Quoth the raven: Do your homework

Tim Schlosser, a teacher at Southeast Middle School, writes:

I usually ignore holidays in the classroom.  Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Easter -- all 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 seventh and eighth graders ... as the true master of horror himself!

OK, 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 warmup I asked students, "If you murdered someone, where would you hide the body?  Why? Explain in four-five 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, 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, -- 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.

An awkward costume moment came later, when I had to discipline a student 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 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 10 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?  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 with a profanity. 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, and not even recognizing one of my own homeroom students because her manner was so different -- 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 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.  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.