WHY I TEACH-Part 23: It’s Nice To Be Needed

The new school year called for some revisions in my classroom rules—I had to add another rule. It’s pretty easy to set rules for your classroom. All you have to do is figure out what drives you crazy and make a rule about it. With my new set of classroom management skills, I assessed everything as:

Can I still teach?

Can the students still learn?

If the answer was yes to both, it didn’t make my list of things I needed to worry about. Clapping, however, was a BIG problem. I don’t know if my students never had anyone cheer or clap for them, but it became obvious they had no clue how to clap, or if they did clap, it was subpar.

So I stood in the front of the room and pulled up the PowerPoint slide that said, “How to Clap.”

“You’re not serious,” Terrance blurted out.

“So glad to have you back this year, Terrance,” I replied. “And yes, I’m serious. I’ve seen the way you clap and it isn’t working.”

Terrance clapped.

“Exactly,” I said. “Thank you for proving my point.”

Terrance laughed and sat back in his chair.

“OK, so to celebrate people in my classroom, whenever they do something, we will clap like this.” I proceeded to slap my legs twice, clap twice, snap twice, then point both my fingers at the closest student and said, “Good job.”

“So again, it is slap, slap, clap, clap, snap, snap, good job. Got it?”

There were several nods.

“Before you try it, however, I have just a couple of rules. First, you slap your own legs, not your neighbor’s legs.”

“OK, so two slaps, but no slapping my neighbor’s legs,” Terrance said with a devious smile as he turned to slap his best friend in the face, once on the right cheek and once on the left. “What’s next?”

“Are you OK, Drew?” He laughed, rubbed his cheeks, and nodded.

“To clarify, you will slap ONLY your legs. Not your neighbor’s legs or face or any other body part.”

“Oh, good to know,” Terrance said.

“Two claps, with your hands, only your hands and no one else’s hands.”

“Excuse me,” a kid with his arm in a cast said.

“You can clap with one hand.”

He gave me a really weird look and everyone in the classroom tried to clap with one hand.

“OK, next is two snaps and before you ask, no you won’t get in trouble if you can’t snap. I’m not going to go around and check to see if everyone is snapping.”

We spent about three minutes practicing snapping or observing the lack of snapping skills.

“And finally, point to the person who has done something amazing and say, ‘Good job!’”

“Got it? Good, let’s practice. One by one, we are going to stand up and state our names and favorite brand of toothpaste.”

“She’s really weird,” I heard a kid say as they left the classroom.

“You get used to it,” Terrance replied.

I slapped twice, clapped twice, snapped twice, and said “Good job” to Terrance.

My schedule wasn’t too bad this term.

8:00-8:15 homeroom

8:25-9:55 1st period Coding Levels 1 & 2

10:05-11:35 2nd period Planning or Subbing

11:35-12:35 Lunch

12:40-2:10 3rd period Computer Repair Levels 1 & 2

2:20-3:50 4th period Multimedia

I had a nice set of 24 beat-up textbooks for my computer repair classes. The local tech school wanted our kids to consider their coding program, so they hooked us up with a free subscription to their coding program and close to $50,000 in fancy equipment. Luckily, it didn’t have a street value.

I had no idea what Multimedia was or how I was supposed to teach it, but it was my class and I was going to make the most of it.

As I sat pondering my upcoming school year, I was pulled abruptly from my thoughts when Mr. Myers walked into my classroom.

He put his hands behind his back and surveyed my classroom. I waited for him to begin the conversation.

“This year, this department is going through state industry certification,” he began. “And you will be in charge of making sure we meet the state standards.”

“What’s state industry certification?”

“It’s a stamp of excellence and recognition for our state-of-the-art equipment and technology.”

I laughed out loud, spittle actually landed all over my desk.

“We may have to slightly upgrade some of your technology, but the rest of the department is more than adequately equipped.”

“So why me?”

“You don’t have as hard of a teaching load as the others in your department.”

Bullshit. But anyway. “So does this mean I’ll be released from subbing duty?”

Mr. Myers gave me a weird sort of look. “No, there’s no need for that. Training takes place on Saturday, the next three Saturdays, actually.”

“Um, no, I have family stuff to do on Saturdays.”

“This is important and you are expected to be there. I’ll send you an email with all the information.” He turned and walked out of my classroom.

I went to my computer and found the Industry Certification Standards website. I sat back in my chair feeling completely overwhelmed. Industry certification would consume the next nine months of my life, or so the timeline stated. I opened the 41-page guide, scrolled through it, and didn’t understand a single word of it until I came to the section on FBLA involvement. I guess I could check that one off the list.

Then it hit me. Industry certification required FBLA. I was FBLA—couldn’t do industry certification without FBLA. I laughed, poor Mr. Myers was stuck with me.