Hero for the Day and Meet the Parents

I'm a temporary hero at school. The emphasis should be on temporary. No, I did not have any of Senator Gregg's luck and win big bucks playing Powerball. Nor did I successfully save any little old ladies crossing the street, nor break up any serious fights and in the process save dozens of lives. But I did do something that had about a thousand or more students slightly excited, and now it seems I have to deal with the accompanying fame. Sigh. It's a heavy burden I live under, teaching public high school AND dealing with student worship.

This is what happened. We had an assembly today to kick off Red Ribbon Week, which is an attempt to educate students to the dangers of drugs and alcohol, and hopefully help encourage them not to use them. For the assemby, with about eleven hundred students there, a speaker came and talked a little about the topic, then proceeded to play volleyball, all by himself, against student teams of about fifteen each. It was quite a show. He was a decent player, although packing fifteen students onto a volleyball court was probably more to his advantage than not. This meant the real volleyball players were hampered by many other students on the court making their best but unsuccessful effort to simply get the ball over the net. There was no coordination to the effort. Consequently, the guy easily won the two games he played against two student teams.

Then it was time for a teacher team to take on the challenge. The principal gave this motivational speech about not letting this guy win in our house, and how this teacher team was going to defend the school's pride and honor by taking him on. So a bunch of us teachers squeezed onto the court for the challenge. Well, there were about three teachers who knew something about volleyball besides just trying to bat it around (two of the volleyball coaches were there), and if it was just them playing they might have had success against the one man wonder. But with so many generally clueless teachers, we only did marginally better than the students. I played up on the net (we didn't really rotate, that's how clueless people were), but didn't really have a chance to receive any serves because there were so many teachers close behind me. I did get the opportunity to block. On one occasion our opponent had the audacity to set himself, then try and spike it right in front of me. I blocked it cleanly right down to the floor on his side of the court. The crowd went wild. A number of my students were especially pumped. I also acted pumped, much of which was for the entertainment of the audience. I heard some students cheering me on by name. I also got high and low fives from a number of teachers.

We ended up "winning," though the score was doctored in our favor to make us win, I suppose in order to preserve the school's pride (this was all in good fun, it's not like we really would have been ashamed of losing). Throughout the remainder of the day a number of my students, present and former, kept on coming in or walking by and congratulating me on the play. Some wanted to shake my hand. One student came in and told me I was "the man," and gave me a sketch he had made of me on a napkin in my honor. I thought it was hilarious. It's basically an earless and noseless man looking very stretched, with a torso almost twice as long as his legs, wearing a button down shirt and tie. His mouth, though round, has teeth on all four "sides." His sleeves end about six inches short of his wrists, and it looks like he's standing on tiptoes. My name is at the bottom of the sketch, so I guess it's me.

Lest you think all of school was fun and games today, I did have to write a student up for behavior problems, but I won't bore you with those details, or spend more time focusing on the negative.

In other news, yesterday was open house, and I met a parent or parents of about forty of my students. That means this years participation rate is almost one third, as I have about 130 students total in my classes. This might not seem very high, but it's about twice as many or more than I had last year. This year I offered a reward for the class that had the highest participation rate: they can eat and drink in class for a month. I think this motivated a few students to get their parents to come out. (One dad told me he felt like he was being set up, as his daughter had told him he had to stop by my class, but didn't tell him why. I explained what the motivating factor was!) The visits (kept to five minutes each if someone was waiting) went very well. Some of the chats were most delightful, as I got to talk with some parents who were as sweet and wonderful as their child is in my class. Funny how there's a correlation there. I have some really cool kids, and and their parents seemed to be just as awesome, at least in the short time I had with them. I found communicating to parents about how wonderful students are, and why, to be a fun and positive experience. So good times, though after about four hours of talking with the parents I was pretty bushed. TGIF.