Sept. 9, 2005
I feel different this year. Now that school’s in session, I’m able to compare these first few days to last year’s first few days. I am a different person.
Last year on the first day of school, I called my mom (who had been a teacher for 25 years and who could empathize) and cried because I was so full of fear and doubt. “Mom!” I remember whispering into the phone. “I have to teach them for 80 minutes tomorrow. I don’t know how to do this! I don’t know what the hell I’m doing!”
Today, in a whole-school meeting, one teacher stood to address the students. She told everyone that she noticed people helping each other, being nice to each other, and she wanted to encourage students to continue doing that. Yet today in my classroom, one student got into an under-the-breath insult match with another student across the room. I think students forget I hear and see everything, so I was quick to get on it and nip it in the bud.
“Not in my classroom,” I said aloud, in a tone not unlike my mother’s. “Nothing like that goes on in this room.” And that was it. I dealt with it.
Last year, something like that would have thrown me for a loop. I would have been shaking, probably. I would have gone off on a tangent about people being kind to each other, and students would have seen that an insult match would be the thing to buy them time in class — the technique to avoid doing any work.
Ah, but I know how their little minds work now. I nip their teenage back-and-forths in the bud and I continue talking about figurative language in The House on Mango Street.
It’s funny, though. I can deal with it in my classroom; I can deal with it in school. But let there be a back-and-forth between adults — my peers — and I don’t know how to handle myself. When I was in grad school, I labeled myself as non-confrontational. Any kind of disagreement that happens at the restaurant — I duck and cover. I’m out. Why is it I can’t deal with my peers the same way I deal with my students?
On a totally different note, my students are struggling with pronouncing my last name.
One student today called me by another teacher’s last name by mistake, and then, when I said, “Excuse me?” he panicked and looked around the room for help.
Other students prompted him, offering other bizarre pronunciations, until one student said, “‘Miss’ is fine. Call her that.”
It’s true. Most students by the end of last year called me “Miss,” although I got it all. (Even “Miss Cujo,” after Stephen King’s brutal fictional dog….how intuitive.)
My student Martin once said about me: “She may be short, but don’t let that intimidate you.” And so I came up with this T‑shirt slogan: Don’t Mess with Miss. After today’s little bullying session, I’m thinking of having that printed up for real.