Well, I Smoke a Lot

Today I decided to teach my IB students a lesson. In both classes, there’s an element that has been reacting really negatively to an old standard-program student of mine who quietly comes into my class during his lunch break and waits for a moment to catch up with me. He’s never intrusive, but they’re upset regardless that he’s in their class, and I do understand the resentment. Still, I thought it was the perfect teaching moment.

Today, I taped an envelope to my door with his name on it. He followed the directions inside perfectly. This is what they said:

Instructions: Walk in today and ignore us all. Copy this onto the whiteboard:

Experiment: Replication of Sherif’s Robbers Cave Aim: See if IB students exhibit in-group behavior. Procedure: 1.    Student enters class during lunch repeatedly. 2.    Record reactions. Findings: IB students behave like twelve-year-old boys. Evaluation: Valid. Reliable. Slightly unethical: no informed consent.

Heh. Heh. Heh. The IB kids are familiar with Sherif's experiment, and the smarter students caught on when they read the procedure. The rest were still asking me, “are you just going to let him write on your board like that?” Slowly, they realized that this meant I had asked him to come in during lunches and run an experiment on them (Well, I hadn’t, but they need never know). Those who had been chill were amused. Those who had been mean to him were less amused. I pointed out that there’s no point in learning psychology unless it makes us better people, and they returned to their work, chastened (I hope).

A few minutes afterwards, I noticed a student was crying. Tears rolled slowly down her face, and then sped up, until she was awash with sobs. She buried her head in her arms as everyone asked what was wrong—they’d thought it was crocodile tears for fun at first. Slowly, it came out: IB! It was too hard. This essay was too hard. She just couldn’t, anymore. A chorus of agreement followed. Everyone understood. Everyone, especially the seniors, began unloading their mountains of stress. They piled worry after worry onto our collective list.

I had to figure out how to stop them, or everyone would walk out of here in tears, and worse, with a strong sense of futility. I thought about something someone sent me just last week, and decided to copy it. I held up my water bottle for their inspection.

“Glass half full!” rang out my smartest student.

“Aha, that’s what you think I’m going to ask you, but I’m not,” I replied. “How heavy is this water bottle?”

“You could carry that forever,” answered a student.

“Well, not forever,” another qualified.

Slowly we began to zoom in on the amount of time I could carry the water bottle without my arm falling off. Then it was time for my inspirational speech.

“If I never put this water bottle down, no matter how light it is, I’m going to become exhausted at some point. Not to mention if I also carry this pencil box, and these folders, and those stacks of paper… sometimes life is a balancing act. Sometimes you have to put one thing down so you can pick something else up. Sometimes you have to throw your hands up empty and run through the quad shrieking. Because if you try to hold everything at once, you’re going to crash. You can’t do it. You have to look at all your stress and anxiety, and then put it aside and focus on what you can do at the moment. And at the moment, we’re not writing essays. We’re not even writing paragraphs. We’re just figuring out how the studies that we found yesterday, support the thesis statements that we chose from around the classroom walls. We can do that.” I checked my watch. “We only have five minutes left until lunch…”

Eek. Only five minutes. Could they even do anything in that time? But it would be anti-climactic to just sit and talk. I didn’t know how to wrap it up. I felt myself floundering. But then a kid jumped in:

“We know, we know, for the next five minutes we’ll focus--"

“Yes! Five minutes of absolute focus on what you can control—the application of studies to your thesis. Do it.”

I blessed the teacher gods for sending me a whiney student who kvetched about my plan before I had it. They always come right in time, preemptively complaining to let you know what you’re supposed to do next.

I sat down beside a lanky, silent student and waited for his thoughts.

“Ms. W, there’s a lot of feelings in this room right now.”

“Yes, there are. How are you coping?”

“Me? I’m fine! I have ways.”

“Oh, yeah, you’re on the team. So, like playing basketball? Does that help?”

“Well, yeah, Ms. W, but it’s really just, well, I smoke a lot.”

The bell rang, and with that laconic touch of truth, he left me in stitches in my seat.