Learn Me Gooder

I’m thinking this will look lovely on an embroidered pillow in the corner of your cubicle.

I have to tell you, you read my mind, man. I would love to be able to model subtraction in the real world by subtracting a couple of kids from my class! Or let me at least send them to the doctor to treat that really nasty minus infection. As it is, I might have to settle for demonstrating subtraction by disallowing Hot Cheetos from the kids’ diets and watching their weight go down.

I say this with one notable exception, because I think I have finally struck upon some true motivation for one of my really challenging kids!

Antonio is chubby, academically low, a talker, a player, a does-not-pay-attentioner, and generally an all-around slug. On the first math test, this kid got a 25. On the second math test, he got a 17. These were not at all hard or unfair math tests, either. He just wasn’t trying at all, and it showed.

Conversely, some of my other kids HAVE been picking it up quite a bit and trying harder. I am finally starting to get through to them that paying attention and doing their work the way we practice in class really CAN help them get the right answers and better grades.

In my homeroom, nearly every single one of my kids who had scored low on the first big test dramatically improved their grades on the second one, and the kids who had done well on the first test also did well on the second. One exception to this was Suzie, who seems to feel that math and science are not nearly as important as frequent napping. She’s putting all of her chips on osmosis through her textbook/pillow, and it just hasn’t paid off yet.

In my afternoon class, which contains Antonio the slug (and several other garden-variety slimers), I haven’t seen quite the same dramatic results, but there were a few kids who improved and several who did pass both tests.

I decided to make a really big deal about this and highlight the kids who have been showing effort. At the very beginning of the year, I had gotten stacks of cards from Denny’s, Golden Corral, and Popeye’s which said, “Buy one adult meal, get one kid’s meal free.” I took the time to fill them out with the kids’ names, my name, our school name, etc, along with the phrase “Math Improvement!” if they had bettered their score the second time around, or “Awesome Math Skills!” if they had passed both tests.

I gave these cards out on Monday. Everybody in my homeroom who got one loved it. Nestor saw the picture on one card and blurted out, “I LOVE the chicken of church!!”

“Um, do you mean Church’s Chicken?” I asked.

“YEAH!” he shouted.

Somewhere around 60% of the students in my second class got a card, as there are still several kids with very poor grades. Obviously, Antonio was in the 40% who did NOT receive this reward.

This apparently struck a nerve. Or a salivary gland. On Tuesday, Antonio started paying attention. He raised his hand to answer questions – and he answered them correctly! He brought his homework on Wednesday with work shown and completed. It was like a completely different kid had inhabited Antonio’s body.

The kids took the 6-weeks cumulative assessment today, and Antonio, while not having everything correct, had work shown for every question. He had labeled his coins, he had drawn place value charts, and he had shown his addition and subtraction steps. When I graded the tests, I found that this underachieving kid – 25 on the first test, 17 on the second – had scored an 80 on the 6-weeks test. An EIGHTY!!

Maybe the planets aligned just right for him to finally get with the program. Maybe something I said about effort finally seeped through. Maybe he had all of the answers to the test written on the back of his fake eye patch.

But I have a feeling it was the idea of free food that finally jump-started his engine.

And you know what? I’m ok with that. I see nothing wrong with the old carrot and stick strategy, and if the carrot comes with a deep fried all you can eat buffet, all the better!

Somebody will most definitely be getting a Golden Corral coupon Monday afternoon.

My own fondness for fast food produced interesting ramifications today after recess. The girls in line were giggling and looking at me, so I asked what they were talking about. Tiny Anna spoke up and said, “I saw you and Mrs. Fitzgerald at Taco Bell.”

The little girls around her giggled scandalously, and Big Jack, eyes wide as platters, demanded, “REALLY? You really saw them?”

We had in fact seen Tiny Anna and her family at the nearby Taco Bell back in August, the week before school started, during one of our teacher prep days. Why she had waited an entire grading period to bring this up is beyond me. Why this would be so scintillating to the other kids is beyond me. Why Big Jack would practically wet himself over this news is beyond me. However, I feel like I’ve learned a valuable lesson from this. Please be sure to remind me, if I ever decide to attempt an affair with a married coworker, to be sure NOT to take her to the local taco joint.

That is, unless I have a valid Buy One, Get One Free card to burn.

