Currently watching: Wild West Tech (it’s about freak shows) on the History Channel
I’m going to take a brief step away from posting on books and music and movies for just this post so I can share with you some stories of teachers scaring their students into behaving. Anyone who has actually spoken to me since I started training to be a full time public school teacher starting this fall–I’m teaching special education English for 11th and 12th grades, by the way–may have heard some of these stories, but they are too funny to not share with as many people as possible.
Story one, The Typewriter. The teacher in this anecdote doesn’t even try to enforce rules or discipline or control her students for the first couple days of school. Then, on the third day, when the class is going absolutely off the walls, she picks up the typewriter that sits on her desk and heaves it against the wall. The typewriter hits the wall with a mighty crash and explodes into many, many little pieces. The students are shocked into silence and proceed to feel awful they angered her so much she had to break her typewriter to get their attention. After this episode, she has the students rebuild the typewriter, they behave fairly well for the rest of the year, and the typewriter is ready for breaking the next year.
Story two, No Need to Yell. This teacher has a background in drama, which she exploits. When a student is talking out of turn, getting out of his seat, talking back, etc., she turns her back to the offending student to speak to a student sitting nearby. Pretending to be near the point of losing control of her anger, she asks the nearby student, “I’m just so angry at Robert right now I can’t look at him or I will do something terrible. I’m just so angry. So, can you just please tell him that if he doesn’t quiet down/get back in his seat soon, I am going to do something we will all regret?” This tactic terrifies students, who always believe the teacher is in fact horrifically mad.
Story three, She’s Crazy. My last anecdote involves a class filled with crazy students–not that kids are actually crazy, but if there were kids that were crazy, this class had them, according to the teacher in question. She one day almost lost her cool entirely, as well as her mind, but decided to act as though she had in a last ditch attempt at gaining some control of the classroom. She stood at the front of the room mumbling wildly to herself something along these lines, “I, I, I just don’t know what I’m going to do . . . these kids, these kids are . . . my medicine, I need my . . . I just don’t know . . .” This pretty well freaked the hell out of her students, who quieted down and inquired if she really took medicine for her, um, illness. Shortly thereafter, the teacher’s sister came to visit her class, and the students asked if their teacher really did take medicine. She took her sister the teacher aside and said, “Did you really tell these kids you take medicine? That’s private! You shouldn’t tell them that.” And from that point onward, students did not misbehave in class because they fully believed their teacher was crazy and everyone knows you don’t mess with crazy people.
That’s all for now, peeps: Jeff and I are off to the wedding of my oldest friend in the world this afternoon.
