Hey, Mr. Kah-tere!

Here at the end of the first full week of school, I am still adjusting to having to be somewhere every day and not having the bulk of my time at my own disposal. Still, I’m enthused about school – there’s a bright and shiny aspect to the beginning of the year, and this semester I’m teaching a new English class that my students seem very into. Feral Mom’s delineations of the significant role teaching plays in keeping her bowels regular made me laugh to beat the band, and it also made me think about how natural teaching feels for me. I definitely get nervous on the first day of class, a day when I’m invariably so high-strung I accept the fact that my new students will think I’m completely batty (and console myself with the thought that they’ll come to see how I really am – only about half batty - as the semester gets underway). But once I’ve learned my students’ names and gotten the necessary policy bullshit out of the way, once I begin really teaching, I feel right at home.

I received a request from Esereth for more stories about teaching, and I have made a note of it. I’ve certainly shared a few school-related stories in the past, from lunch duty anecdotes, to my run-in with the math department , to my on-campus lingerie-making escapades. I’m not sure why I don’t blog about teaching more. Maybe because I already spend so much time doing it and talking about it (my Old Man is an English teacher too, and we never seem to tire of talking about literature, writing, and teaching). Maybe because I’m afraid if I start, I’ll never shut up.

I will end with a teaching anecdote. I like to think of myself as a fairly unflappable teacher - it's rare that a student busts out a comment that surprises or flusters me, because I'm basically a potty mouth with a dirty mind and a puerile sense of humor myself. In fact, I sometimes have to work up a good impression of a disapproving authority figure when a kid says something inappropriate that I actually find funny. I also pride myself on being honest with my students. But last week during my Creative Writing class, I both got flapped and told a flat-out lie. We were discussing J.D. Salinger's story "Just Before the War with the Eskimos" and one of my students compared the fifteen-year-old Ginny's crush on her friend's twenty-six-year-old brother to another kind of intergenerational crush: "It's kind of like when you get a crush on your teacher." Suddenly I felt my uptightness nerve begin to clench strenuously. "But that never happens," I said emphatically, "never." It was a joke, but it was also a lie and a convenient way of shutting down a discussion I didn't feel comfortable with. (Hey, I enjoy mid-eighties Van Halen as much as the next person, but when the "Hot for Teacher" thing goes from the realm of hair-metal fantasy to something close to my reality, I want to change the subject.)

And then, twenty minutes later another student admitted that she "hadn't brushed her teeth in four years," and I just about lost my shit. Discussions with students about student-teacher crushes? I get a little unsettled. Student disclosures (however exaggerated) about terrible oral hygiene habits? I get downright riled up. Luckily in this situation, I could be totally honest. And I schooled her. And I hope she learned her lesson.