Talk to you later,



Cyrano de Burrito



Date: Monday, October 5, 2009





To: Fred Bommerson



From: Jack Woodson



Subject: You’ll have to speak up, I’m wearing a tie





Hey Fred,



So what did Paul say when you proposed the idea of meal coupons for improved performance? (Not that I believe you really proposed it.) Were you aware that Larry has been known to use those “Buy one adult meal, get one child’s meal free” coupons? It must be very off-putting for bystanders when the cashier says, “But sir, where is your child?” and Larry replies, “This card doesn’t say I have to have a kid with me! Gimme my meals!”

I think my instinct was dead-on, by the way. When I presented Antonio with his free food card today, he lit up like a Christmas tree. You’d have thought that I had just offered him a starring role in “High School Musical 6: Get a GED Already!”

You do make a very valid point, though. If his slug side starts to return, I may very well need to offer TWO cards as an incentive next time around.

Last Thursday marked the end of the first six-weeks grading period. Friday was Fair Day – The State Fair, not “play impartially without cheating” – so there was no school. I spent my long weekend getting grades together and putting them into the computer. I’ve decided that preparing report cards would be a lot more fun if Nintendo would hurry up and develop Gradebook Hero for the Playstation or Wii.

Today is the first Monday of October, and that means a big change in how I come to work. The summer dress code is officially over. Never mind the fact that it’s still over 100 degrees outside and even inside the classroom, I feel like a microwaved poodle. The HVAC units in our classrooms seem to have been cobbled together by drunk baby pandas in the 1950s, and they are just as likely to HEAT an already hot classroom as they are to cool it.

Nevertheless, now that it’s October, I’m required to wear a tie and a button-down shirt. For me, this automatically means a long-sleeve shirt, because I just can’t bring myself to wear a short-sleeve shirt with a tie and look like I stepped out of the NASA Apollo program of the ‘60s.

Our art teacher, Mr. Vann, decided a few years ago that he didn’t like his tie hanging down into the clay/paint/whatever, so he started wearing a bow tie. This hasn’t been challenged, so I’m thinking maybe I could start wearing a bolo and get away with it.

Or I could take a page from my old high school basketball coach, whom we called “The Guam Bomb.” Every game day, our coach showed up wearing a Hawaiian shirt, a tie, sweat pants, and cowboy boots. The tie was always undone and hanging loosely by the time the game actually started.

Usually, the transition from casual to dressy goes unnoticed, or at least uncommented on, by my students. This year, though, I received several compliments.



“Nice tie!”

“You look great today!”

“I like your shirt!”

“Handsome!”

“You look like a businessman!”

“Is that 10 pounds of crap in a 5 pound bag?”



Just so you know, I threw that last one in as an example of the kind of thing that was NOT said to me today. Everything was very positive!

While my attire was new, the kids’ level of confusion retained its status quo, as evidenced by a few things I heard today.

Mrs. Bird shared a funny story at lunch. She’s been fed up with the rote, wooden, zombie-like nature of the kids’ Pledge of Allegiance recital in the mornings, so she had them write out the Pledge on paper. In addition to a plethora of misspellings, one thing really stood out to her.

Victor had written (and I assume has been saying), “One Asian, under God...”

He must have forgotten where he lives, though he wasn’t the only one geographically confused today. On our walk out to the buses, Isabel told me that when her dad gets out of jail (!), they are going to move away from the United States. I figured she meant they were moving to Mexico, so I jokingly asked her, “Oh, so you’ll move to Japan?”

“No!” she answered.

“The moon?” I asked.

“No!”

When I asked her where they were going to move to, she replied, “To Miami.”

Isabel’s understanding of the world was less than ideal, and I suppose that could have been a carry-over from today’s math lesson. We compared numbers in class, using the symbols for greater than, less than, and equal to. My kids seemed to grasp that concept pretty well for the most part. Of course, they really sank their teeth into the whole “alligator mouth eats the greater number” mnemonic. Literally. Almost all of them drew the symbols with jagged teeth, forked tongues, and in Jessie’s case, fiery breath.

Mrs. Fitzgerald told me at lunch that one of the kids in her class looked at a problem where the two numbers were equal and declared, “The alligator don’t know which side to eat!”

Unlike that alligator, I DO know which side to eat, and I’m hungry, so I’ll let you go here. I’ve got a certain fast food card with my name on it, now all I need to do is find a kid to be my accomplice.

