Lies Your Teachers Told You

Growing up is a constant series of discovering all the things that you thought you knew but you really didn't. Like learning the actual lyrics to that one song, (R-E-S-P-E-C-T… take care of BLT!); or suddenly understanding the dirty jokes in a beloved childhood film (Grease, anyone?).

Being a first-year teacher, I’ve learned a great many misconceptions I had about the things teachers tell you. Flat-out lies they tell you: 

1.  Teachers always have a lesson they’re trying to get through, and you not being quiet is hindering the whole class’ experience.

This is not always the case. Sometimes the kids blow through what I’ve prepared in much less time than expected, and I’m secretly grateful for the opportunity to improvise a lesson about respect and classroom conduct.

        2.  Teachers don’t care about your opinion. Of their subject or themselves. 

This is also sometimes a lie.  Experienced math teachers have hardened their hearts, and understand that not every child is passionate about the beauty of Euler's Law, but most teachers really love what they teach, and want their students to love it too. Maybe this is a newbie teacher thing, and I’ll grow out of it. But when that cool girl in the 9^th grade says to me, her tone dripping with vitriol and boredom, “This is dumb. Do we have to do this?” A little piece of my soul dies. I moved across the world to share my passion for performing arts with a bunch of disinterested small humans. And apparently, I’m still a middle school girl inside, who secretly cares about the cool kid’s opinion of me.

        3. Teachers don’t have favorites.

This is most definitely, 100%, always a lie. There are students we like, students we really like, and students we really, really don’t. I can say sincerely, I care about every one of my students, but some of them have opened my eyes to the appeal of corporal punishment.

I want to tell you a story about one of my not-so-favorite students:  I have a crew of 7^th grade boys. That sentence alone should make your soul shutter with fear—but it gets worse. They’re waaay too cool for school, and they’re smart. This crew of besties hacked into all the 7^th grade lockers and changed everyone’s combinations. They sit together like a pack of wolves, and they speak very little English.

I know they understand me. Well, they understand some things: like when I tell them to stop grabbing each other, or stop talking, or stop touching the drums, but other than that, they’re totally checked out of the lessons.

The other day, they were causing their usual ruckus, disrupting the class, and finally, I sharply told one, we’ll call him Calvin, (the one that hates me the most) to move to the other side of the circle. He made his protestations, but I gave an insistent finger point (universal language of pointing--very effective), and he moved. I didn’t know what the rustle was, and I didn’t care, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw this tough guy with quiet tears streaming down his face. I was surprised, I thought he was totally apathetic.

A moment later, the one originally sitting next to Calvin, we’ll call him Peter, interrupted me, “Um… Miss…?” (he’s the one most shy about his English. Also the one that cares least about my class, as evidenced by the fact that he doesn’t know my name)...

 “Miss Corkin?” I threw him a bone. But then, admittedly annoyed at being interrupted by his antics again, I was a bit harsh with my tone, “What, Peter?”

“It…not… was Calvin.”

“What?” I didn't understand.

“I had…  took his pen. Fault not Calvin. My.” Painfully stumbling through finding the words, he was trying to tell me that his friend, who I’d banished to the other side of the circle, was not responsible for the trouble, that Calvin had been provoked, and shouldn’t be the one punished. This boy, who was totally uninterested in me or my class, was offering up himself in an honest attempt at taking responsibility. That’s why Calvin was crying, because he’d been wrongly blamed (even on a small scale, we can all relate to this utterly powerless, deeply disturbing feeling). 

But here, his friend Peter was trying to fix it. No matter the personal cost, including struggling through limited English in front of the whole class.  

How much I underestimated this young man because he annoyed me sometimes. How easily dismissive I was because of a language barrier. What character in that moment he proved to have. 

Impressed and humbled, I melted. Oh, my heart. 

“Thank you for telling me that, Peter. I really appreciate your honesty, and taking responsibility.”

I didn’t know how to convey how moved I was at his gesture, in a language we could both understand. So I just smiled warmly. The best I could do.

“I still don’t want you to sit next to each other though. So just stay there right now. Next time, you can move.”

Speaking the Same Language

One time, I sneaked into a  Music and the Brain conference at Harvard Medical School. Thinking, “I am smart, I like brains, I like music--I took a neuroscience class at Harvard, and I can play the piano, this will be fun!" 

While I recognized they were speaking English, they were not speaking a language I understood. So I sat in the dark, straining to focus harder, blinking up at their presentations, trying desperately to understand what exactly any of these words meant, and what I got out of it was a very stinging feeling that I was not that smart.

Trying to get to work using the bus on my own for the first time in Germany. Or the second. Or the 8^th. I ask in my embarrassing German, “Eine Tagskarte, Bitte” (One day ticket, please), and place a few euros on the shelf. And the exchange that comes after is painful: 

The bus driver gives me very specific instructions, then stares blankly while I clearly don’t follow them, and in those moments, I want to say, “I’m so sorry. I'm trying. I’m not stupid, I promise! We just don’t speak the same language.”

I am now teaching little humans. And while I am no Harvard neuroscientist, there is a language barrier between the English I’m speaking, and the English these small people are able to speak as they grow. Including the ones for whom English is their first language.

But I want to remember that feeling I had in that neuro-music conference. Or the feeling I have every time I try to speak German. How small it can feel.  And as I’m going along in my classroom, trying to align the tongue we speak, I want to make them feel like they’re not small, but growing.

I’m learning how important a virtue patience really is. And how wonderful the end product worth investing—a world in which we can understand one another.