Top Ten Memories of Teaching Middle School

During COVID, homerooms were kept small to allow for social distancing, and masks were mandatory. The last homeroom group of my 40 years made me laugh every day, even on Zoom. This is a photo of a game they called "Tilleyball" after Mr. Tilley, the Science Teacher, told them to put down their screens and play something active. Evan, third from left, coaxed the shy kid to play with them.

40 years in Middle School are a blur, now that I've had five in retirement. At the new year, I feel this might be a good time to record my top ten favorite memories of teaching. After the first one, they're in no particular order.

Big One: About 10 years into my teaching career, kids shunned me after I gave Laura a "C" on her term paper. Her mother, on the phone that day, told me how her daughter had stayed home weekends working on her research "just to please you." I protested that I had to uphold standards -- and she scoffed, "'Standards.' You teachers should take the Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm.'" The next day, I asked students' forgiveness, and asked how I could better ensure students' success in writing class. Their ideas started me in the way I taught for the rest of my career. Their forgiveness -- including Laura's, and even her mother's -- made this painful episode a best moment.

Early one school year, our textbook introduced poetry through "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost. After a first read-through, a boy said, "I don't get any of this!" In discussion of poetry, I always let the kids tell me what they noticed -- about what's going on in the world of the poem, and what's going on in the writing of the poem, and what's going on in us as we encounter the poem's twists and turns. They unpacked the poem thoroughly. That same boy said, "I never took a poem seriously before. I really liked it." (On the other hand: Another class was reading "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" the first time when a girl jumped to the conclusion that the speaker was Santa Claus -- harness bells! snow! miles to go! "He has to go around the world, duh!" My first principal Dot Kitchings gave good advice: Sometimes, you just throw your hands up, laugh, and say, "Kids!")

While I gave notes to the 8th Grade Drama class following our after-hours dress rehearsal, an eighth grade boy stood up and headed for the exit. This was so out of character for the polite young man that I paused to ask, "Are you O.K.?" He said, "I'm Muslim. It's time for me to pray." Seeing his classmates gape, he said, "Whoa, this is awkward." The alpha male in class, child of wealthy and powerful parents, master of sarcasm, said, "No. I think it's beautiful."

Our weekly Advisory meeting one week involved a "fishbowl" activity. The boys were "in the fishbowl" answering questions written by the girls. The question was, "What do you look for in a girl?" Tension grew as the boys looked for a response from the tallest, strongest boy with the deepest voice. After an uncomfortable pause, he said, "Kind." The other boys nodded, saying nothing more.

I directed a middle school drama class in the classic American comedy Heaven Can Wait, in which a boxer, taken to heaven before his appointed time, comes back to earth in the body of a millionaire. When he realizes that he has fallen in love with a staffer, he lightly touches her cheek. In the audience, his father, who had seen him only as the goofball in his family, gasped.  Any time when student actors stretched beyond themselves was a favorite moment.

At the center of this collage from 1995, 8th grade actor Brian as Macbeth lays his hand on the shoulder of his wife, played by Caldwell. It's after the guests have fled her banquet, and she has asked what he's going to do. She has been crying; you see his concern for her anxieties and guilt. The line, delivered gently, was, "Be thou innocent of the knowledge."

I learned the day before school started in 2001 that I would have to teach drama AND music to all the sixth graders who hadn't signed up for chorus that semester. Literally mobbing me as I entered the auditorium where we met, the kids clamored to know, how are we going to do music AND drama? On the spur of the moment, I said, "We'll create an opera!" Over the weeks that followed, they reimagined "The Frog Prince" to include a posse of mean girls for the Princess and a gang of frogs who befriend the Prince-turned-into-a-frog. In small groups, they wrote words and tunes for themselves. All was going well, but the day came when I had to say, "It's time we stop writing and start rehearsing. How can we finish the opera?" Andreas volunteered to write the last scene that night. The next day, he apologized, "I didn't have any new ideas, so I just repeated tunes from the rest of the opera with new words. I hope that's all right." I told him it's what geniuses have done since Mozart. Andreas adapted the Frog's song to the Princess, "I know I'm small, I know I'm warty -- do you think you could love me?" In the finale that Andreas wrote, the entire cast turned in a line to face the audience and sing, "We know we're small, sometimes we're crazy -- do you think you could love us?" Many parents and teachers, including School Secretary Terri Woods and Principal Nancy Calhoun, wept.

One of the most difficult students I ever dealt with was Marc. Sharp-witted, charismatic, determined to play around with his pals during class, he was also able to treat any disciplinary action as unfair. Once I wrote a demerit for of his subversive activities and he turned the tables, doing a great imitation of me that day as I'd been on alert to catch him in misbehavior -- and I laughed out loud and ripped up the demerit. A few years later, he visited from public high school, a very big guy. When he saw me, he said nothing: He just came forward, arms wide, and drew me into a hug. Later, as editor of UGA's newspaper, he wrote a kind letter about what his writing owed to my teaching. PS - When he was still in 7th grade, I had a bad accident. Only he, of all my students, visited me at home. My lovely dog Cleo jumped up on the sofa next to him, something she had never done before. What a blessing!

Sometimes, I took the casts of plays to locations that would help them imagine the real contexts of their scripts. The cast of Cheaper by the Dozen inhabited the rooms of a local B+B from 1912 and gave each other Christmas gifts in character; Mr. and Mrs. MacBeth shared dinner; the cast of The Foreigner prepared and ate a meal in character at a private lodge in the mountains of north Georgia, the setting of the play. I took the entire cast of The Miracle Worker to experience a simulation of blindness. These memorable occasions grounded the casts in the reality of their stage settings.

A 7th grade Literature skeptic became my poster boy for what literature can do, as he worked through a term project with several stages. First, the students researched an historical subject. Second, they wrote an essay focused on a turning point in the event. Third, they wrote a story focused on a fictional character connected to their research. Then, they were to pull all of their work together in a poem with a strict length limit. Stephen protested that no short poem could contain all the important things in his long story: a soldier on D-Day, his family and friends, the importance of the battle to the war effort, the sensations of the battle, and the effect on his life. But, as he explained in a short reflection that capped the project, he had an "ah-ha" moment thinking about the iron doors of the troop transport. They swung open for companies to pile out onto the beach under enemy fire. These gates became his metaphor for other "gates" in his character's life. He got poetry, and his work helped others to get it, too.

I'm tempted to say that my entire last year is a best memory because COVID restrictions forced me and my colleagues to become first-year teachers again. Classes met only twice a week, twice as long as before, while half of the class was home online, a different half each meeting. How could I keep them all engaged with literature, writing, vocabulary, grammar? How could we do drama on Zoom? I remember climbing that learning curve as a thrilling experience, once I got the hang of it. But I'll focus on a favorite moment during a Zoom conference mid-year with the dad of David, a kid new to our school that year. The math teacher and I described how the boy was curious, conscientious, polite, focused, funny, and kind to his classmates. The dad wept. PS - In a COVID drama class, this David teamed with Evan (see first picture) and another buddy to write a screenplay for soldier ants who overcome sneakers and other obstacles in a teenage boy's bedroom to capture a potato chip. Cellphones in hand, they broadcast themselves climbing all over the auditorium towards their objective, an outsized panel of cardboard. It worked! [See my poem about the COVID year, Dear 7th Grade]