Tag Archives: teaching

John Lennon and Long Underwear

Musings, Stuff, , , , , ,

bossyI taught high school and college Spanish for thirty years.    For the most part, I really enjoyed my students.  The only way to keep teaching is to love your subject and enjoy the age you teach.  And to retire before you lose your mind or hurt someone.

Often my students were funny.  One October day when I was teaching in Fort Bend County outside Houston, I noticed  one of the guys in class sweating manhad sweat pouring down his face.   His hair was wet with perspiration and he was gasping for breath. Concerned,  I leaned over his desk and asked what was going on, was he sick?  He said, “Mrs. Perrine, may I go to the restroom.  It was cold this morning so I put on my long underwear but it’s really hot now.”  What I love about people in the South is they don’t understand they never have a reason to wear long underwear.

LeninAnother time I was talking to an upper-level Spanish class about Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist who paint a controversial mural of Lenin in Rockefeller Center.  I asked, “Does anyone know who Lenin was?”  One young lady raised her hand, so excited she waved her arm  and said,  “I know.  I know.  He John Lennonwas one of the Beatles.”

I always attempt to be polite and not laugh when a student says something funny.  I don’t want to hurt their egos but I did chuckle a little–okay, I chortled- when she said that.  They are young and she was sort of close.

One student I taught, Billy,  could make me laugh any time.  There are some students who believe they are funny but usually aren’t.  He   didn’t try to be funny.  He just was.  He’d say seriously  in a voice filled with concern, “Mrs. Perrine, I have a lot of trouble with irregular preterit tense verbs.”  I know that doesn’t sound funny, but I would laugh so hard I nearly fell off my desk.

Do you have a story about something funny that happened in a classroom?  I’d love to read it.

Following up: A teacher’s nighmares

Musings, , ,

I have recurring nightmares about teaching.  Even though I retired from teaching six years ago, they still haunt me.  No one gets hurt in those nightmares and there’s little gore.   I dream about the worst situations I could ever have as a teacher:  hundreds of students meeting in a tiny cabin with no books or material.  I always arrive late because I can’t find the place.   And sometimes I’m wearing the wrong kind of underwear:  bright green under a white shirt. 

Oddly, the students are terrific.  Not a discipline problem in sight. 

The administrators who stop by never notice the crowds or the lack of material, and always ignore what I say–not always true in my real life of teaching but often enough that it comes up in the bad dreams.  Oh, and the administrators always  make note of that inappropriate underwear. 

Recently, I realized I have the nightmares when I’m under stress.  With the most important novel in my career releasing in two weeks and all the promo I’m doing and edits for the second book at the same time I’m attempting to write the third book in the series–well, yes, I’m feeling pressure.  At least I understand why they pop up.

What I wonder is this: 

 1)   Do some of you teachers have this kind of dream?  I have a good friend who doesn’t.  Obviously Martha is much more balanced than I.

2)    Do people in other professions have bad dreams?  Do fire fighters dream of burning buildings?   Are nurses surrounded by dozens of patients shoutng for medication? 

I’d really love to know.  If you don’t have nightmares about your job, what does bother you in your sleep?   Or, what kind of bad dream might you have?

Anne Frank and The Magic of Words

Writing, , ,

Words have always fascinated me.  From childhood, I’ve read voraciously.  I’ve taken courses on linguistics, and, in the classes I teach, I bore my students endlessly by showing them the history of words and how words are formed.

Words!  They are amazing.  The words I’m typing now have never before been put together in this way.  Even more amazing:  when you read these words at sometime in the future, you’ll know exactly what I was thinking at this moment.

It’s magic.

The most exciting example of the power of words I’ve been part of was from 1985-87, when I taught English in a school for pregnant teenagers.  The majority of the students were African-American, most lived in poverty and many had struggled in school.  But, with the coming of a baby, each courageous young woman came to this program to complete her education and give her child a better life.

In tenth-grade English, I taught The Diary of Anne Frank.  We’d read Shakespeare, Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom they enjoyed, but they really loved this play.  Even those who couldn’t read—and there were several–listened, spellbound.  The story of a Jewish girl who lived in the 1940’s and who hid from the Nazis in a tiny attic room spoke to my students like nothing else we’d read.

Through her words, Anne Frank, isolated in her ghetto created by prejudice, reached out over forty-five years, fromAmsterdamto these minority students shut up in a ghetto inLouisville,Kentucky.  My students understood Anne Frank and were astonished to discover that another young woman had suffered from the prejudice that surrounded them.  Anne Frank became one of them and they joined her in that attic.

This is what storytelling is:  reaching out over the years and through the differences and divisions between people to touch emotions and open the reader to new ideas.

And we are the storytellers, the ones who transmit the heritage, who transport our readers beyond the barriers of time and place, who deal with the truths of our experiences, who share and interpret the struggles we all face.

As writers, we are magicians.  We create worlds that have never existed before and populate them with characters that  spring from our imaginations.  We fiddle with our creation’s lives.  They get sick, suffer, fall in love–all with a few keystrokes on our computers.

The words we write make people we’ve never met laugh and cry and think and sometimes get angry.  What tremendous power words have.  What an amazing, awesome craft this is.  To be magicians.  To work miracles.