Okay, I’m never doing that again

“Okay folks, I got you lined up a little early. Go find something to do for two minutes,” I said to a class of second graders when I was a substitute teacher. 

Looking back on these two little sentences, I can see so many problems with what I said and what I expected to happen. But, as a substitute teacher with, maybe, 50 hours in the classroom under my belt, it seemed like a reasonable thing to say.

Boy, was I wrong!

I’m sure my memory is not 100% accurate, but here’s how I recall the next few seconds after saying those words…

The sound in the room was like a jet engine starting up. Slowly at first, but determinedly building as the seconds ticked by. Soon, it was a deafening roar.

It was like an out of body experience. As I looked around the class, I saw kids pulling out board games, playing tag in the reading area, and I swear there were children swinging from the ceiling fans. One child was doing a hand-stand and another group were making a human pyramid. 

Thirty seconds - if that - it could have been a little as fifteen seconds before I was surrounded by complete and utter pandemonium. The sound was incredible, I know there were no more than thirty children in that room, but it felt like there must have been a hundred or more. 

“Sit down!” I yelled over the din. 

“Sit down in your seats!” I repeated.

“Return to your seats!” I shouted before I began to see a response. 

As if in slow motion. The children began to respond. Ever so slowly they filtered back to their seats. The room looked like a tornado had blown through. 

There was paper everywhere. Board games were open and their pieces and parts were scattered. Someone had let the hamster out of his habitat, all the windows were open and a cold breeze was gently wafting the detritus of my error across the floor.

Thirty quizzical little faces were looking at me. They were confused. Finally, it was silent.

“Okay, I’m never doing that again,” I whispered to myself as I lined them up to go to art. 

Please, Tell Me More...

As you know, I sometimes ask questions about what you're interested in, about what we’re about to learn, or what we’ve been working on. The answers are…well, interesting to say the least:

What is your #1 goal for next year?

“To study hard and be pretty."

What do you think causes seasons on Earth?

“Mother Nature.”

What do you think causes weather on Earth?

“Mother Nature.”

Thinking of our work in the Planetary Science unit, what topic do you wish we had

covered?

“God.”

Which planet in our solar system is most like Earth and why?

“Mars because it’s round.”

The Laws of Motion were first described by 

“Eyes of Newton.”

For whom are Newton’s three laws of motion named?

“I forgot.”

What part of science would you like to know more about?

“Soup.”

Thinking about our work in chemistry and the periodic table, what is an apple made of?

“Apple.”

When I look over your work, I just never know what to expect, but least some of your answers amuse me.

You’re Never Going to Believe This

Sometimes I think you and I grew up on different planets. The way life was when I was in middle school is so vastly different than what you are going through. I’m not going to be that grumpy old man and growl that my experience was better, I’ll just wistfully smile and say mine was very different.

What am I talking about? 

How about this..

No video games. Really, they hadn’t been invented yet. No Fortnight, or Pac Man, or even Pong. If you were in front of a screen it was a TV and you were watching Gilligan’s Island or The Brady Bunch or any of a score of classic TV shows that you can now find on YouTube.

Oh, and about that TV, it was black and white - do you know what that means? No color TV. I remember when my family got it’s first color TV and it was A-Mazing! And a big

screen television on those days was 23 inches. (As a point of reference, the TV hanging in my classroom is a 65”)

Our phones were screwed into the wall. No hand-held, portable devices. No social media, no Insta-worthy moments. We had no instant communication - no texting or anything like that. If you were lucky, you had a phone somewhere in your house that was out of the way and not in the main traffic pattern of the house. It’s awkward to call a girl on the phone with your mother making dinner five feet away. It I hadn’t had access to the phone in my dad’s office, I would have never spoken to my friends outside of school.

Cameras were a whole separate device and they came with something called “film.”  When you finished the role of film, you took it down to the drugstore or grocery store and they developed the pictures. The whole process took about a week and cost money. If the pictures didn’t come out well, too bad, that moment was long gone.

We listened to the radio. If your favorite group dropped a new song, you listened until the radio station played it. You could call and request it, but it was a long shot to even the through on the phone. It was always busy-busy-busy. Someone in our group of friends would usually have a portable AM/FM radio that we could listen too.

Oh, and Sundays. Nothing was open on Sundays except the occasional convenience store. It was against the law. No going to the mall, or grocery shopping or getting a hair cut or going to the nail salon. What was open? Church and some restaurants. It was just kind of assumed that everyone went to church and if you didn’t, people would judge you.

Sunday afternoon was a good time to hang out with your friends. Outside. Yes, our parents would send us outside to play. We’d go door-to-door gathering the kids in the neighborhood then go build a fort, play football or baseball, have a crab apple fight (Pro tip - grab the top of a trash can for a shield), walk the abandoned train tracks behind our neighborhood or walk downtown to Earnshaw’s drug store and get an ice cream or maybe buy a model kit or some candy. The point is we spent a LOT of time outside. 

Think about how very different my middle-school world was from your middle-school world. 

Can you even conceive what that was like?

If you could go back in time to my world, what would you miss the most from today?

You Know We Worry, Right?

I do not live in Lowell. In fact, most of your teachers don’t live in Lowell but we’re all tuned into what happens in this city. 

We hear and see things on TV and radio news, read in newspapers about things that happen, or see alerts on the internet. There are fires, shootings, stabbings, car accidents, really, any number of things happen in a city this size, and they happen every day. 

I am not saying Lowell is a bad place. I live in a similar-sized city and bad things happen there too. It’s just what happens in cities - Boston, the area’s largest city - is in the news every single day for something awful that has happened to someone.

