I woke up this morning feeling pretty awful. My ribs and collarbone ached, and this turned into (over the course of the day) a full body ache that makes me think I’m getting sick.

At one point, I came by the house to get some medicine in the midst of running all over the place doing other things, thinking, I haven’t used any sick days yet…this would be a good time for it. And I have a message from a number with the same prefix as the district I teach in.

It’s the secretary, telling me that the teacher who I ultimately replaced (with one teacher between us) had passed away. I call her back for details, and she really has none. I tell her that I had been thinking about calling in sick, but that’s out the window now: I can’t abandon my students, especially the seniors who had this teacher as sophomores in her last year of teaching.

I honestly don’t know what I’m going to say tomorrow, although I know that I can’t really teach at least my senior English class. I’m going to have to let them know that I’m here for them and to lend a sympathetic ear. I don’t even think I know what I would do otherwise.

Tomorrow will be hard, especially if I feel the way I do. This is a moment, though, that I cannot afford to lose with my seniors, who are (now, finally) somewhat back on board with me after many of them starting to show signs that I’m losing them. If I didn’t show up when they will be grieving so for this beloved teacher – the teacher they were just talking up on Friday in a class discussion – then I would really be disrespecting them. I just have to bite the bullet and be there, in whatever shape I’m in. The students will likely do the same.

I don’t know if I’ll help at all. But the fact of the matter is that I have to try, and hopefully that will mean something.

I happened to catch a TV ad for the Illinois Lottery’s holiday campaign, entitled “Joy Someone”. My first thought: Is this a new sense of the verb joy? I knew the intransitive sense of “rejoice; take joy in,” but this transitive sense was new to me.

Well, I no longer have access to the OED Online (darn you, alma mater!), but I can at least see free dictionaries, and lo and behold, I found:

v.tr. Archaic
1. To fill with ecstatic happiness, pleasure, or satisfaction.
2. To enjoy.

So the sense of “to make joyful” is there, but it is mostly obsolete. I am skeptical that the creators of the ad knew this, opting instead just to use this existing intransitive sense of the verb form (which I think is rare, although I could be wrong) and use it transitively. (Linguists: Is there a term for using an otherwise intransitive verb in a transitive sense?)

But at least there is precedent for it, and that makes my inner grammar snob feel better.

Short version: Sometimes they’re wrong.

Okay, the background – I purchased a small class set of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for my novels class, and we’re getting through it right now. While the students are digging into the monster’s narrative about his life after being created (and rewriting/paraphrasing it), I’ve been reading ahead to have some ideas for discussion.

My students have also expressed difficulty in understanding much of this novel, which is due in no small part to the fact that all of the novels we have thus covered – Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Great Gatsby – have been 20th century American novels, and Frankenstein is early 19th century British. One of the nice things about this text, however, has been a glossary of endnotes and a vocabulary reference at the back of the book, broken down by chapter so that students can refer to them. It’s worked okay for some, not as much for others; one student has been asking me about certain words, and I’ve found that explaining some words – like traverse – takes a little more than a simple denotative explanation. Still, it’s reasonably helpful.

That is, when it’s right.

In reading the beginning of Chapter XVIII, I found this passage where Victor is deliberating over making a female companion for his original creation:

I found that I could not compose a female without again devoting several months to profound study and laborious disquisition. I had heard of some discoveries having been made by an English philosopher,† the knowledge of which was material to my success…

The † symbol referred to an endnote, which said,

Note that Victor is not interested in the science of life from non-life any more; he is more concerned with the philosophical and ethical considerations of the experiments.

But in an earlier endnote, the book had pointed out, in referring to “Natural philosophy”:

the study of nature; the belief that everything within the  universe is alive and interconnected.

Despite a lack of reference to science, it seems clear to me that readers are going to think of science when they see this note – as well they should, as there was a great deal of similarity between the two during this time. In fact, I even asked my students to think about natural philosophy as science, which underscores the disparity in the story between nature or what is natural and science (which is considered “unnatural”).

