My First Day of Teaching

That first day of classes, I was understandably nervous. Attempting to look professional, I wore my best sport jacket. This was not a difficult selection since I owned only three sport jackets (and no suits), which I’d bought for $10 each at thrift shops on the Philadelphia Main Line, not far from St Joes. ?My first day I put on one of my father’s ties, corduroy pants, a white shirt, and a sport jacket . I had never ironed a shirt. Trying to be independent, the night before in my bedroom I had used an unsteady ironing board and attempted to iron the shirt , which? didn’t turn out well with more wrinkles than the principal’s face. I went downstairs to ask for my mother’s help. Unfortunately, I left the iron on and it fell on my bedroom rug, leaving a perfect burnt outline that looked like something Scully and Mulder would investigate on the X-Files.? My mother ironed my shirt, and I went to work the next morning.

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There were some tall, long-haired boys in my eighth-grade homeroom who seemed to have no idea what to think of their new tall, long-haired science teacher and who exchanged bewildered looks. I saw one boy mouth to another boy what looked like the letters to the word h i p p I e.

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I was only seven or eight years older than the kids in my classes. A few of the boys, including one tall boy with a decent start on a mustache, looked almost as old as their new teacher. The girls just looked at me and mostly giggled. There was a very chubby kid named Mike, who looked like he cut his hair with a lawnmower and seemed almost as round as he was tall. I keep expecting to see Mike pop up on an episode of My 600 Pound Life and tell the story about his mean and insensitive eighth grade teacher that I’m about to share. I hope he tells the story before the shower scene early in each episode. I found the shower scene in Psycho ?less disturbing than a few of the shower sequences on the show. The other obligatory scene is for the 600-pounders to stop about five minutes into the drive to Houston for an appointment with Dr. Nowzaradan, pull up to a McDonald’s drive-thru window, and order enough double quarter pounders, fries, apple slices, hot caramel sundaes, and additional junk food to have kept the entire Donner party alive during that fateful winter of 1846 snowbound in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. [1]?

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There was no science curriculum, no science kits or materials, no videos, no microscopes, in fact, no technology or equipment at all. I had never planned a lesson, so I had decided to follow the science book chapter-by- chapter. The book was fifteen years old. In the first chapter was a chart titled The Progress of Science, which listed in chronological order many of the most important scientific discoveries of the 20th Century but? ended with Jonas Salk discovering the polio vaccine in 1955 and the Soviet Union launching Sputnik in 1957.?

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I had gotten only ten minutes into my first lesson when Mike began to make a persistent and annoying buzzing noise, like a loud mosquito hovering near your ear.

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???????????????????????????????? ????????Buzzz…

?????????????????????????????????? Buzz…Buzz…

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?I tried to ignore the distraction, expecting that Mike would stop. But he did not. The buzzing got louder and louder. Several students had started to giggle and laugh. Others had begun to talk to each other in low voices. They wondered how their new teacher would handle his first discipline problem. I was wondering the same thing myself. I turned my back to the class to write on the chalkboard and someone tossed a paper airplane that struck the chalkboard. I was on the verge of losing control of my first class on my first day of teaching. My one and only education class at St. Joes had not prepared me for what to do when a kid the size of the Goodyear blimp was doing an imitation of The Fly. What do I do now?

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No, my education class at St Joes had not prepared me, but how I had been raised provided an answer. As Mike continued the annoying buzzing, I approached him and said in a loud voice , “Are you deflating?” Maybe if I had taken more than on education class , I might have had a more appropriate response, but it was all I could think of at the moment.

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All the boys except Mike broke up. Mike turned a deepening red with embarrassment. He didn’t think my remark was funny, but I certainly did. I’d accidentally discovered the first two tools in my classroom management toolbox: sarcasm and humor. They are also two core elements of my personality.? Everybody on my mother’s side of the family was sarcastic.? Sarcasm was my mother’s family first language. English the second. They were a lot of other things, too, which I’ll get to lat