Author: Phyllis Swartz

Last week, I sat in my dad’s hospital room. I watched as the IV dripped pain medication and the crease lines on his forehead eased. I saw his eyes droop. I dimmed the lights and his breathing deepen. And finally he slept. But a moment later, the door flew open, the lights switched on, and a cheery voice asked if any visitors wanted a cookie.

“None for you!” she said to my dad who peered out from under heavy eyelids. “You’re on a special diet.”

So we tried for sleep again—pulling the widow shade, straightening the sheets, and adjusting the pillow.

But the interruptions kept coming—the phlebotomist after blood, housekeeping to empty the trash, beeping from the IV pole, a volunteer with a therapy dog, the intern with questions my dad had already answered five times. And when the nutritionist came in to see if we had any questions, I couldn’t help myself. I shushed her, like a bossy mom.

Through all these interruptions, though, I knew my dad was in a good hospital. The people who drew blood from my dad and fed him and took his blood pressure and made decisions about his surgery and gave him pain relief were experts. I’m glad my dad was so checked-on—and with such efficiency and professionalism.

And I had to admit, that from that bedside perspective, I recognized myself.

Way too often, I had been the expert bursting through the door of my classroom ready to ply the tools of my trade on students, as if they were objects. I had seen them as a means to fulfill my professional goals as a teacher—to raise test scores, for example, or to boost attendance rates. Too many times, I was so aware of a diagnostic measure I was about to dispense that I forgot to notice drooping eyes.

I’m glad my dad’s hospital had therapy dogs and cookies and people to draw blood. But I also I wish they had a sign to hang on a closed door: Enter Quietly; Patient Sleeping.

 

If an average person says 7000 words in a day, how many words does a teacher say?  I just know I’d come home on Friday evenings not wanting to say one more word . . . to anyone. But for how much I talked, I often used only a small part of my vocal range. That is, until I sat in the back of Mr. Love’s class. He didn’t have a teacher-type voice—one that talked at kids, not with them. He didn’t alternate between sharp-edged voice and a sugary one. He used his voice to connect kids with content. So when Mr. Love spoke, students listened. Here are some tips from Mr. Love I’ll pass along to you:

• Pause—Just before an important concept, Mr. Love would pause. “Listen to this,” he’d say. “Get this.” Then he’d wait. And silence would hang in the room. He seemed to know exactly how long to hold the stillness, and at just the right second, he’d make his point. Sometimes he’d pause just after he made a point. And in that silence, I could almost hear the thinking.
• Emote—Mr. Love used his words as baskets to carry feeling. He’d make his voice big and then he’d make it intimate. He’d tone his voice up and down, filling it with awe and then practically whispering to show intrigue or mystery.
• Alter rhythm and tempo—Mr. Love varied his voice as he change approaches or ideas. He showed degrees of importance by how he spoke. Were his words part of an aside? A continuing narrative? A focal point? Students could tell. They could hear the emphasis.

When I sat in the back of Mr. Love’s class, he had already taught over a decade. And that day, he had already taught for five periods. But his voice wasn’t plodding through a lesson. His voice showed he had something to say and he enjoyed saying it. Mr. Love’s voice presented the content, but it also presented a theatrical side of him. And this drew students into his words.

Ho

Some people said James Thurber’s cartoons in the New Yorker looked like they had been scribbled on the back of a napkin. Others said their kids could draw better than Thurber.

And when parents sent their children’s drawings to prove this, Thurber would write back, “Your son can certainly draw as well as I can. The only trouble is he hasn’t been through as much.”

Thoughtful reflection on tough experience, this is what was behind Thurber’s simple lines. It wasn’t how well Thurber drew a dog, for example, it was the way the bloodhound decides not to bother a bug. Wisdom, Thurber shows with this rough-drawn dog, is knowing when it doesn’t matter, when it’s best to let someone go their own way.

Veteran New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff says of Thurber’s cartoons: It’s the think, not the ink.

As a teacher, I’ve found it easy to be preoccupied with the “ink” of my profession—with the strategies I use. I pay more attention to how well I draw than to why I am drawing it, or even if I should draw it. Educational theorist Dylan William suggests that educators are like magpies, amassing so many shiny ideas from the latest workshops and books that teaching turns into a complicated tangle.

Good teachers know that all these “deliverables” need to serve the end goal—that students learn. The “ink—the stuff you bring to the classroom—without the “think” is ineffectual. Students are not machines, and following scripts is not teaching.