But obviously someone wasn’t thinking or reading the above quote from Chapter XVIII very carefully; Victor is clearly thinking about his scientific efforts in making a second creation – Eve for his Adam – not necessarily about the moral or ethical considerations (although there is plenty of evidence to suggest that he is thinking about them, despite the lack of focus on that here). Moreover, any discoveries – if indeed they would even be called that – by a moral philosopher would not be germane to Victor’s success in “compos[ing] a female” as he suggests a sentence earlier.

Obviously, someone making notes to add was not thinking about this from the time frame and made an anachronistic interpretive note based on how we as 21st century readers understand the term “philosopher” – and, thus, a note that is more likely to confuse than clarify.

On the other hand, I paid about $2 a copy for these books…maybe I shouldn’t be complaining too much.

Right now, about 3/8ths of a year into my teaching career, feels like a valley.

You see, I’m at a frustrating point where I have a decent idea of what I should do (at least in general terms) to improve my teaching immensely…but it’s just not happening, and the blame for that is entirely on me. It’s like seeing an object and reaching your arms and hands outward, outward, short of the goal, and falling flat on your face — because you haven’t taken the few steps forward to put it within reach.

Okay, so maybe “falling flat on your face” isn’t quite where I am yet. But it feels bad enough.

————————————

The catalyst for this whole mood for me is multi-layered and starts something like this:

In my senior English class, we finished up debates today. They have been surprisingly good, for the most part, and despite some problems, I think the students did a decent job of defending their positions, even the students who argued positions that they did not necessarily believe in (and there were a few of those; I had warned them that it might happen because of the mere logistics of the debate).

I have one student, however, that decided that it wasn’t worth coming to help argue for their side of their issue, leaving the other two members to pick up the slack. And this is the second time this student has bailed on a group for a presentation, which makes me think the excuse of being sick (despite pretty good attendance otherwise) is a load of bull.

Thinking that approaching this student myself might not be the most effective way, I went to talk to another seasoned teacher who has expressed a great fondness for the student. We discussed the problem, particularly that failing to participate will almost inevitably result in a failing grade given this student’s lack of effort on the assignments that are completed, and we decided that it might be a good idea to talk to him together.

I thought we had mostly worked things out for that situation. But after school, prior to a meeting, this same teacher caught me in the teachers’ lounge, grabbed another fairly experienced teacher, and said to me (paraphrasing here): “Let’s have a chat.”

I expected this to be about the same student, but I was dead wrong. Instead, the teacher (we’ll call her Mrs. S) named off several of my seniors and asked me if these were the students I was having problems with. It honestly caught me a bit off guard, and I clarified which ones I really thought were giving me grief and which ones were tolerable enough not to be real issues.

Come to find out that Mrs. S seems to be implying that there is some problem going on with my senior English class…which had not been my impression, really.

Says Mrs. S, “I think the problem is that the seniors don’t think you like them.”

I sit mostly in flabbergasted silence; I am quite fond of the vast majority of this class.

“And,” Mrs. S continues, “I think I might have an idea – the kids have made comments about you not standing during the Pledge of Allegiance.”

(If you hadn’t yet guessed that I teach in a rural school, I imagine all doubts are gone from your mind now, dear reader.)

That the seniors have noticed this fact is not a surprise to me – they have brought up it up briefly in class, although I brushed it off in order to make sure that debate happened on schedule – but I am having difficulty with this as an issue.

This gets into a tricky spot for me: on the one hand, I have a policy about not disseminating too much of my personal opinions in the classroom because I want to make the classroom environment open to any opinion that can be reasonably held and argued. Yes, there are plenty of educators out there who insist that this is a wrong-headed idea (James Nehring is one), but I haven’t found any compelling reason to override this desire for ideological neutrality. I don’t divulge my religious beliefs, as much as is possible, and neither do I see any reason to divulge other opinions that aren’t relevant to the discipline itself.

But if Mrs. S is correct, then avoiding any confrontation of this issue will be counterproductive.