Talk to you later,



Ernie Quality



Date: Thursday, October 8, 2010





To: Fred Bommerson



From: Jack Woodson



Subject: Nobody likes a bad BM





What’s up, Fred?



I will give you credit for being innovative and thinking of a creative “solution” to the shirt and tie issue. I will not be USING your solution, however. While I really like the idea of cutting a hockey score out of the newspaper – Stars 1, Avalanche 1 – and clipping it to my shirt, I don’t think my principal would view it as a valid loophole.

Hey, you know that old theoretical exercise of putting a million monkeys at a million typewriters and seeing what they randomly produce? The old adage goes that eventually they would produce Hamlet and all of Shakespeare’s other works of genius.

I’m not so sure about that, but I know what they COULD produce pretty quickly – the district Benchmark Tests!

We have to administer the Benchmark tests – or as I call them, BMs – twice every year. These things are horrible. They are poorly written, they have some super difficult questions on them, and they often don’t even cover the topics we’ve been teaching.

The only good thing about BM days is that with half the day devoted to testing, my actual teaching periods are shortened, so the kids can’t waste as much time.

The higher powers defend these tests by saying that the Benchmarks are harder than the TAKS, so the kids will do much better on the TAKS. This is like saying that running away from bulls in Pamplona is much harder than roller skating at the local Big Wheel.

This is the first set of standardized tests of the year, so it serves as TAKS practice for the kids. It also serves as practice for the teachers in monitoring random kids. For the past few years, we haven’t been allowed to monitor our own kids during the TAKS. This is because of some educators south of here who cheated and helped their kids on the test. Now we all have to swap with teachers from other grade levels to ensure that we do not succumb to our base instinct for treachery and dishonesty. So on the TAKS days, my kids will take the test under the watchful eye of a teacher they may occasionally see in the hallway but whom they probably do not know very well. How will this affect their mood, temperament, anxiety level, and/or performance that day, you might ask? Well, imagine that the next time you drop your pants at the doctor’s office for your yearly physical, the FedEx delivery guy walks in snapping on rubber gloves.

This week, I switched places with Mr. Redd and watched his fourth graders. A lot of his kids were in my class last year, and it’s refreshing to know that they haven’t matured one bit since they were third graders.

We gave the kids a BM each morning this week; first reading, then math, then science, then social studies. Let me tell you, standing around for two hours every day with nothing to do but watch kids take a test is like Christmas coming early.

Mr. Redd left a page of observations on my desk after each test. Among the gems:



“Joaqim counting on his fingers… during the READING test! Probably counting up his IQ points. Who is this kid?”



“Lakeisha filled in a bubble on all 50 lines of the Scantron answer sheet. She did this without even opening her test booklet, so she never noticed that there were only 20 questions on the test.”



“I think Suzie pulled an all-nighter, because she fell asleep at 8:30.”



I went through the math tests and found many of them to be in almost pristine condition. Most of the kids showed no work at all. Maybe Franco has been spreading the word about his “new way” of doing math.

You’d think that the kids would understand that the way we practice solving math problems in class is the way they should solve math problems on a test. I mean, Lebron James doesn’t shoot jump shots in practice but then try to kick the ball through the hoop during a game. A concert pianist doesn’t sweep her trained fingers across the keys in rehearsal only to pound out a sonata with her elbows at the recital.

Never once in class have we scanned a problem, grabbed the first two numbers we saw, added them up in our heads, and then picked the answer that’s closest. However, that appears to be exactly what some of my kids did on the math benchmark.

Many of the wrong answers chosen didn’t even make sense mathematically. A boy with only 17 apples somehow gave 34 apples to a friend. A 24 page comic book will take 36 days to read. 56 boys and 37 girls were selling popcorn, yet the total number of kids was only 19. I’m sure that if 21 had been an answer choice for that one, 50% of my kids would have chosen it.

Then there were the questions that make me despise the BM-producers. There were two division questions, when we clearly haven’t even introduced the concept yet. There was even one question that I had to create an algebraic system of equations to solve – on a third grade test!!

And this little turd of diabolical cruelty:



“Tommy is taking folklorien class. His lesson begins at the time shown on the clock below. What time does Tommy’s folklorien class begin?”



FOLKLORIEN??!!?? What the folklorien is a folklorien???

