both sports do have small white balls and sticks, right? “Is that the sport with the nets and they can use their hands but not their feet or their feet but not their hands?” Isn’t soccer just upside down basketball?
It is a special treat if I get a student playing water polo: “How do they get the horses in the water? What happens when they poop? I know you can lead a horse to water, but will it swim?”
Yes, there is a little bit of snobbery and geekiness in this. I have never been a sports person. It also says that I am not an expert in everything and that there are many things about which students know way more than I do.
I claim that I could never play sports because I was just not coordinated enough. I tell kids that I am fork in the forehead, pencil in the eye kind of guy. When they ask for a pair of scissors, I tell them I am not permitted sharp objects or fire by court order.
At holiday time, when students give me treats, I frequently tell them that I am the amazing expanding English teacher. When they give me the ubiquitous Starbucks gift card, I let them know that I will be using it for hot chocolate because you don’t really want someone with my temperament taking caffeine. Yes, I know that chocolate has caffeine, too. It’s a joke!
Frequently, I open the door for kids (or anyone) and, as they go in, say, “Age before beauty – no wait, I think I have that backward. I love school dress-up days when kids are in outlandish outfits. I will nearly bump into kids wearing fatigues and tell them that I just didn’t see them. If they are wearing dance outfits, I’ll sigh and say that I couldn’t get into a tutu, I needed a four-four.
I know that Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences have fallen out of favor, but someone in our building is still giving kids some kind of inventory that tells them if they are auditory or visual learners or if they learn best through movement or music. Every child can recite his or her learning style. I tell them that I am a gustatory-olfactory learner and that no one ever taught to my learning style! I need scratch and sniff handouts or edible lessons!
As we are preparing for finals and talking about strategies for short answer questions, I advise kids to follow the North Shore motto. They look at me quizzically, “I have lived my entire life on Chicago’s North Shore. You know the main rule here: More is better!”
When people find out that I work in the same building with my wife, it is only a mild exaggeration when I tell them that, “I break ‘em, she fixes ‘em!” I joke that they run to her and say, “I know he’s your husband, but do you know what he DID?”
When the eye rolls appear. When I am accused of telling dad jokes (I am a dad!), I shake my head and tell them, “You got the weird English teacher and you are just going to have to cope.” Almost all of my students survived class with me and went on to lead mostly normal lives.
Mostly normal, whatever that is!
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