The Required Amount at the Prescribed Rate (Handcrafted From the Finest Corinthian Leather)
What Doesn't Kill You, Might Make You Dumber, But You Also Get Some Good Stories
Much has been written about the inspirational power and profound consequences of having a good teacher-- but there's a dearth of information on the importance of having a few bad teachers along the way: truly mean people (like my fourth grade teacher) and incompetents and weirdos may not put us pedagogically ahead of Finland and Japan, but these folks do make our kids tougher, more jaded, and provide them with loads of entertaining stories that they can pass along to their own children (I lost twenty-five points once on a test because I didn't have the proper heading . . . and if you had a certain gym teacher in our high school, it was pretty much a forty-minute free-for-all melee with the floor hockey sticks, day in day out . . . and then there was the guy who made the high school kids race around on those little scooters . . . etcetera, etcetera).
Who'd you have in 4th grade?
ReplyDeletekasden. rough times . . .
ReplyDeleteMy kindergarten teacher was mean, if you can believe that. After her though, I think my teachers were pretty nice, so much so that I ran roughshod over my third grade teacher who told my mother "This is the worst class I've ever had in 35 years of teaching and your son is the ringleader." So maybe it's important to have a mean teacher along the way, but not too early because it turns you into an asshole like me.
ReplyDeleteI had Heifich, aka Heifbitch. So obvious now that 4th grade teachers at Judd School were total playa haters
ReplyDeleteOn a more positive note, I saw on the news today, student gives teacher $10,000 as a thank you, forty years later. You might want to start making a positive impact on your student's lives..
fourth grade boys might also have something to do with the preponderance of mean fourth grade teachers.
ReplyDeleteand i got a really nice coffee mug from a student! i even got a compliment on it from the cashier at wawa.
My first grade teacher was Mrs. Lane. Crotchety old lady. I was a goody-goody back then but my friend Greg (who went to W&M) was seat-belted to his chair, had masking tape put on his mouth, routinely had his desk dumped of all of its contents, and once had a yardstick broken over his backside. He still remembers the poem he write that year which depicted her dying in a plane crash.
ReplyDelete1976. A different era for teaching.
Mrs. Arnesen was an awesome 4th grade teacher at Judd.
ReplyDelete