The question just required the kids to read an analog clock, but instead, it totally hung them up on a word that hasn’t been used, outside of Renaissance Fairs, for a couple of centuries!

The kids’ mistakes on the science test were much more fun to read. By “fun,” I of course mean “depressing.”

The bubble gum hypothesis question did indeed show up on the test, and I was happy that we had performed it in advance so the kids would be prepared. But then I checked the tests and saw that only half the kids got it right. Gwenn chose “the mass of the bubble gum will change color.”

The majority of my kids decided that a short-sleeve shirt and sandals would be the best attire for an outdoors science investigation. Twelve children would use a ruler or a stopwatch to measure the temperature of melting chocolate. Six of my students believe that a magnet can attract a cardboard box. Most confounding of all was a question that asked which action would be CORRECT to do during an investigation, where three of my students, I kid you not, chose “Decide not to tell your teacher about a small cut on your finger.”

Clearly, we have a lot of work to do this year. I suppose the benchmarks did serve some purpose after all, in much the same way that a car’s gas gauge shows when the tank is empty. Obviously, we need to look more closely at test strategies. Because if we have another set of BMs like this, I might just smash my folklorien in anger.

Later,



Ben Shmarkstink



Date: Monday, October 12, 2009





To: Fred Bommerson



From: Jack Woodson



Subject: We’re gonna potty like it’s 1999!



Hey buddy,



Let me answer your questions about the science BM in the order that you asked.



1) Ascot and speedo was NOT one of the answer choices.

2) It shouldn’t matter if the ruler was metric or customary – it won’t measure temperature!

3) The question never said there was a hunk of iron inside the cardboard box.

4) We don’t (officially) teach the “suck it up” mentality here, so nobody should have chosen that answer.



Enjoy your trip to New York! I know that might be hard to do since most of your time will be spent in meetings, AND because you’ll be with Larry and Philby. But if you get a chance, try to see Mount Rushmore. And the Golden Gate Bridge. And whatever else might be up in that area.

OK, I realize now that Isabel might not really have been geographically-challenged when she told me she was moving to Miami last week; she might have been making a joke. Nah, she was confused.

Moving from confused to dazed, the funniest thing happened this morning. On my way from the office to pick up my kids, I stopped to use one of the student bathrooms, which is usually empty at that time of the morning. Today, however, I was not alone.

I was standing at one of the urinals, doing my business when this little kindergartener walked in and went to the one right next to me. Clearly, no one has ever explained to him the rules of male restroom etiquette.

I’ve seen this kid before and taken notice because he’s short even by kindergarten standards. I’d be surprised if he was 3 feet tall.

It all happened very quickly. The kid stepped up and yanked his pants down around his ankles. He couldn’t have peed more than two drops and he was done. Then he sneezed.

Some combination of the sneeze, the lowered pants, and the simultaneous fart knocked the kid down. He actually fell to the floor, sort of backwards and sideways.

The poor kid was rolling around, trying to right himself like a turtle that’s been flipped over, and all I could do was try my very best not to bust a gut from laughing.

I eventually had to reach down, pick the kid up, and get him set upright once again. I asked if he was OK (still fighting back giggles), but he didn’t seem to hear me. He looked like a flash-bang grenade had been set off in front of him, and he swayed drunkenly on his feet with a dazed look on his face. Then suddenly he snapped out of it. He pulled up his pants, yelled, “BYE!” and made a beeline for the door.

“You might want to wash your… OK then, never mind,” I trailed off as he disappeared.

The rest of my day was pretty uneventful, but the events of the morning reminded me of something that I don’t think I told you about last week.

Last Tuesday, Cerulean’s mother came up to the school to deliver a doctor’s note.

Cerulean is a large girl who's just not very bright and who takes so many bathroom breaks that we’ve had to call home, concerned. Thus, the doctor’s note. It made for a very interesting read, though some of the technical jargon was a bit over my head.

The note said:



“Cerulean has a functional voiding disturbance which has strained the bladder so that she has trouble with wetness, holding urine. Please allow the child to go to the bathroom when she feels the need and encourage her to stay as long as it takes her to completely empty her bladder. Your cooperation with this is sincerely appreciated.”



“Functional voiding disturbance??!!?” What on earth is that? While I’m sure Dave Barry would say that would make a great name for a rock band, it sounds to me like one of those dire side effects that are always listed with prescription medication.



