1st Day of Teaching

There’s a lot in teaching that is learned on the fly. When I first started teaching, I realized that you have to be flexible, what you have planned will not go exactly like you want it. The very first lesson I taught during student teaching, I worked on for four days prior to the class. I had objectives correlated with state and national teaching standards, an opening statement that would interest dead people, and plenty of group activities that would ensure even the weakest link could partake in the fountain of knowledge. In other words I had never taught a class.

I was beginning my opening soliloquy on the three branches of the national government to seniors in their required government credit class – a speech that surely would have been turned into the next great Man Booker Prize when written down in my first book – when my supervising teacher came running into the room. “Have you seen the news?!?” he said. “No, I am attempting to mold young minds!” I responded back, now wondering what could be going on that was necessary to interrupt the panicky thoughts now occurring in my cerebrum. This was definitely not in the lesson plan. “Someone has just flown a plane into the World Trade Center in New York,” he explained. In the flash of my synapses I realized my grand opus was coming to a quick close. A student in the front row turned to me as the supervising teacher was turning on the classroom television to CNN and said, “What does this mean is going to happen to us?” I had definitely not written up the lesson plan that included this question…nor did I have any clue as to the answer. So I said something that I have finally started to be more comfortable in saying, “I have no idea, but let’s watch and find out.” We continued to watch that day and see the events of September 11, 2001 play out across the nation.

One year later, the senior that asked that questions revisited my room but with a new answer to his own question. He knocked on the door, entered wearing his heavily starched Marine uniform and asked if he could speak to me. Not usually being confronted with Marines, I was taken aback that this student would consider talking to me about anything related to the military. Quickly, I thought of the question that he had brought up a year earlier and asked him to explain to the current group of seniors I was teaching how his life changed in one year. He responded, “I have spent the last six months in Afghanistan after spending the first six being trained as a sniper. I never picked up a gun until this war, but it turns out I learn quickly. I have been part of a small team of Marines that slips back and forth across the country seeking some of Al Qaeda’s top marks. Stay in school, learn what you are presented, and you will see how much better your life was when you were in high school.”