Do Not Smile until Christmas

As the stories flowed over lunch, about how we learned our craft, I thought about when I was a student teacher, in Port Coquitlam, working with a Preston. Preston became a good friend and was a wonderful Mentor to me. As a new teacher, I was sure of myself, I knew my material, I was serious, dedicated, and I was out to change the world. I prepared my lessons, I knew the curriculum from a practical and a theoretical perspective.  I was confident in front of the students. I had learned the rule of the day for new teachers. The rule was (Do Not Smile until Christmas). The thinking of my instructors in Teacher Training was that if you wanted to maintain classroom control, you had to be strict and unyielding in the use of your power.  I followed that rule in my first week of teaching the classes and I thought Preston and the other teachers were impressed.

What I did not know at the time was that I was too serious, too unyielding, and I had forgotten the reason I was there, which was to reach children and help them learn. I was not there to just teach the curriculum. The first day of my second week, Preston said he wanted me to try some multimedia in the Consumer Ed class I was teaching. He told me he had this record that he wanted me to play for the students. I wanted to preview the material, but Preston and the other teachers in the Department said there was no need. They told me that all I needed to do was to impress on the students how serious they should take what they were about to hear and to pay close attention as Preston would test them on what they heard when I left.  

Feeling full of self-importance for being given such an important task so early in my teaching career, I did what I was asked to do. I really laid it on thick. I then put on the record. The record was of a serious of jokes about passing gas with all of the prerequisite sound effects. The class started to laugh, moreover, I did as well.  I momentarily lost control of the class, but I did reach the students as we shared the joke. Preston told me after class that he believed I needed to relax and to focus on the needs of the students. I learned my lesson, and I also learned to not take myself seriously either in the class or in life. 

One of my other classes was a grade 12 Accounting class which was first thing in the morning. In my first class, I was frustrated and upset as I had a student fall asleep about 30 minutes into the lesson. I woke the student up and gave him a detention at noon. After class, I talked to Preston and he told me that the young man was working two jobs to help his family. Preston told me that this student only had classes in the morning. By noon he was finished. The student then went home to catch up on his sleep, as the young man worked  from 3 to 11 at a gas station, and then worked from 12 to 8 at the local mill. Preston said that this young man would be the first to graduate high school from his family, so to help him, Preston allowed him to sleep. 

Preston said that we were lucky that the young man could make it to school.  I thought about the way Preston phrased the statement. When I talked to the student at noon, I said I would allow him to sleep but the only condition was that if he was snoring, I would have someone wake him up.  The rest of my time in Preston's classroom, the student always fell asleep after about 30 minutes. I learned that my voice had power, but not the power to keep one awake if tired.

I enjoyed the time I spent with Preston as his student teacher. Whenever I saw him again, in my professional career, he reminded of the "passing gas lesson". I told him that the real lesson for me was that as teachers we always had to not take ourselves seriously and that we had to always put the needs of our students first. It was a lesson that I learned early  and one that I used every day as a teacher. My only regret was that I never did get a copy of that record.