“Possible side effects of Drugzinol include cotton mouth, snow blindness, explosive flatulence, and functional voiding disturbance.”



I also noticed that we are asked to encourage Cerulean to stay as long as it takes her to completely empty her bladder. I guess whenever she’s using the bathroom, I should stand outside the door with pom-poms, cheering, “Push it out, push it out, WAAAAAY out!”

Truly, I don’t begrudge someone an actual medical issue. But Cerulean is the kind of girl who will most definitely take advantage of this. She was in Mrs. Bird’s room when the note was delivered, and coincidentally enough, she needed to use the bathroom as soon as her mother had left. It wasn’t even 8:30! Wednesday, she raised her hand to ask me around 2:00, and she got up and slowly walked past the other kids, grinning and smirking at them like she was on her way to accept the crown for prom queen.

There’s already another girl in my afternoon class, Temperance, who presented a similar doctor’s note at the beginning of the year. So each afternoon, it’s become a contest to see which of them will ask first. Not which one will ask – which one will ask FIRST. This afternoon, after both of them had gone and returned, Tyler told me that he needed to go. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t have a doctor’s note, so his request was denied. Fortunately for me, he didn’t break wind and blow himself out of his chair. I think that would have trumped any doctor’s note.

Talk to you later,



Gus T. Kidd



Date: Wednesday, October 14, 2009





To: Fred Bommerson



From: Jack Woodson



Subject: Playing for the wrong team





Hey dude,



OK, you are either a genius or the craziest fruitcake on the planet. It’s not enough that you worked the phrase “functional voiding disturbance” into conversation during your customer meeting yesterday, but you did it THREE TIMES???

The funniest part about that (or the saddest maybe) is that your clients just nodded their heads as if they knew what you were talking about. I guess it does sound like a legitimate semi-conductor malfunction. Still, I would have loved to have been there to see Larry’s and Philby’s reactions as you introduced the newest jargon into play.

Get your customers to start using that term in their correspondence with you, and drinks are on me next time we hang out.

One of my kids used a new term today, but I don’t think he was just being a smart-alec. I had a conversation with Kevin this morning that introduced me to the brand new word AND made me fearful of ever having children in this lifetime.

After finishing his problem of the day, Kevin (AKA Anferny) called me over to tell me that he had a football game coming up on Friday night. I made a little small talk with him, asking how he liked football and what position he played. He then told me that they were playing a team called the Dragons.

I said, “Oooh, they sound dangerous. What’s the name of YOUR team?”

He replied, “The Mancocks.”

While a circuit within my brain suddenly burst into flame and began to smoke, my mouth filled in as best it could. Trying to relate it to the unfortunately chosen South Carolina mascot, I asked, “Oh, is that a type of bird?”

Kevin responded, “No, it’s just a name my coach likes.”

“And has your coach registered with the proper authorities yet?” That’s what I might have asked if I didn’t have such tremendous self-control. Instead, I wittily responded, “Ahhhh.”

Later in the day, when I had a free moment during my planning period, I looked up “mancock” online. After skimming past forty or so entries for adult sites that might get me fired just for reading the web addresses, I finally found one that defined a mancock as “a type of birch bark container used to store rice in some villages.”

Poor fire-breathing, scaly Dragons… You don’t stand a chance against the wooden, grain-filled Mancocks.

I’ll admit, that word haunted me for the entire morning. But it was put out of my mind for a while by another incident right before lunch.

About fifteen minutes before picking the kids up from the gym, I walked up to the office to check my mailbox. As I passed the cafeteria, where all of the kindergarten kids were filing in to have their lunch, I heard a sudden wailing. In the space of one footstep, a mighty debate that Gollum himself would have been proud of raged inside my mind.



“Do I stop and render assistance?”

“No, it’s kindergarten, let them handle it. Don’t get involved.”

“Well, I’ve already glanced at the scene of the crime, I shouldn’t just keep walking.”

“You can always say you thought the screeching was coming from a rabid possum loose in the cafeteria.”

“Oh hey, it’s the little kid who sneezed/farted and blew himself down in the bathroom. I wonder why he continues to scream like somebody’s attached electrodes to his groin?”



In the end, I forced myself to respect the Good Samaritan Law (you can’t witness an accident and drive on past without checking on the situation), and I went over to see what was going on. A small crowd of kids was gathered around my tiny friend, who was writhing on the floor and showing no signs of lowering the volume on his shrieks. I zeroed in on the calmest looking kid, a boy who looked like he was annoyed that the lunch line had come to a halt, and I asked him to tell me what had happened. The boy pointed down at the kid on the ground and said, “He hit me.”