Still, I am absolutely frustrated by this development. I think my reason for not saying the pledge or standing during it is valid – I don’t see the necessity in having to affirm my support for the government when part of my role as a citizen is to look at the government with a critical eye, and I see my loyalties as something loftier than to a government anyway, despite the fact that I would likely never contemplate anything other than constitutionally protected action against my government – but I find it a bit exasperating that my opinions here have to be put on trial (which is itself a bit ironic, given our work with debates right now) and that there will likely be a great deal of social pressure to conform to this practice of at least standing. I don’t want to conform to that, since I’m the “adult” in the classroom and would like to set my own example based on my own convictions.

I’ll probably end up raising the issue myself tomorrow, if it doesn’t come up on its own (since I won’t be standing or saying the pledge), and if I can, I’ll try to connect it to what we’ve studied in our discussion of debates. But there is still a sense of defeat for me in having to give in to this.  I guess it comes with the territory, and it should be a good thing to introduce some more diversity of opinions into the class.

I don’t know. It just felt like another thing to come down on me at a moment when I don’t feel all that confident in what I’m doing, and from a teacher, no less. I couldn’t have been oblivious to something like this, right?

And so I walk through the valley of the shadow of doubt, hoping that I will grow a little more sure of what I am doing in this whole matter and a little wiser in the process.

Todd Whitaker has this little bit that he talks about in person (and he’s done it both times I’ve seen him) where he talks about teachers who say things like, “I’ve told Billy a thousand times not to do that.” His remark: “Now there’s a slow learner.” (After a few seconds, you start to realize that Whitaker’s not talking about Billy…)

Sometimes I feel like that teacher.

See, I understand that one of my jobs as an English teacher should be to relate literary texts to the texts that students consume everyday: reality. This intersection with the “real world” is crucial, and there’s a tendency to let the literary side of things run what we do. I’m guilty of that, definitely.

In trying to figure out where to go in my American lit class, I stumbled upon a possible connection from The Crucible, which we just finished, to Irving’s “The Devil and Tom Walker” (mostly the devil-witch angle). And in thinking about the Irving story, I thought about the issue of greed, and immediately my mind went to Bernie Madoff. So I planned a lesson for students to engage the idea of greed, its cause, and its effects, using an article on how Madoff’s Ponzi scheme affected Elie Wiesel and his charitable foundation. In one section at least, it was a great discussion that managed to get some of the less interested students talking.

Previously, in the unit on The Crucible, I had my students do a role-playing thought experiment, asking them to imagine that they are living in New York City on September 13, 2001 – and they are Arab-American. Despite the fact that my students were still very young when 9/11 happened, they got it, and we had an engaging discussion about the sort of stereotyping and presumption of “terrorism” that was common at the time, linking it to both the Salem witch trials and to the Communism witch hunts that Miller is building from with the message of his play.

When I was doing a pre-student teaching internship, I taught a lesson on William Cullen Bryant’s poem “Thanatopsis,” and I took some time out of our discussion of the poem to talk about death and why we fear it. It was a great discussion of psychology, relating nicely to students’ own ideas and experiences.

Okay, I admit it: I’m a slow learner.

Again, it’s a hard battle to prepare things like this that really push us from the intellectual vacuum of the classroom into the greater sphere beyond, but I daresay from my own experience – and from what I have gathered from the experience of others – that the payoff is worth it in the long run.

I am so far behind, both here and in real life, so here are some highlights of the past, uh, week or so:

The highlight of the last week was Friday; after having had a student request that I model an informative speech (the ones we just finished), I made a last-minute decision to do a demonstration of a demonstration speech (now that’s meta) for them in preparation for this new material. To model this, I brought in my acoustic guitar to demonstrate how to tune a guitar. After that happened, I inevitably heard, “Play something!” After my experience on the last day of student teaching, I had already predicted this beforehand and didn’t plan anything else, knowing that I should go through with it.

