The Cleveland Talks & My Dirk Habits

Yesterday, I took a day off to drive down to Cleveland and meet with the high school principal. “Cobra Cranberry” (*) seemed like a pretty good guy. He appeared friendly, sincere, and articulate. Also impressed with the school secretary; she seemed friendly and efficient. I was early for my appointment and had to rattle the front door to have a school janitor let me in. A few young black kids were walking across the school grounds wearing book bags, and a white police officer stopped to question them. Once inside, I met a young, slender man from Greenville with a casual way of dress and demeanor that frankly reminded me of so many of the young male teachers I knew in Namibia. The secretary, after first showing us to sit down, later came back and apologized for not introducing herself. After ten or fifteen awkward minutes during which the FedEx man came and went and the other young man revealed that he was also hoping to get hired to teach math there, Cobra finally arrived. With his football player dimensions and coach’s black tee & sweatpants, he flashed a great big smile, said, “You must be . . .” and after only a momentary pause, remembered my name. He showed me into his office directly and seemed to like what he saw of me. He commented that I looked like a math guy. When the interview was over, I mentioned that my predecessor, “Pickled Jaws,” (*) sends his greeting. (Actually he blatantly told me to drop his name. It worked.) Cobra’s face lit up, and he instantly offered up another hearty, gigantic handshake. As I left, the other prospective teacher was outside again, chatting with the UPS man.

It was a weird trip. I almost got stranded at a realty office earlier that day when the car I borrowed from my second-year mentor (see below) refused to start. The heat was sweltering inside the car, as I sat there sweating in my dark dress pants and tie, turning the key over and over again to no avail. Fifteen minutes later, after I had already tried fruitlessly to call the car’s owner and my dad in search of ideas, and not to mention the realty office secretary had gone around back to look for a sweaty man who might know something about cars, finally the car sprang back to life. The same thing happened a couple more times during the trip, the most frightening example being after I had stalled the car in a busy highway intersection and could not even find the hazard flashers on the unfamiliar dashboard. What a strange day. Probably the mystery has something to do with the electronic theft prevention circuitry in the key and ignition itself.

Anyway, apparently the school district had more or less reserved a spot for me at the middle school, unbeknownst to the high school principal, who had called to schedule an interview with me last week. So now that the high school seems to want to hire me, the school district personnel office has to approve. Last week, I found out that the middle school has partitions instead of solid walls inside the building and will have its third principal in three years, which only strengthens my preference to teach at the high school.

This week we started our summer school teaching. A couple days ago, I taught my first lesson and got evaluated by a second-year who has a somewhat different classroom management philosophy from the paradigm I had been working from. I tend to be fairly strict about classroom noise and do not allow students to blurt out whatever comes to their minds. “Priority Moda of the Wise Belief,” (*) on the other hand, truly seems to enjoy teaching, and I admire his lesson delivery quite a bit. He lets kids make, as he sees it, whatever verbalizing they need to do in order to process the topic at hand. His somewhat negative evaluation caused me a fair bit of self-doubt in the ensuing 24 hours. Do I really have a good reason, after all, for being so strict? Could I be more effective with a more tolerant approach? Sometimes it is said that you should be yourself, but could it not also be true that I am the way I am simply because it is how I learned to survive teaching in Africa and because it is more familiar to me, rather than because it is the most effective possible way to teach? Could Moda be right that my strictness is causing unnecessary student-teacher friction and student disengagement, or is it really, as I initially perceived it, more a matter of two markedly different teacher expectations clashing when placed back to back in the same classroom, with the same students?

Well, today I taught another lesson, and it went much better. The friction that was previously noted as, “You have a negative attitude,” by one of my students, was gone today. I was able to establish a much better rapport with the kids by asking them what fun or exciting things happened yesterday, joking that Dirk Nowitzki was my cousin, and using the NBA playoffs as a theme for my set. I established a better system for hand-raising in class. I told them, if I raise my hand when I ask a question, you have to raise your hand and wait for me to call on you before you answer. But if I ask a question with my hand down, you can answer all at once, right away. It worked fairly well and gave me a lot more flexibility to enforce my rules without becoming internally inconsistent, although I did sort of forget to raise my hand once or twice before asking questions. Moda continued to tease me for my so-called “militant” style, but he actually acknowledged today that classroom management is one of my strengths. The weakest aspects of my lesson were that my board writing became a bit disorganized, and I focused too much attention on just a few students who were eager to participate without drawing shyer students into the discussion or even assessing very well whether most of the class was with me. The former is an unusual problem for me, easily fixable, and probably due today to my experimenting toward a more horizontal, student-centered type of lecture environment, where students themselves work and explain examples to each other, etc. The latter is a deeper problem, but an easy trap for almost any teacher to fall into. You get in a rush, or you get flustered, or whatever, and you just start calling on the students you know can come through for you. I should probably take the suggestion of Moda and carry a class roster / seating chart with me in class, so that I can more consistently call on all of my students and check off their names as I go.

* Random name generators are great fun! Make up some weird-sounding abbreviations for all your acquaintances and enter them at http://www.bandnamemaker.com/generator/. Just disguise their names a bit and go ahead, trash your friends and coworkers with impunity! (**)

** The author makes no warrantees, express or implied.