Education Humor
With Regina Barreca

It's All About Context

One of the first things I learned of value in an education class happened when the instructor -- a brilliant woman in her 50s who was the only professor I've seen able to wear cowboy boots and get away with it -- told us that many of the stories we'd hear about what "really happened" in somebody's class might have "really happened" but (and this was the important part) they might have happened quite a long time ago, such as around the time the Earth's crust cooled.

Some wonderful stories about teaching are apocryphal. So what? They remain wonderful. Here's one I heard only recently, via e-mail; delighted, I forwarded the e-mail to an older friend. She suggested that since this story had been around during the Nixon administration, I might want to "Google" it to see if it appeared elsewhere.

Turns out the story has appeared not only elsewhere, but everywhere.

Background aside, here's the version I heard from an elementary school instructor in Wisconsin: "I'd given my class a writing assignment about what they most wished for their family. They had to write and illustrate their story, as well as give it a title. I'd given this assignment before and it had always worked well; the students drew pictures of houses and boats and pets and friends. It helped them connect both abstract and concrete ideas. Imagine my surprise, then, when one of the quieter little girls raised her hand and asked me, 'Mr. Smith, how do you spell 'penis'?'

"A few of the kids looked up, a few giggled, and meantime I am trying to juggle my 500 immediate internal reactions to this question. 'Oh Lord,' I'm thinking, 'should I call in Social Services? Ask the school psychologist to speak to her? Should I set up a meeting with the parents? Are they teaching things in biology of which I'm unaware?' I walked over to her desk and saw that she was quite calmly drawing a picture of a bunch of kids flying kites. 'Of course I'll help with your spelling,' I tell her, 'but can I ask you why you want to know how to spell that word?' 'I know how to spell 'hap'' she explained, 'and now I need the rest of the word to spell 'happiness.'"

He said he felt the "sort of relief that you feel when you realize you don't need to provide CPR."

My correspondent's story is instructive as well as funny -- no matter where (or, for that matter, in which decade) the anecdote first originated.

There are times when what makes us most effective as teachers and as mentors is putting things in context and offering a sense of perspective for our students -- as well as putting things in context and offering perspective about our students.

On certain days it is the hardest thing in the world to do.

Concerned as we are with legal, administrative, cultural, political, and emotional implications of everything we say and everything we do in our professional lives, it's often tough to remember that not everything is necessarily Earth-shattering or inflammatory.

Sometimes a kid will draw a picture with a black crayon and a red crayon, not because he's destined to grow up to be a serial killer, but because he likes red and black. Maybe he'll grow up to be a New York fashion designer. A little girl can nibble on the feet and hands of her Barbie dolls, not because she's tending towards cannibalism, but because the toes and fingers of Barbies invite any normal child to chew. The school's star athlete might stop playing soccer, not because of incipient depression, but because chess has become more interesting.

Not everything is a big deal. In other words, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar; if Freud acknowledged as much, so should we.

Please understand, too, that I am almost preternaturally aware of the fact that we as teachers are often on the front lines when it comes to seeing and acknowledging trouble for our students and that it is often incumbent upon us to help them and their families find help when help is needed. It's an important part of the job.

But it's not the only part of the job.

The temptation to obsess about what could possibly be going wrong is rather overwhelming; the need to celebrate what's going well is often less pressing. But does that mean we should focus exclusively on the potential misery nascent in every moment? It makes for a long, long workweek, if that's the lesson plan.

And it's not like I'm Mary Poppins or anything. When I was a kid, believe me, I cried at everything: about Tootles the Train, about the petunia in the onion patch, and about the ugly duckling. In my bleak imagination, Mary Anne the Steam Shovel would end up in a junk heap in Rahway, New Jersey, sold for parts.

Yet I've managed to become a more-or-less functional human being (okay, therapy was involved), and one who thoroughly enjoys her life. True, I still weep at children's stories and movies: watching Fly Away Home with some kids during the holidays left me sobbing so hard I was nearly apoplectic, to the unutterable delight of my small compatriots who thought my reaction to the movie was the funniest thing they'd ever seen.

But maybe my extreme tenderheartedness as a kid formed the basis for the kind of sensitivity that helps me be a strong teacher -- not because I want to make a sad story out of everything, but because I learned to take a step back, rethink my reactions, and get some perspective on what's really happening.

Maybe selective sensitivity is what it's all about - not that you're sensitive only to certain kinds of kids (or adults, for that matter) but that you're sensitive in a sensible, credible way. You hear a great story and you "Google" it, for example; you don't discredit the effectiveness of the tale, but you learn a little bit about how to frame it. It helps you figure out how to fit it into the larger picture -- you know that assignment, right? The larger picture is the one we spend a lifetime working on, the one that doesn't get a title until the very last line is finished.

Plus, if you make a big deal over everything, then what do you do when you encounter the stuff that really does matter?