Teachable Moments

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 25, Verse 3

"You cannot understand the height of heaven,

the size of the earth, or all that goes on in the king's mind!"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

In third grade, there was a kid named Ari.  You went to school with Ari, too.  He had a ton of curly blonde hair and, somehow, defying the predominant mental image you are now conjuring up of him in your mind, he wasn't cute.  How you can have your scalp kissed by such golden locks and not be punim-pinchably adorable is an exasperating mystery, but, hey; that's Ari for you.  

Ari drooled.  That mental image changing yet?  It should, because, when you're nine weeks old, drooling's pretty much a given.  But no mother or father wants their nine-year-old son going to Mrs. Griffin's classroom wearing a bib.  Adding to Ari's increasing list of misfortunes was his lisp, which was just about as subtle and endearing as Truman Capote's.  

And, he was chunky.  Not fat, per say.  Just, you know-- fat in the ass.  

As you can maybe see now, all in all, at least outwardly, Ari wasn't quite the prize package, and, sadly, some of his teachers let him know it.  While I don't have too many memories of this particular time of my life, I do distinctly remember one moment in third gradery where Mrs. Griffin was showing us some words on butcher-block paper propped up on an easel.  She had written the words in austere, thick black Sharpie.  

"What's this word?" she asked us, pointing to the word "Determined" with her marker, peering at us from behind her Sophia Lorens.  We looked at the word, then we looked back at her.  Ari might have raised his hand.  Maybe he didn't and she called on him anyway.  Either way, she said his name.  And he said,

"DEETER-MINDED!" 

And we laughed, because that wasn't how you said that word.  Looking back on this display, this obviously would have been the moment where Mrs. Griffin sharply admonished us for making fun of Ari, but the way I recall the event, she rolled her eyes, looked at him and said, "Deeter-minded?  Really, Ari." and proceeded to call on somebody else who gave the correct pronunciation, while Ari quietly contemplated suicide or, more accurately, said to himself, "One day I will be wealthy enough to buy and sell all of you and you, Mrs. Griffin, will be festering and rotting under the ground onto which I shall gleefully piss while my square-jawed chauffeur warms up the Shiatsu massaging Alcantara-hide throne in the back of my Bentley Mulsanne."

I don't fault Mrs. Griffin necessarily.  It's hard to always know what to do and what to say in a given situation, especially when you're an authority figure.  I was once the Assistant Director at a summer camp.  One of the young girls I had as a camper was a sweet girl with albinism.  As with many people with albinism, she had an eye condition called nystagmus, where the eyeballs move rapidly back and forth.  She also had extremely poor vision, and so when she read she had the book almost quite literally pressed up against her face.  And her hair was the color of straw and her skin as pale as 1% milk.  But she was one of my special girls, because, when she was three, my wife had her as a pre-school student, and we had become close with her family.  Well, one day, we were rehearsing a scene and another young girl looked over at her and said, "What's wrong with you anyway?"

Instantly, my body temperature soared to 164 degrees and my spine began to sweat.  I could have torn that little fucker's face right off with my fingers.    

"HEY!" I shouted, my head spinning towards her so fast I thought my neck had snapped, "WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU?!  Don't you EVER talk to her like that again, do you understand me?"  

The girl bit her lip and I thought she was going to take a shit in her shorts, which she very well might have done.  And that would have been alright with me, actually, though I probably would have gotten fired.  And maybe I should have anyway.  It wasn't a very good conflict resolution strategy, and I certainly didn't mediate in a positive, affirming way that turned it into a "teachable moment",  and I don't think I did my flaxen-haired favorite any favors either.  But I did what I had to do to stop the situation in its tracks, as I was deeter-minded to do.

And, in that moment, I felt for old Mrs. Griffin, who did wrong by Ari, and by all of us by not showing us the way with grace, skill, and tact.  This from a woman who told a room full of nine-year-olds that the most memorable moment of her recent trip to Australia was when "a drunk Koala I was holding peed all over me", so maybe tact, skill, and grace wasn't her thing.  

It's not my thing either.  Of course, I try.  I try to be good.  I overcompensate with deference and candied words, but if you read me and know me and have spent any longer than a minute-and-a-half inside a car piloted by me then you know.  I can be mean and spiteful and cruel and, if I ran into Ari today, I'm not so sure that I wouldn't say, "Hey, have you learned how to pronounce 'determined' yet?"  I'm not exactly sure I was one of the kids who laughed at him, but I'm reasonably sure I was.  

Unless, of course, I was very different then.  

Yo, Teach! I Gotta Piss.

CHIP OF WISDOM:

 

Proverbs 15, Verse 2

 

"A wise teacher makes learning a joy; a rebellious teacher spouts foolishness."

 

---

 

CHIPPED WISDOM:

 

In the high and far off times, O best beloved, the idiot had no graduate degree.  He had only a tiny little Bachelor of Arts degree, in Theatre, no less, that he kept tucked under his arm-- no, on his back.  He wore it on his back, like a backpack.  Like a backpack filled with monkeys, monkeys on his back.  Millstones around his neck.  Bricks tied to his ballhairs. 

 

You see where this is going.

 

In 2006, I decided to go to graduate school.  Now, the phrasing of that last, short sentence is actually very important.  It identifies the year in which the decision was made, and it indicates that some decision was decided, and the sentence very clearly states, without ambiguity or room for interpretation of any kind, who made that decision.