Well, here’s how it worked out: After having to stall a little bit to get students back to the room who had been getting the H1N1 vaccine (a worthy distraction), I did my demo speech and then played my standard song, “Everything You Want” by Vertical Horizon. (Some of these kids were in kindergarten when that song hit the radio! Crazy.) I only got through the first chorus of the song before there were a bunch of people who were at the window by my door (I had shut it, and the door stays locked throughout the day, although it’s usually propped open) trying to listen in. So by the next hour, the word had gotten out, and when I started playing for the next class, the Spanish I class in the next room was able to hear me and implored their teacher, Ms. N, to let them come down near the end of the period. So I then had an audience, and the word went further. I was able to stretch it all the way through my junior classes, where I used it as motivation for getting work done (“If we get through everything that I want to do, then maybe I’ll play something”).

Now, two days later, I have to say that I don’t think it worked any miracles with behavior. But more realistically, it should be something that I can resurrect periodically to make things more interesting, and the students know about it and have built something more of a reputation about me. That, in this case, is a good thing.

I’m really behind on grading, too far behind to even state just how long I’ve had some of the things I need to grade. To add insult to injury, I gave tests in two courses today, which leaves my grand total of things-I-need-to-grade-very-soon at: two classes’ worth of essays (only 1-3 pgs. each, fortunately), and three classes’ worth of tests.

Tomorrow’s a day off, but I won’t get to use much of it: my nephew turns 2 on Thursday, and we’re driving the 2 or so hours for his birthday party. And it’s throwing off this whole week: today felt like a Friday, and Thursday will quite assuredly be like a Monday. Two Mondays and two Fridays in one week = not productive.

A possible light ahead: our school purchased licenses to an online writing tool for every junior high and high school student, which I was trained on at the end of the school day. I’m optimistic that it will allow me to do more writing with students, provide faster feedback (with less paper wasted), and monitor what students are having problems with much more effectively.

I say “optimistic,” but I am not without my reservations: this program works off Natural Language Processing (NLP), which means that it assigns a part of speech to every word submitted and then analyzes the relationships between words in close proximity to determine grammaticality. There are definitely problems with this, especially given the utter flexibility of words in English to take on different parts of speech (see the “Time flies like an arrow” example of syntactic ambiguity). The program also claims to be able to analyze style, organization, and structure, in addition to the more mundane things of grammar, usage, and mechanics. The trainer also claims that it can detect improper use of homophones from context, which I’m going to have to see to believe. (I can conceive how it was done, but I am still skeptical.)

But if nothing else, it can help me do what I have wanted to do with grammar all along: eliminate the systematic study of grammar and focus on working with students on the things that are inhibiting their writing. If run-on sentences are a problem, then I should be able to see this from their writing, and having a quick tool to analyze this should be helpful.

Anything to help get me caught up.

Since finishing my last book, I have moved on to a book I have wanted to read for ages, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. As a parent of a child with autism, I have heard interesting things about the fact that this story is written from the point of view of a person who has autism and speaks frankly about it. I can’t speak directly to how an autistic person sees the world, but I think that the way Haddon approaches the writing is very authentic, and it is written with first-hand experience of autistic individuals: Haddon had worked previously with autistic children. It’s a very compelling work; I started it today and am already about 75% done with it.

So far, two very interesting topics have jumped out to me. The first is a literary issue, concerning metaphors:

The word metaphor means carrying something from one place to another, and it comes from the Greek words μετα (which means from one place to another) and φερειν (which means to carry), and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn’t. This means that the word metaphor is a metaphor.