Good teachers think. They decide when to toss the latest strategy, the best-laid lesson plan. They choose when to ignore the next discipline level and give a hug instead. They know when to ask a question and when to give an answer. And then they reflect on what just happened. Why did that work? Why didn’t it work? And what have I learned?

These reflections guide their future practices, making their teaching strong, spare, and clear.

And like James Thurber, good teachers can make it all look deceptively simple.

 

The tears kept coming—all through the quarter. Some students blinked them away, glancing sideways to see who had noticed. Some just let them roll.

These students were dads, practically all of them. And they had almost no access to their kids. Still they were sitting through a class on child development in a state prison school. Often it didn’t take much for another set of eyes to water.

One day, for example, we were focusing on autonomy versus shame—the second stage in Erikson’s model of psychosocial development.

“Two-year olds,” I told students, have a job—to develop independence. “And they bring lots of energy to the task. This is why it’s so easy to fight with a toddler. Your telling them what to do knocks right into their need to assert their will.”

“So what do you do?” an inmate asked. “They gotta get dressed and eat and go to bed and stuff.”

So we talked about giving them choices—all day long. Do you want to wear this red shirt or this green one? Eat Cheerios or Chex? Go to bed now or in five minutes?

“Do that with a toddler,” I told the students. “And you’ll likely see fewer tantrums and more cooperation.

In the back corner of the room, a burly man with tattoos marching up his arm stood and slammed a fist on his table.

“What didn’t nobody ever tell me this?” he asked. “I thought she was just being rotten!”

He swallowed hard and sat down abruptly. For the rest of class, he sat with his elbows on the table and his head in his hands.

After class, he stopped by my desk.

“Just wish I had known,” he said, his eyes suspiciously red. “We gonna talk about teenagers? That’s what she’ll be when I’m up for parole.”

And now I felt a burning in my eyes.

“We’ll talk about teenagers,” I said.

 

Alex’s shoulders had been slumping, his eyes rolling, and his head jerking. And now his hand was up. So I stopped by his desk.

“I gotta stand in the back of the room,” he said. “Can’t keep my eyes open.”

This was a daily battle. And not just for Alex. They all had their reasons: parents fighting late into the night, video games that just wouldn’t let loose, texting friends for hours in bed, late sports events and then homework to do, worrying—about world hunger or a coming war or that a boyfriend was about to breakup.

“You need to find a way to sleep,” I told Alex that day before I sent him to stand at the back of the room.

I wish I had known then what a recent study has shown about the importance of sleep. Perhaps the results of this study would have impacted Alex more than I did.

Sleep, the study found, is when the brain takes out the trash.

All day while the brain is awake, garbage builds up. As brain cells work, they excrete what they don’t need—carbon dioxide, ammonia, and protein waste. This garbage collects in the spaces between the cells.

But during sleep, brain cells shrink in size—as much as 60 percent. This opens up the “streets” of the brain. And that’s when cerebral spinal fluid flows through the brain flushing out the toxins.

“If you don’t get enough sleep,” I wish I had known to tell Alex, “you wake up with heaps of garbage still in your brain. No wonder you feel like trash.”

Would this have been enough to motivate Alex to turn off his phone at ten?

Maybe not.

Still, the imagery from this study might be striking enough to catch the attention of a middle school kid.

This week I paid tribute. My aunt died—the aunt of a famous chocolate cake, the aunt who loved people just as they were, not waiting for them to change, and, for me, the aunt of the chifferobe. In my memoir 𝘠𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘚𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘭, I tell the story of the chifferobe—a little dresser, just my size.

My family was moving from Grantsville, Maryland, from the nest of grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, from a large church and a close community. And we were moving to the city—to Flint, Michigan, where we knew no one, no one, at all.

The morning of our moving sale, I wandered around the yard, through the grape arbor and along the creek. People strolled in the lawn looking at our furniture. Then I saw my chifferobe. It had a space for hanging clothes on one side and drawers on the other side. Above the drawers was a mirror, just the right height for me.

This is mine, I thought. Why are my parents selling my chifferobe? I didn’t like the way people inspected it, opening the drawers and tilting the mirror. And I didn’t want to see who bought it. So I ran to the back yard where someone was selling hot dogs out the kitchen window.

I thought I’d never see the chifferobe again. But years later, when my daughter was born, my aunt invited me to her house. In a back bedroom, she showed me the chifferobe. She had seen my yearning the morning of the sale. And she had bid for it. And saved it for me. The chifferobe was her gift to my daughter.