 

Me.

 

Over here.

 

In the corner.

 

In the red Chuck Taylors.

 

I did it.

 

I.. Aye.  Eye. 

 

Eh?

 

If you happen to talk to my wife about this particular chapter in our lives together, she will probably express a certain amount of guilt/remorse/bitterness/embarrassment about my going to graduate school, and she will probably tell you that she feels responsible for my undertaking that (ad)venture.  Now it is true, O best beloved, that she encouraged me.  Yes, she did.  "Go ye into that vast chasm of resplendent academia and attain for yourself a degree of advanced studies that shall confer upon you all the rights, duties, privileges and heartaches afforded to those who seek to answer the highest calling of a teacher, leader, an expander of minds."

 

That is the way bi-colored python rock-snakes, and wives, for that matter, always talk. 

 

Of course, one can encourage a person to chew broken glass while shoving a pencil up their own ass so far that they can play tic-tac-toe on their pancreas.  In the end, whatever encouragement you may receive, the choice to act is yours and yours alone. 

 

So I enrolled.  I stuck my own smear nose into the crocodile's mouth because I wanted to find out what it had for dinner.  Two years later, my nose had stretched out to the ungainly size it is today and I became a M.A.Ed. 

 

It's rather shocking to think that it's been five years since I received that degree and I spent a grand total of one month in an actual, honest-to-God classroom.  I've been paying $436.40 every month for five years, and I'll continue to do it for 327 more years until it's all paid off.  I don't remember exactly what the hell I did in graduate school.  It didn't feel very different from college, in fact at times it felt decidedly less challenging.  I know there was some reading, and some writing, and some playing at being a teacher, but mostly I remember the professors.  A rum lot they were, my dear.

 

One of them was on the verge of retirement.  He spoke about himself often, but not in an annoying, self-involved way.  He was just self-referential, and he was so in the 3rd person, which was amusing.  He wore a wristwatch that was approximately the size of a satellite dish and the most meaningful conversation we ever had was after class one night when I asked him about it and he said it was a Sturling and it was the last watch he was ever going to buy, so he knew he wanted to spend a lot of money on it.  That year, I bought one for my wife-- it was a skeleton watch, the kind that you can see all the gears moving around inside, and it had an orange band, which she loved.  She loved it till the second hand fell off and got stuck in the gears and killed it.

 

I had another teacher who I think was reasonably convinced that she was Jacqueline Kennedy.  SHe taught a course called "Human Exceptionalities" which, for those not in the politically correct inside circle, means "Special Ed".  She one night arrived at class wearing white kid gloves and a mink.  Her hair was primped and sprayed to perfection, and I never saw someone who believed in sequins as if it were a religion. On some level, I really respected a woman who thought it was important to get that dolled up to teach a bunch of apathetic losers about Kleinfelter's Syndrome.

 

Then there was a man whom I'll refer to as Fat Bastard (not his real name).  Fat Bastard taught some bizarre class that I don't even remember the name-- it had something to do with slogans and reification.  What that has to do with teaching, I'm not really sure.  But anyway, Fat Bastard was universally despised by everyone in the room, even the students who were too stupid to know why they despised him.  He didn't have much going for him in the looks department-- morbidly obsese, glasses from 1984, greasy AND flakey hair (don't know how he managed that, O best beloved), and loved to talk about his glory days as an unabashedly racist teacher in the Philly public school system in the turbulent '60s.  His rambling opening monologue to us on our first night of his class included a gem about how he was writing some sort of equation up on the blackboard and all of a sudden a student called out and said,

"YO, TEACH!  I GOTTA PISS!"

 

Apparently, Fat Bastard said the student couldn't go to the bathroom at that particular time, so the student walked over to the trashcan, unzipped his fly, and let loose.

 

"And the worst part was," Fat Bastard reminisced to, well, at us, "the trashcan was made of mesh-- wire mesh, so all this kid's piss went out all over the place onto the floor."

 

Yeah.

 

I don't remember what the point of that story was, and I'm sure he didn't either.  But, even five years later, every time I see a wire mesh trash can, I think of him. 

 

I miss my teachers.  Every now and then I want to pick up the phone and call one of them, to check in, to shoot the shit, to joke around, to pay attention or homage, to wrestle with a mind-fuck, to share a hurt or a happy.  Teachers hold this very strange place in our lives, the ones you remember, the ones you don't-- the ones who remember you, the ones who hurt you or the ones who tried.  I had a teacher in high school who said he stalked J. D. Salinger once, didn't speak for a year, and who told us that, if his wife was dangling off the edge of a cliff and a bag of popcorn was similarly dangling next to her, he'd go for the popcorn first.  My seventh grade English teacher put so much Vaseline on her face her cheeks and forehead glistened in the fluorescent lights like the sunlit snow.  My high school anthropology teacher used to clack his hockey ring on the desk when he was making a point, or thought he was anyway. 

 

I don't know if I'm ever going to be at the helm of a classroom again like I was for that one little month in 2008.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  But I know one thing for certain, O best beloved, my students, if I have them, will read Kipling and Twain and Gilbert and they'll stick close to their desks and never go to sea, and if they want to know what the crocodile has for dinner, they'll have to go and ask him themselves.