I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining an apple in someone’s eye doesn’t have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person is talking about.  (p.15)

And shortly thereafter in a footnote concerning the sentence “It looked as if there were two very small mice hiding in his nostrils”:

This is not a metaphor; it is a simile, which means that it really did look like there were two very small mice hiding in his nostrils, and if you make a picture in your head of a man with two very small mice hiding in his nostrils, you will know what the police inspector looked like. And a simile is not a lie, unless it is a bad simile. (p.17)

Forgiving some obvious errors – the phrasing “a pig is not like a day” indicates a simile, which is explicitly not problematic according to the narrator Christopher, and “the apple of my eye” is not so much a metaphor as an idiom – I find the evaluative distinction between a metaphor and simile to be fascinating, mostly because both are examples of figurative language, language that is explicitly not meant to be taken literally. (Of course, one can reliably assume that an autistic narrator will be prone to errors of hyperliteralism; it’s a stereotype. Christopher in particular is also very opposed to lies in general, so bringing out this point isn’t surprising.) It should give us pause, however, in our own language use to consider those disadvantaged groups that may have problems with comprehension: language learners and those with linguistic delays or deficiencies.

(I also had never really thought about the etymology of the word metaphor: it is definitely very meta.)

The second is more contemplative, which is Christopher’s musing on prime numbers:

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them. (p.12)

Dead on, in my opinion.

I don’t even have to finish reading this book to tell you, faithful reader, that you should read this book if you haven’t already. If nothing else, it will give you some insight into a more diverse way of seeing the world, and you will find yourself entertained in the process.

If one can be considered a fan of some grammatical artifact, I am a fan of the subjunctive mood, for some undefinable reason. Maybe it’s because the subjunctive is somewhat of an endangered species, having all but disappeared from modern English. I’m not a stickler about it – I don’t know that I can really be called a stickler about anything grammatical other than the bare essentials for communication – but I have been known to advise students in feedback about its formal use. Yes, it might be acceptable in general to say something like “If I was six feet tall, I would be much better at basketball” even though the subjunctive would call for the construction “If I were six feet tall…”

However, I suggest that there are instances where understanding of the remaining uses of the subjunctive mood or at least the underlying reasons for its existence are useful, since it does still exist but is rarely ever taught explicitly. Generally, this should consist at least of an understanding that the subjunctive can be used to express a state or proposition that is contrary to fact.

Some real-life situations:

1. A student in one of my classes was talking about something gender-related (I don’t recall the specifics) and asked me, “Mr. B, if you were a guy–”; at this point, I interrupted and said, “Whoa, wait a minute: are you saying that I’m not a guy?” He didn’t intend (I think) to communicate this piece of information, but it was communicated nonetheless through the construction.
2. Similarly, my wife recently started out a sentence, “If I were me,” at which point I remarked that she must have some severe identity (and logic) issues.

So even if the subjunctive is on its way to extinction, despite my affinity for it, understanding the remnants of this mood can in fact be useful. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

I finished the book I’ve been reading this week earlier today, Why Do We Gotta Do This, Mr. Nehring?: Notes from a Teacher’s Day in School by James Nehring, and I have to give it my highest recommendations for any junior high or high school teacher (although it will be more topical for the latter). It is a very compelling book, equal parts narrative and commentary but all contained within a narrative framework that is very approachable. Nehring does a great job of telling the story of education – not a history, but the way things are. I say “are” because I don’t think things have changed a whole lot in the 20 years since this book was written and published; in fact, if you replaced all instances of “Walkmen” with “iPods,” there would be virtually no dissonance with the reality of education in 2009.

There is much that can be said about Nehring’s commentary – perhaps the most important part of the book, although the narrative is entertaining and engaging – but I want to return to that dreaded question that I wrote about a few days ago*.

The question, of course, is in the title of the book, and Nehring returns to it on multiple occasions. Later on, when Nehring is talking about explaining the reason for “why we gotta do this” to a low-achieving class, he turns the lens inward:

