Step Aside HG Wells: Tis the season for...The Time Machine

You can’t argue with math and science—ask any teacher this time of year. Because…yes, (oh, I so want to say “Virginia,” here, but I’m afraid I’m the only one who is old enough to know what that refers to) …it IS THAT time of year! No, I’m not talking about artificial snow and elves. And, no, I’m not referring to that other messy business, worrying about accidentally uttering “Merry Him-whose-name-may-not-be-spoken- in public-education-mas!”

No, I’m talking about THAT time of year all teachers dread……..that week before the end of the semester.  That week when all the slackers finally log on to their online grade accounts and figure out that the little “m” stands for missing, and that a zero averaged in with three 90 percents equals the letter D. (That’s the math part.)

It’s that week in the year when the wire basket on the corner of your desk fills up with old grammar sheets and reading quizzes that were handed back without somehow getting recorded.

Well, okay, if I’m gonna bag on the kids, then it's only fair I bag on myself a little, too. Yeah, I know you parents don’t want to hear it, but sometimes….rarely…once in a while…I “fat finger” it (as my esteemed colleague Dough puts it)  and miss an entry as badly as the next guy.

And it’s true that when you’re a high school English teacher and you carry work back and forth from home to school every night, it’s not shocking to learn that sometimes….rarely…..okay…once in a while…a paper falls into that little crack between the console and the passenger seat and rides around town for a week...or two. And usually it’s that make-up compare/contrast paragraph on Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est and Joyce Kilmer’s Memorial Day, that some kid handed you on his way to after-school tutoring when you were just returning from the teacher’s lounge carrying that pile of junk mail about workshops on “Behavioral Intervention Differentiating for Multiple Intelligence Reluctant Learners in Your Classroom through Motivational Strategies!”, and a full-color, glossy, brochure for “Teachers travel free with thirty-seven paying students!”  Thank God my old dog-eared copy of The Great Gatsby was on top, or the whole kit and caboodle would have gone in the trash! That’s all I can say. And yes, White-4, I already apologized for your Huckleberry Finn tests in the back of my daughter’s Pontiac, but I found them, didn’t I? All I can say to that is My bad, dog! (That makes it all okay in the teen world, I’m told.)

And it’s that time of year when, like Christmas carols playing on department store loudspeaker systems, you can hear one of my old familiar favorites called, “What can I do to bring my grade up?”

And it’s that time of year when I adapt a little lesson in cynicism I learned from another esteemed colleague who plays the Ukulele. (feel free to steal it as I did….along with all the other excellent teaching strategies that teachers give away online and interdepartmentally for free on a daily basis because they are just that kind of cool people who give away excellent stuff for free all the time. It’s part of the nature of choosing the profession. People silly enough to spend 60K on an undergraduate degree and another 32K for a master’s when they only get paid 40K a year are NOT sassy enough to charge for their intellectual property…………….c’mon, get real!)

Anyway, here’s what it looks like step-by-step when a student asks, “What can I do to bring up my grade?” (At least this is what it sometimes….rarely…okay, once in a while…looks like in my head.)

 1.  Don your most Madonna-esque smile, with gently parted lips like Curly’s wife dead in John Steinbeck’s barn after letting Lenny touch her hair—please add the beam of 3:30 p.m. sunshine streaming in from the setting sun behind the teacher’s head for the halo effect—and murmur back softly, like Daisy Buchanan, “What can you do?”

2. Pause, for a brief look at the ceiling like Jim Casey trying to piece together a prayer for Grandpa’s funeral.
 

3. Curl lips together in deep thought. Tap upper lip with index finger, shift mouth to bite upper lip corner like Scout Finch trying to figure out what Atticus’s brother is talking about when he tries to explain what a Whorelady is.

4. Let out an audible gasp—like Abigail Williams in the town meeting hall before Judge Hathorne—who yes, is the great-grandfather of Nathaniel, who changed his name from sheer denial about those horrible witch trials—when John Proctor calls her a harlot.

5. Ask again like Daisy, “Do you know quantum physics?”

6. Pause for this to absorb. (And, by the way, for you doubters, the answer is always “no.”)

7. Adopt a nearly Tom-Sawyer-like frankness and kick right into, “Because, (fill in name), you see…at this point, my friend, (I like to add the “my friend,” but it’s absolutely optional—whatever you’re comfortable with) you’re going to need a time machine to go back into the past and turn in all the work you failed to do for the first 17 weeks of school.

Viola! And it’s just as simple as Arthur Miller’s brother-Ben walking into the jungle when he was 18 and walking out a millionaire!

Rejoice, teachers around America! A semester has flown and the large majority of your students have passed! Sure, you’re going to get called into the administrator’s office to explain what happened to that other marginal percent, whose scores are scraping pavement under the chassis of the great piece of machinery called the American Educational System, dangling somewhere between  25-37 percent, whose grades you couldn’t hope to save, because you never received a single sheet of paper from them, let alone saw them in your classroom, whose home and personal lives are so riddled with pain and confusion, and perhaps chemical addictions, that for them to even show up to school in the morning upright is sometimes an applaudable task in and of itself. Rejoice! For your seniors are going to move on to college or other higher education, or jobs, or real life. Rejoice! They, for at least six days, knew the definitions for supercilious, anon, jocularity, inferential, and reciprocal; they could draw a little hill-like plot line and pronounce denouement;  they knew that Huck Finn was up to more than a simple trip down a river, and they understood that Gatsby’s life was as empty in the end as  Pa Joad’s Wallet.

Merry Christmas, American teachers everywhere who will be grading essays over “holiday" break.  And rejoice, rejoice, rejoice that there really isn’t a time machine anywhere for any of us. Because I’m not sure which of us would cheerfully go back and repeat high school again. One time around was challenging enough, wasn’t it?

And this fact, perhaps above all others, is the one that restores us and makes us return again for another semester, hoping that maybe we can make it just a little less hard and just a little more enjoyable for some kids who could really use it. And that, my friends, doesn't take a scientist to figure out.