Eliyahu Hanavi Visits the Back Trailers

Monday, I entered my trailer at 5:45 am, refreshed from three days of chag, excited about my lesson plans for the day (kids made commercials using compliance techniques and then dissected each others’ commercials by identifying, you guessed it, compliance techniques), and breathing in the steam from my mug of chamomile tea with an air of peace. Then I opened the door of my trailer.

Students learning about the value of working together; or,
In-class replication of the Robbers Cave Experiment

If you have ever met me, you know that I care about cleanliness. Messiness, to me, is not just a sin, it’s a character flaw. And in my trailer my students had, left for two days with a substitute, well… the desks were scattered every which way, papers littered the floor, a few hung half-heartedly off the board as a result of pilfered pins, and the whiteboard exhibited choice graffiti (amazingly enough, none of it profane—in fact, there was some good artwork up there). I gritted my teeth and got to work, thinking about the talking-to I’d give my kids. Halfway through cleaning, I gave up and sat at my desk, seething, deciding to leave it to them to clean up. For a fleeting moment I thought up every different kind of punishment I could imagine: Take away the i-pads from today’s activity. Give candy just to the clean blocks and let the other blocks know. Sing instead of speak all week long. No, too cruel.

And then, as I pondered the mess, the door opened. An older African-American man I’d never seen before, with a goatee and a broom, poked his head in.

“I heard you moving things around. It looks like the night man didn’t clean this room.” He came in and began sweeping. Talking to me quietly, he began to get rid of the mass of papers floating around. Heartened, I started to rearrange the desks. As he took out the overflowing trash bins, he commented that this was a much better way to start the day. I think so, too. It reset my mood completely, reminding me how important it is to greet my students with a smile instead of a growl, and I’m pretty well convinced that Eliyahu HaNavi showed up in my room to help start our week off right.

A little fairy helped, as well. She poked into my box while I was gone and left this note from a student:

Her response to my thank-you note? To come up with her best friend after class and tell me, “Ms. W, I really love you. And now you’re laughing, but it’s true.” I told her she could use that for her paper on breaking a social norm, but I also told her I loved her back, and that she’s a great student who makes being a teacher wonderful. Because it’s true and sometimes you have to tell the kids the truth. Once in a very little while.

Two of my particularly adorable students hung out with me during lunch today, working on their IB internal assessment, and we got to talking about social conformity experiments. So of course we had to try one. As students returned from lunch, we hung out outside, all staring intently beneath a trailer. Sure enough, we collected a crowd of students peering beneath the trailer, intent on they knew not what. We debriefed, but one of my students has now renamed the Asch Conformity Experiment into the “making people mad experiment.”

Great minds at work:

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"You learn whatchu want to learn. Nurture, not nature."
On genetic engineering: "You bake the cake, that's you, that's your baby, but somebody else does the decorating, instead of you doing it yourself and giving it to chance."