Teachers have grown weary of telling kids why they gotta do stuff. Worse yet, I fear we’ve stopped asking ourselves. So we tell the kids with knuckleheaded determination that they gotta do it, so just do it. And when pressed, we say it’s on the test or it’s just something that an educated person should know. So a kid tries his best, under the circumstances, to learn what he must conclude is meaningless, and he either learns it or doesn’t learn it or he learns it partially, then turns around and forgets it completely because after all it’s meaningless. The next year, when a different teacher starts teaching the same stuff, the kid figures, why ask why we gotta do it since we gotta do it, anyway. Third time around, if the kid’s sense of justice has not been completely subdued, acceptance turns to resentment: All right, I’ll do it, dammit. While all this is going on in the kid’s mind, the teachers follow a related mental path. You learned this last year, says the teacher. Don’t you guys remember anything? Then, in the faculty room, teachers talk. We teach this every year to these kids, and you’d think by the time they reach high school, they’d know it. If concern among the staff becomes great enough, then a departmental meeting is called (sometimes multidepartmental) and at this meeting all jointly exclaim how terrible it is that kids don’t know this stuff, and it’s TV, and it wasn’t this way twenty years ago, and it’s time we set up some rules and policies. If there are educationists in the group, they talk about “articulating the curriculum,” which means that instead of making the kids do the same meaningless stuff every year, we make them do a little of it each year on the incorrect assumption that the kids can’t do it because it’s too difficult, when of course the real reason is that they don’t do it because it’s meaningless. (pp. 124-125)

There’s a lot in that passage, much of which isn’t all extraordinary in education. But what it does make me think about is what I’m doing and what I should be thinking about.

It’s a fundamental problem with the way we set up curricula, in my opinion, and I can’t say that I’ve done much to change it despite having the power to control what I teach almost absolutely (that is, my curricular choices have really only been limited by the available materials, not really by top-down proscriptions on required material). Why do we read Moby-Dick in American lit (or at least study it)? Generally, the answer is something like “Because it’s one of the classics” or “Because that’s part of the standard curriculum for an American lit survey.” If you want to go for a more intellectual answer, you might say something like “Because it provides excellent material to compare the elements of Dark Romantic or Anti-Transcendentalist literature with Romantic and Transcendentalist literature,” but that of course just pushes the question back one step further to “Why do we gotta worry about stuff like transcendentalism?” Eventually, that question needs a satisfactory response.

Some of the material I’ve been teaching has an easy explanation. My sophomores have been preparing informational speeches, which they will begin presenting on Monday, and the answer there is easy: “Because knowing how to speak well in a formal setting is an incredibly important that will help make you successful in the real world.” My seniors wrote a college application essay, and…well, I didn’t have to explain the relevance of that assignment to them. Neither did I have to draw out the reason for writing autoethnographies, which my seniors really dug into and explored in interesting ways.

But I can think of opportunities that I’ve missed to really connect my curriculum to the real world. When I got remarks like this when studying Native American creation myths in junior English, I could have said, “Because it’s important to understand what oral cultures valued” or even “Because it provides us an opportunity to look at our own myths with a critical eye.” I could have more fully explained to my sophomores how reading about individuals from different cultures can allow us to draw connections to our own lives and see how some themes and issues, like missing a loved one who you are apart from (a theme of one of our stories, “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” by Jhumpa Lahiri), are somewhat universal; the answer here is “Because making these connections will help us empathize with other cultures and think of them not as strange and uncivilized but as fellow humans” or “Because understanding those who are different from us is important for us to coexist with them as citizens in an increasingly globalized world.”

It’s a question I want to keep asking myself, in the hopes that I don’t press on to teach my students something that I don’t think is worthwhile. I’m in a place to make my classes fairly customized and relevant to my students, in a way that perhaps many teachers don’t have the flexibility to do. Don’t want to teach Julius Caesar? See ya, Brutus and Cassius. Want to teach something that is outside the canon? Go ahead, if it’s appropriate for the audience (reading level, maturity level, etc.). So why don’t I do that?

Truthfully, because it’s a lot of work. But that doesn’t make it out of the question, and it’s a goal I still hope to achieve at some point, even if it’s not attainable in the first year.