Yeah, that’s usually the response when you hit someone, you keel over and scream incessantly. After a few minutes of interrogation, I discovered that the boy on the ground had slapped the other boy on the butt, so THAT boy turned around and kicked the first kid in the junk. Hard, judging by his continued caterwauling.

It’s a shame that he didn’t add, “It’s for science,” because then I would have felt justified in letting it go. Instead, I had to wait for a kindergarten teacher to show up and take control. When she asked what happened, I told her that the poor little guy got kicked in the mancock.

Her eyes widened, but all she said was, “Oh!” So I added, “Also, I think he may have a functional voiding disturbance.”

OK, so you’re not the only one who’s a genius/crazy fruitcake.

Yours truly,



John Mancock



Date: Friday, October 16, 2009





To: Fred Bommerson



From: Jack Woodson



Subject: They call me MISTER Teacher





Dude,



I don’t care if one definition of mancock is “the awesomest source of awesomeness in the universe” – you don’t name a Pee Wee football team something so close to something so anatomically private! I’m worried about the league Kevin is playing in. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if his next matchups are against the Titmouses, the Spotted Dicks, and the Golden Taints.

Ugh. Now I feel the need to take a shower again. Let’s move off of weird team names and on to weird kids.

I have a little girl in my class this year, Shelly, who doesn’t quite seem all there. She’s a sweet enough little girl, and so far, she appears to be doing all right academically. However, there are frequently times when I talk to her face to face, and I can tell that the light is on, but nobody’s home.

One major issue, she ALWAYS calls me “Miss Woodson.” She’s not being malicious or trying to cut me down, she just feels for some reason that that’s what she should call me. When I try to explain to her that I am a man, and therefore I should be addressed as “Mister,” she gets a puzzled look on her face, as if I was telling her that Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy were not real.

I thought for a while that perhaps Shelly called everyone Miss and was completely unfamiliar with any other prefix. But that was disproven a couple of days into the school year. The art teacher and I were monitoring the drop-off zone out in front of the school when Shelly’s aunt pulled up and let her out. Shelly ran past us yelling, “Good morning, Mister Vann! Good morning, Miss Woodson!!”

Maybe it’s just me, though I do consider myself to be somewhat manly looking. I mean, my Adam’s apple is as prominent as the next guy’s, and I rock a mean three-day stubble. I don’t think that she actually views me as a female. So I’m at a loss as to why she can’t understand why I wouldn’t be MISTER Woodson.

I can just imagine what would happen if I lined up with a bunch of people with various jobs and let Shelly greet all of us.



“Good morning, Mister Ramsey!

Good morning, Doctor Barton!

Good morning, Judge Carson!

Good morning, Special Agent Johnson!

Good morning, Archduke Fielder!

Good morning, Miss Woodson!”



This afternoon, I noticed that Shelly was writing notes at her desk while we were going over the homework. When I told her that she needed to be paying attention and grading along with us, she looked shocked and replied, “But I was writing a note to YOU!”

She said this very defensively, as if she was thinking, “When we walked into class today, our two choices were to either pay attention and do the work or to daydream and write notes – and I made my choice!”

I told her that it was very sweet of her, but that she needed to do that at home, not during math class. Still affronted, she continued, “It’s a note about how you’re my favorite teacher!”

I glanced quickly at the paper on her desk and saw little hearts lining the edges. At that moment, I was very thankful that I hadn’t just snatched the paper off of her desk and thrown it away, because I could totally imagine Shelly tearfully asking, “Miss Woodson, why? Why do you hate love?”

I finally convinced her to stop writing notes and to pay attention in class – at least, her version of paying attention.

At any rate, I’ll probably be getting a very lovely note come Monday morning along the lines of, “You’re the best, Miss Woodson!!”

Talk to you later,



Matt Skewlin



Date: Tuesday, October 20, 2009





To: Fred Bommerson



From: Jack Woodson



Subject: Commercial success





Hey bud,



Good to have you back in Dallas, with most of your sanity intact after a week with Larry. I know how exhausted you must be after spending most of yesterday catching up on paperwork, build statuses, team updates, and the like. Yet somehow you found the time to tell everyone about that last email.

