Anyway, the only reason I'm telling you this is that I recently suffered a huge shock when I attended a high school basketball game. The coach of the opposing team was one of my high school teachers. In fact, he was THE ONLY TEACHER I EVER HATED, and I couldn't believe that he was still having an impact on young people over 30 years later! I was really angry about it in fact. Now, I'm not going to name him, and I'm going to pray that he is nothing like he was when I had to tolerate him as a history teacher, but I am going to share the excerpt from my book-in-progress where I give an example of how NOT to be for first-year teachers. Realize that I wrote this about a year ago, and remember that it's a work-in-progress.
Here it is with the specific part about him bolded:
Use whatever metaphor you want for
the teaching profession, but I like to see students as the adult people we are
helping them to become. It’s like an assembly line where they come to us these
little partly formed packages, and it’s our jobs to put on a whole bunch of
extra pieces to prepare them for life after school, and if just one of us
screws it up, we’ve screwed it up for everyone.
Seriously, if a kid is an ass in
our classroom, and we don’t do everything we can to help him not to be an
ass, then he’ll be an ass the rest of his life and put a lot of other
people through the agony of having to deal with him. True; we cannot fix everyone,
especially when the damage is done at home, but we can do whatever we can while
that kid is in our room, and we can show him that not everyone is an ass,
so don’t be one yourself.
I had a high school history teacher
who took my very serious question of “Why aren’t there any women in our history
book?” and answered it with this little gem – “Because women have never done
anything important.” I remember sitting there dumbfounded as he and quite a few
of the guys laughed at what he thought was a funny reply to my sincere
question. Now, imagine I hadn’t been the kind of person I am – a
take-no-prisoners and put-up-with-zero-bullshit sort of gal – and instead I’d
been beat down my whole life by men in my life or I simply suffered from low
self-esteem. Any idea what kind of damage his answer would have done to me?
Instead, it just really, really,
really pissed me off, and I guarantee that I didn’t care one little bit about
anything that ever came out of that man’s mouth after that. I’ve had countless
teachers over the years who have said countless things in class, but it’s that
one truly asinine and thoughtless comment that I can still hear plain as day in
my head, and it still pisses me off.
Clearly, that teacher was an idiot,
and I’m hoping that you are not an idiot, but even the best of us say idiotic
things from time to time, and if you happen to notice (as you should) that
something you said, whether in jest or not, has had an obvious negative impact
on your student, then you need to take steps immediately to remedy that. It
seriously could be a simple misunderstanding, and that can easily be remedied.
You and your student may not have the same sense of humor, and that’s fine, but
if your “joke” crossed the lines of sexism, racism, religions, or anything else
that was clearly in bad taste on your part, then you need to fix it immediately
and refrain from those kinds of jokes in the future.
Even if what you say or do doesn’t
have long-term ramifications, it could have short-term ones. If you are
purposely mean or rude to a student, he’s going to leave your room in a foul
mood, and he’s going to take that mood with him to the next class where he’s
likely to act out or spout off rude comments about you, which could then land
him in a detention or cause a serious disruption in the other teacher’s class.
Believe me, teachers notice when other teachers are the problem. I’ve had
numerous occasions where students have come to my class after certain, usually
inexperienced, teachers’ classes over and over again in really bad moods, and
often for quite justifiable reasons. Don’t be the teacher who is making other
teachers’ jobs more problematic; you need them on your side. So, do your best
to send the students out of your classroom in a decent mood. They don’t have to
leave glowingly happy by all means, but they need to leave on a positive note.
People are our product, and we want
them leaving us in the best condition possible. Either they are moving down the
line to more advanced classes where the teachers will be adding more pieces to
them, or they are walking out the door upon graduation, and where they go from
there is up to them. If you’ve done your job to the best of your ability,
they’ll be moving on in good working order, so do your damn job.
I sincerely hope that this man has changed. From what I observed of him as he coached, though, I'm not going to hold my breath. At least, considering how old he has to be by now, he won't be influencing young people too much longer if he hasn't changed for the better.
Fortunately, while I had a few teachers who bored me, this man was the only teacher who I can say I truly despised. All my other teachers were good in one way or another. I know, as a teacher, that we can't please every student every day, but I also know that we don't have to intentionally be mean. He was intentionally mean to me that day and others after it (and he completely believed the idiotic thing he said). I've never forgotten it, so seeing him recently was just too big of a shock not to share.