When we hear “Lowell,” our fear is that something bad has happened to one of you or someone in your family. That concern is moderated by seeing you every day. It escalates during the long breaks in December, February, and April. The worst is the Summer break - six weeks of worry and concern without being able to check in on you. 

“During the Summer, every time I hear that something has happened in Lowell, my ears perk up and my heart skips a beat,” one teacher said to me not very long ago. 

There is nothing you or your teachers can do about this, but I thought you ought to know: Your teachers worry about you, when you’re not in school. 

When Am I Ever Going to Use This?

“When am I ever going to use this?” You should be hearing that in that unique tonal quality in which whining teenagers excel.

I hear that often enough and I’m sure your other teachers do as well. 

Just so you know, education is not just about teaching you things you’ll rush right out and use tomorro, it’s also about you learning how to learn, how to think critically, how to solve problems. 

For science, it’s about having a fundamental understanding of how the Universe works.

And math, well, maybe you won’t go buy 120 grapefruit all at one time, but you will use much of your math in your future. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know many of you hate fractions, but you WILL use these again.

I’m renovating my kitchen and look what I found behind the microwave. 

Look at what this worker did - they measured, divided by two, then subtracted 15. I think they were trying to center the microwave in the wall, by measuring from one wall to the edge of the microwave. 

I particularly love the way they divided the fraction - they just doubled the denominator, thus cutting the fraction in half. (Note: When do you think a school-aged Mr. McKellar would have predicted he’d need to know the name of the bottom number in a fraction?)

Maybe you’ll never do construction, but you might want to hang a picture on the wall, or craft a halloween costume, or double a recipe or any of a million other things.

Education is not wasted, it changes who you are, even if you never use a particular bit of information for a practical purpose, it helps make you a better version of yourself. 

The Last Time I Saw My 6th Grade Teacher

Memory is a funny thing. It fades over time. Events blend together like an impressionistic painting. Certain events will stand out, but as you get older even those will drift out of focus and become fuzzy. You might remember your middle school teachers names - maybe, but in a few decades you will have very few clear memories of us. 

That is unless, you have a teacher who really makes a super-strong and long-lasting impression. That middle school teacher for me was Fred Hone. He was my 6th grade teacher.

He looked a little like Jug Head from the Archie comics, but what impressed me was that he didn’t talk to us like we were kids. He didn’t talk down to us. He treated us as equals who just didn’t have the education and life experience he had. 

He was a great teacher for me. He was energized and intense. When you had his attention, you had his FULL attention. A few moments stand out:

When he read The Call of the Wild, a wonderful book about a sled dog, he opened the

huge windows in the classroom on a cold winter day and read aloud as snow flurries swirled around our feet. 

He showed us how to frame a building and helped us build scale models of houses and garages. 

When I casually mentioned my family was getting a pop-up camper, he diagramed how and where to weld the hitch to the frame of the car we would use to tow the trailer. (I’m not sure if he expected an 11-year-old boy to actually do the welding or just impart the information, diagrams and all, to my Dad.)

You know how it is, you see the teachers you had in younger grades around the building. It was the same for me. I saw him around until I left the building and went to high school. 

I didn’t think about Mr. Hone for a very long time - about 18 years. In those years, I finished high school and college, got married, started a family and was, of course, working.

I came home from work one day and casually turned on the TV - The Oprah Winfrey talk show was on - and these were the days when her talk show was a lot like the Jerry Springer or Maury Povich shows. That is to say, very sensationalistic with all sorts of strange and bizarre people featured each day. 

And there was Mr. Hone and his wife casually chatting with Oprah. They met in his 6th grade math class. He was her teacher and, a few years later, when she turned 17, they married. It was national news. He even went to jail for a brief time.

I was shocked and stunned. I just stood there in my kitchen, mouth agape and just stared at the TV. I mean who does that?

That was the last time I saw my 6th grade teacher and it’s kind of a funny story to tell.  But, when I think about Mr. Hone (Here I am, 60 years old and he’s still Mister Hone to me), I think about how enthusiastic he was in the classroom, how he loved to impart knowledge to his young charges and how intense his teaching style was. 

Sadly, as I was researching this post, I discovered that Mr. Hone passed away this September. He made an impression on me. I hope I carry some of his respect for students in my teaching style.  

And, if anyone wants to know how to weld a trailer hitch to a car, I’d be happy to diagram it out for you.

Do Your Job

“Do Your Job.”

It’s about the most famous phrase in New England sports history. 

It’s the mantra that has powered the New England Patriots to six Super Bowl winning seasons.

I say it all the time, but in the school-speak version: “Do your work.”

I know it’s true for my class, but I suspect it’s a universal truth - if you do your work, you’ll get good grades.

When I see students who are not getting good grades in class, it’s almost always because they’re not doing the work. And, it’s usually not because they don’t understand, it’s because they’d rather sit and chat. 

We’re at the end of the first quarter. Report cards come out next week. Your grades are probably just about done. You can ask your teachers about your grade. 

If you’re not happy with the grade, now is a time for some honest reflection. Did you do your work?  Did you finish assignments or just let time slip away until it was too late to complete your work? Did you sit and talk while you should have been working?

It’s not too late to change your approach to school. It’s really pretty simple:

• If you do your work, you’ll get good grades.

If you get good grades, lots of good things happen: Your parents will be proud of you. You’ll be proud of yourself. You’ll have more choices on where to go for high school. You’ll get the better classes in high school…and so on.

• If you don’t do your work, you’ll probably get poor grades. 

If you get poor grades, lots of bad things will happen: Your parents will be on your case. You’ll feel bad about yourself. You’ll have few if any choices on where to go for high school. You’ll get the lower, slower classes…and so on.

Just do your job - do your work.