They all sent me emails calling me Miss or Ms. Except Winter, who always has to top everyone. His email was addressed to Mademoiselle Woodson. And they say engineers never have an original thought.

In addition to those emails, guess what I received yesterday? If you said an autographed picture of veteran character actor Robert Loggia, you’re not far off. I got (pause for dramatic effect) A CARD FROM SHELLY!!

Who could possibly have seen that one coming?

It said, “Dear Msr Woodsman, You are the best techer ever! Love, Shelly.”

I’m willing to overlook the misspelling of my name, since she does verbally say Woodson. So I won’t need to call her “Barry” in return.

I think “Msr” is just a misspelling as well and doesn’t mean that she’s decided to start addressing me as Monsignor. She still looks at me oddly when I ask her to call me “Mister,” but she’s not the only one who is still trying to figure me out. I’ve been with my kids for about two months now, and it’s amazing how the two classes behave as completely separate microcosms. One group seems to really “get” me, while the other seems to wonder what planet I’m from.

This morning, we were going over a word problem that mentioned someone’s garden. I knew that Mrs. Bird had just finished reading a story with the children called “Ugly Vegetables,” so after reading the word problem, I said, “Tim’s garden is 5 feet wide. Oh, maybe Tim is planting some UGLY VEGETABLES!”

Dead silence. I looked out into a sea of blank faces, as a tumbleweed slowly drifted across the room. I tapped on the end of my overhead marker and spoke into it – “Is this thing on?”

After lunch, with my second class, I tried the exact same bit. Maybe it’s just the personalities of the different kids, maybe I improved the timing in my comedy act, or maybe the cafeteria pizza pockets had nitrous oxide in them, but the results were decidedly different.

“Tim’s garden is 5 feet wide. Oh, hey, I’ll bet Tim is planting some UGLY VEGETABLES!”

The room exploded into laughter and applause like Showtime at the Apollo. Kids were waving towels in circles around their heads, shouting “WOO WOO!” and throwing buckets of confetti at each other.

Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.

They may not all be hanging on every word I say just yet, but they certainly are influenced by what they see on television. Mrs. Bird told us a story over lunch today about a response she got from Jacob during her social studies lesson. She’s been discussing the court system with the class and going over the roles and functions of judges, juries, lawyers, etc. Today she asked, “Who could you go to if you needed help in solving a legal problem?”

Jacob immediately raised his hand and shouted out, “James Handler, The Dallas Sledgehammer!”

Clearly, Handler’s local commercials – “My neighbor’s dog peed on my mailbox, and James Handler got me $450,000!!” – have made an impression on young Jacob, among others.

This is not the first advertising campaign that has had an effect in the classroom. A few years ago, every time I mentioned bar graphs, one little boy would go into a robotic trance and recite, “Cingular – Raising the bar!”

Heck, Mrs. Fitzgerald and I have been paying homage to an ancient commercial for years! You remember the old jingle, “Cha cha cha, Charmin!” for Charmin toilet paper? We adapted that to make it easy for the kids to remember where to place the comma in a number. “Cha cha cha, comma!” (Where each “cha” is a digit to bypass.)

I’m always tempted to tell the kids, “Don’t squeeze the Thousands!”

There is no possible way that these kids are familiar with the old Charmin commercials, yet the jingle resonates with them. It makes me wonder if teachers might not be wise to take a different approach to lesson planning. Maybe we should start making commercials to be aired during Saturday morning cartoons and Monday night wrestling. This might turn out to be more effective in promoting concepts like estimation and the scientific method than boring ol’ classroom activities.

I’m thinking a simple, direct message played over and over for 30 seconds, wedged in between ads for Playstation games and Vytorin. Just look at how successfully the phrase, “Headon, apply directly to the forehead!” has gotten stuck in our brains. Sure, everyone wishes they could meet the creator of that ad, just so they could punch him in the face, but there’s no denying that the message sticks.

We could record someone saying, “Comma! Apply directly between the Hundreds and the Thousands. Comma!”

Over and over, for the entire commercial.

I mean, if James Handler can infiltrate my kids’ minds with a catchy slogan, then I sure as heck ought to be able to!

Later,



Mark Etting



Date: Thursday, October 22, 2009





To: Fred Bommerson



From: Jack Woodson



Subject: Green Eggs and Math





Hey Fred,