One more thing that I want to add (this is long enough already) – Nehring talks about a student in the early days of personal computers and word processors (and we’re talking early, given that this is the late ’80s) who starts plagiarizing information for reports, even going so far as to offer the service for other students. In the same way that he turns the lens inward regarding the rationale for our curricular choices, Nehring states why this often happens:

When kids are not taught how to do something, they learn how not to do it. Teachers call this cheating. Kids call it survival. (p.130)

Having had a student cheat, I agree with this – it took a conversation to understand that the student didn’t know what to do and had resorted to plagiarism instead of coming to ask me. When I understood that, it was easy to offer a second chance and rethink my own pedagogy.

It’s not easy to look at teaching this way, and certainly we get blamed for a lot as teachers that we don’t deserve blame for, but it’s a different perspective, one that can make us re-examine what we do. We must remember that out of all the people that walk into our classrooms, there is only one person whose actions we will ever be able to change: ourselves.

It’s not really a victory in the classroom, but I count it a victory nonetheless.

One of my professional duties is lunch duty, which probably sounds ridiculously boring but which I find to be a very useful time. This is for several reasons: first, it’s non-instructional time, and the amount of actual supervisory work is incredibly low. I also have duty for the first period of lunch (out of two), and this period happens to be almost the exact disjunction of the set of students I currently have in class – that is, I teach 10^th-12^th graders (well, most of them), and this period covers 7^th-9^th grades – so I have been able to get acquainted with a number of students who I will (most likely) have in class in the next few years. Consequently, I think I have begun to build positive relationships with many of these students, and I think this will work out in my favor.

But these aren’t even the best things about having lunch duty. My favorite part is, to be blunt, basketball.

The students have roughly 30 minutes to eat, and there are a number of students (particularly boys) who finish in about 15 minutes and then use the rest of the period to do other things, especially basketball and, to a lesser extent, volleyball. They play on one side of the multi-purpose room where we eat lunch, and so it’s easy to supervise.

I’ve always liked basketball – not really professional basketball (college or NBA), but the real thing, live and in person. I used to play basketball quite a bit when I was younger, although I eventually grew less interested in it. (I attribute part of this to my father, who has been an avid basketball player for ages.) So watching the kids play has been one of the most enjoyable parts of my day, at least when the students are cooperating and playing fairly.

As with every other day, the bell rang to signal the end of the lunch period, and the boys playing basketball split into two groups: those who bolted for the door, and those who fought to get one or two more shots before they had to get to class. And as I always do, I go over to get the basketball and shoo the students off to class so I can put the balls away and get to my own lunch.

But something different happened today – when I got the ball, the few students left, all of them freshmen, urged me, “Shoot it, Mr. B!” At first I shrugged it off, and then my eye caught a red ribbon that had fallen on the floor (this week is Red Ribbon Week, and students are wearing red ribbons with a weak adhesive on the back). I asked them whose ribbon it was, and one student says, “If you shoot it, then I’ll pick it up.”

Now a compromise had been issued, and it wasn’t even contingent on my success in the shot. I quickly did a cost-benefit analysis: if I don’t shoot, then I’ve missed an opportunity to meet the students on their terms in a low-risk setting; if I shoot and miss, then we can laugh it off and continue on our day; but if I shoot and make it, then I have the opportunity to really gain the students’ respect.

What did I really have to lose?

So I did the wise thing and took the ball forward a little from where I had been standing to the three-point line, thinking aloud, “Okay, but I haven’t shot a basketball in years, literally.” (That’s actually true.) And I took the shot.

And like the ending of a predictable basketball movie, it was nothing but net.

I still can hardly believe that I made the shot, especially a three-pointer. I fully expected to miss – I had just been hoping that I would at least hit the rim!

The best part, though, was seeing the freshmen boys just erupt when the ball made its swoosh through the net. It was easily one of the best moments I’ve had this year with a group of boys that I’m really starting to like, despite only seeing them for half an hour in a non-instructional setting. Still, I can hope that this one little moment, this one little victory, will put me in a still better place to really engage these students on a personal level when they get to my classroom next year (if all goes as planned).

If only all my days were like this: nothing but net.