Don't try to be cool.

How teachers do what they do.

Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

Teaching started in earnest this week, so I’ve only got a little something for you this time. As always, thank you for reading.

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The study hall meets in my classroom on Wednesdays. I’m not responsible for it, but there I am, working at my desk, today innocently overhearing a conversation between freshmen I don’t yet know.

They’re three days into their high school career.

The boy with the open laptop is (mysteriously) perusing dictionary.com, and he announces the word of the day to his neighbor.

“‘Stymie!?’” the neighbor responds. His voice is laced with derision. “What kind of a loser uses a word like ‘stymie’?”

True story.

“I do.” I answer him unashamed over the bent heads of the other students, who seem to be trying to make good use of their study hall.

“It’s a great word,” I tell him, and I ask him how it’s spelled: maybe he’ll see (surely he’ll see) the delight. The word is funny looking at best.

He spells it correctly and is unimpressed.

Begin— just begin— to name words that rhyme with it. None of them will be spelled the same way. (Your word game: words that rhyme with “stymie.” Ready, set, go!).

And then there’s what it means: hinder, impede, thwart, block, encumber, bind, curb, shackle, stifle, restrain, hog-tie. Excellent words, all. Surely he could find use for stymie.

Among all those words, only stymie is Scottish, only stymie comes from golf. And of all its synonyms, stymie is the best onomatopoeia: it practically screams vexation.

But I don’t tell him any of this, of course. He doesn't know me yet. He thinks I'm ridiculous. And he has work that’s been assigned to him, maybe even things that are due tomorrow.

He’ll be in my class next semester.

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I have a new colleague who’s never taught high school before. She works with her church youth group, and one of the teenage girls there gave her solemn advice for her new job: “Don’t try to be cool,” she said.

My colleague laughed in the retelling, and I laughed too.

“Of course I won’t try to be cool,” she says to me, as if to the student. “I’m becoming a teacher because I nerd out about this stuff.”

Which is what we all do: nerd out. About etymology and semi-colons, the periodic table. About sine, cosine, and tangent, the beauties of the triangle, musical or mathematical. About the Haarlem Renaissance, translating Seneca, the structure of a sonnet, the importance of a counter-argument in your essay. The birth of Christianity in the Roman Empire. How to conjugate the subjunctive in Spanish.

We nerd out all day. It's what we're paid to do.

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As teachers, we write, modify, implement, improve curriculum. We design projects, invite narratives, require alternative modes of expression. We assign things and grade them, attend soccer and volleyball games. Praise our students and encourage them to continue to try.

But at bottom, our job is a marriage of loves: love of students and of subject. Plus the earnest faith that we can help them find each other.

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On Reading Poems to a Senior Class at South High

Before I opened my mouth
I noticed them sitting there
as orderly as frozen fish
in a package.
Slowly water began to fill the room
though I did not notice it
till it reached
my ears

and then I heard the sounds
of fish in an aquarium
and I knew that though I had
tried to drown them
with my words
that they had only opened up
like gills for them
and let me in.

Together we swam around the room
like thirty tails whacking words
till the bell rang
puncturing
a hole in the door

where we all leaked out

They went to another class
I suppose and I home

where Queen Elizabeth
my cat met me
and licked my fins
till they were hands again.

-D.C. Berry

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I’m loving getting to know my new students and enjoying so much the ones I’m teaching again. The start of a new school year is always a big lift, so I appreciate your appreciation of this short little something. I’ll hope to be back here with more soon enough.

Don’t miss the word game!

With joy,

Rebecca