The word “yap” is all the rage with the youth at the moment. Yap yap yap. My mom was yapping at me. You wouldn’t stop yapping about that during lunch. Yap yap yap.
I will now yap about stuff I’ve had on my mind.
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I used to buy customized pens for my AP Lang students, a small gift recognizing the amount of handwritten essays they had to do in the class. This year I wanted to give my students a similar gift. If not pens, then some sort of customized pencils. But you have to buy like five hundred a batch…very expensive, not worth it. So I’m experimenting with printing small stickers and having students create their own messages for them. I asked them to come up with messages for the pencils. They obliged.
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Being a teacher at the end of the quarter feels like being a loan shark. Students slouching into your office full of excuses, begging for an extension on the loan – er, project on which they have a zero. The late penalty is like the vig, incrementally penalizing the debtor. The student’s fear of angry parents is like the fear of thugs shaking you down. This all makes sense to me.
Granted, I have never taken out a loan from a shark, nor have I acted as one. Given my treatment of students, I probably wouldn’t make a good one.
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For the past five years I have been teaching Secret Handshakes, my name for a set of grammar and style conventions that are often misused – to use them properly shows that you get it. Alternate names include the “Well, actually…” rules and the “Why didn’t your English teacher teach you this?” rules.
It started the online year, when so much of my communication with students was through email, and I started noticing the same little things cropping up in student writing, little things that by themselves didn’t require a full lesson, but when cobbled together make for something I thought would be edifying.
This includes small stuff like effect/affect, fewer/less, “a lot” is always two words, when to use a semicolon (never), what is a dangling modifier and how to avoid it. Also some truly obscure rules, like not ending -ward prepositions with an s. It’s forward, not forwards! We spell it gray in the United States.
Then some personal pet peeves, like never saying “oftentimes,” a word used solely by windbags. This one really outraged my eighth block class last year…hmmm I wonder why…
When I give my defense of learning these rules, I offer the cynical assessment that knowing them gives you an opportunity to correct others, a subtle flex that is valuable in social situations where one is jostling for power. I never tell them this story, but always I think of the time in college I told a communications major that I was “doing good.” She sneered at me: “Don’t you mean you’re doing well, Mr. English major?”
I don’t want my students to ever feel that same sense of worthlessness that comes from pedantic grammar corrections — I’d rather they instead do the correcting.
It’s old-school, extremely granular. For that reason, every year I wonder, should I be teaching this to my students? Am I perpetuating the sort of fussy old-English-teacher rules that have been imposed on white-collar language (emphasis on white) in our culture for centuries? Isn’t the point of language just to communicate, however best possible, without regard for conventions?
If nothing else, I think it’s worth teaching these rules to my students so that they are aware of them, so they can’t say they weren’t taught them when someone gets in their face when they misuse fewer or less, when a parent gets angry they don’t know well/good difference. Whether they use them or not doesn’t really matter to me. Can we agree that ignorance is bad and knowledge is good? That’s all I’m getting at. It’s the knowledge of these rules that matters to me.
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My wife got me this heat-transfer instant camera for Christmas. It prints these quick photos on receipt paper, no ink required, cheap and reliable. My co-teacher and I started using it for student-of-the-day photos. Most of the students had a generally apathetic attitude at receiving student-of-the-day and the attendant custom sticker — although you can sometimes catch a glimmer of pride in some at being recognized. At a certain point I accumulated enough student-of-the-day photos on the bulletin board to where I decided to transfer them to the wall in a more organized fashion. A few student-helpers decided it would look good as a face mural. It does indeed.
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Another Christmas acquisition was a banjo. It has made me so happy. In addition to my nice resonator-equipped five-string, I bought a cheap open-back model off Facebook marketplace from a guy in a CVS parking lot. It has its home at school next to the seat at my desk. Any student who has even the smallest competency at guitar has been made to accompany me on “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” and “Red Haired Boy.”
After the initial surprise at my new instrument, the students stopped reacting to my playing, a testament to their ability to adjust to anything, or maybe a testament to their apathy, or maybe the hypnotic quality of my pickin’.
Every Thursday afternoon I jam with science teachers Looney and Pyle, with students and other teachers joining in the fun from time to time. It’s one of those things that’s good for me in so many ways. I take an online grad class later in the evening – my wife and I call my time after school “Bluegrad,” a pretty wonderful pun I have shared multiple times with my Zoom cohort, who always have connection issues that cause them not to laugh or smile when I tell them.
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My enthusiasm for banjo has led to plans to start a bluegrass jam on club days next year. This would entail the liquidation of juggling club, which has dwindled in attendance after a robust start to the year.
I have mixed feelings about this. It was founded last year strong by a group of enthusiastic freshmen, who, after two years of high school, have unfortunately become sophomores.
First meeting of the school year
Most of them learned to juggle, at which point they moved on to other clubs. I think that’s what they did — in any case, they stopped showing up. Some told me they felt a certain self-consciousness about being seen at juggling club, a prejudice perpetuated by the uncoordinated and jealous civilians who add grayness to our world.
Also, club meetings started to include those who could juggle, but didn’t attend the club for that purpose. What I couldn’t abide was students showing up to then sit and play on their phones. My fussing about this really sent the attendance dwindling. Here’s our family photo from yesterday’s final meeting:
Rest in power, juggling club. Aside from exposing dozens of students to a fun hobby, you will be remembered fondly for your rich tradition of being a nuisance to the person whose space you were invading for practice, whether the history teacher’s classroom last year, the attendance secretary at the beginning of this year, or the leadership club in the library this spring.
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Speaking of nuisance, I recently listened to a biography of MLB pitcher Jim Bouton, who is notable for his tell-all diary Ball Four chronicling his 1969 season and the antics in the clubhouse. He didn’t stay idle after retirement – he was a television sports anchor, an inventor (Big League Chew), a jewelry maker, and a commissioner of an old-timey baseball league.
It was one of those biographies where you lose most of your respect for the subject as the tale drags along, Jim Bouton being motivated less by his purported quest for justice and more by a quest to glorify Jim Bouton. That said, it’s inspiring to read about a guy who was passionate and mostly optimistic throughout his life, who often endured a gauntlet of anger (whether due to his progressive stances or outsider decisions) but always retained his sense of humor.
That’s why Ball Four remains one of my favorite books, certainly the most comforting. Throughout the season, Bouton is always on the verge of losing his career as a ballplayer and faces a barrage of humiliations: derided for his ineffectual knuckle-ball, demoted to the minors, shelled in relief outings, traded mid-season. At one point someone nails his cleats to the floor of the locker room, the perpetrator an unknown pissed off enemy on the team. Throughout all this, he stops to observe what’s around him and appreciate the ugly humor in it where possible.
Mentally, I feel a certain degree of kinship with Bouton. I try to be positive, as hard as that might be some days. Accepting that reality and not letting the poor vibes smear into subsequent days is the key to success, whether you’re a ballplayer or have a more mundane profession.
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Probably my favorite student this year is a young man named Aaron. He operates by his own code, and he has a sense of mischief that can brighten your day on days when it doesn’t drive you insane.
For example, when co-teacher Maynard and I started implementing student-of-the-day with Aaron’s class, he came back the next day with his own teacher-of-the-day award, which he presents to one of us as he leaves at the conclusion of the class. It’s been almost four months at this point, and he’s still doing it, a respectable commitment to the bit. So far, I have received teacher-of-the-day fourteen times.
Ironically, I don’t think Aaron has ever been student-of-the-day, in part because of his yapping.