“I love this story about Miriam,” I said to those gathered at her funeral. “It shows her generosity and her thoughtfulness and her graciousness.”

In these ways, Miriam had always reminded me of how Jesus lived—and of how I want to live.

I was going to get fired. I discovered this at 3:00 on a Saturday morning when the phone beside my bed jolted me awake.

“Mrs. Swartz?” the voice said. “I’m calling from Madison Correctional. We have reason to believe that you have prison keys in your possession. Did you take home the prison school keys?”

When I checked my bag, I found I had. And this, I knew was a fireable offense.

“Your supervisor will see you on Monday,” the officer said when I delivered the keys to the prison twenty minutes later.

All weekend, I replayed what would happen on Monday morning when I walked into the prison school. And teaching, I was sure, wouldn’t be my main activity. I’d be signing termination papers.

Except that on Monday morning nothing happened. So I taught as usual, waiting all the while to be called from class. But my supervisor never sent for me. Neither did the captain of security. Or the warden.

Not until weeks later did I gather the courage to talk with my supervisor about the mislaid keys.

“We decided,” she said, “just to forget that happened.”

I had been handed, as golfers say, a mulligan—a second chance, a do-over.

That reprieve increased my attention to security and my loyalty to the prison school. Even more, it shaped my dealings with students. While policies and guidelines are needed, they are tools to be used, not chains that should bind.

When to stick to the rule book and when to grant a replay is not a formula. It’s an art, that requires nuanced thinking. But here are some times mulligans can bring growth:

• When the playing field isn’t level—Students who are hungry and homeless, who are worried about deportation, who have parents who never knew how to do school, who assume parenting roles for younger siblings in one-parent households, who struggle with learning challenges, who are just learning English—these students are climbing steeper slopes and can use a second chance.
• When there’s a forgivable motive behind an offense—Slugging another kid at school is never right. But there’s a difference between protecting a bullied student and being a bully.
• When there’s a chance of learning from failure—If students have no chance to improve a grade, for example, they have little incentive to examine what went wrong. But allowing guided do-overs gives students tools that will help them recover from failure throughout their lives.
• When it just seems right—I haven’t always known why I offered a mulligan. Sometimes it’s what I see in their eyes—remorse or fear or discouragement. But the longer I taught, the more replays I offered. Students are different, and some need more . . . more understanding, more time, more guidance, and more second chances.

Though my students have earned F’s, I’ve rarely seen an F motivate a student to work harder. Though I’ve issued demerits, I’ve rarely seen a demerit compel a student toward angelic behavior. But I’ve found that a merciful mulligan often restores hope.

I took Louisa May Alcott into the classroom with me. But I didn’t realize this until during a class in graduate school when I was already well into my career. While studying the revolutionary teaching practices of Louisa’s father, Amos Bronson Alcott, I became curious about how his pedagogy showed up in Louisa’s novels. So I reread Little Women and Little Men.

Best sellers when they were published soon after the Civil War, Alcott’s books have been criticized as overly sentimental and sermonizing. But the books have also been lauded. The New York Times, for example, ranked Little Women in the 100 best young adult books of all time.

When I first read Alcott as a kid, I hadn’t care about reviews or best seller lists. I read for the story, identifying especially with Jo, who is socially clumsy, hotly-opinionated, geeky, and always trying to make something happen. Like Jo, I wanted to paddle my own canoe and write a book. But as I read Alcott’s books again, I realized how much she had fed the practices of my teaching.

When I began teaching, for example, paddles still hung on the walls. And with my room just down the hall from the principal’s office, I could hear the whacks. This sometimes took me back to the scene in Little Women when Mr. Davis punishes Amy for bringing limes to school. Amy “set her teeth, threw back her head defiantly and bore without flinching several tingling blows on her little palm.” Alcott uses this scene as a contrast to more thoughtful interventions like the “conscience book,” which was used in a weekly conference with students about their progress in overcoming bad habits, improving manners, and growing in virtue. Alcott, I realized, had set in me a proclivity for peaceful teaching, to use love rather than fear as a motivator.

Alcott also shows scene after scene of adults being honest with kids. Professor Bhaer admits to Nat that he, too had a problem with lying. Marme tells Jo, “I am angry nearly every day of my life . . . and I still hope to learn . . . though it may take me another forty years to do so.” And I found that when I was honest with students about my temper, my forgetfulness, my worry, they took courage, knowing they had company on the journey.

Most of all, Alcott helped me to create an ambiance. “We have such good times here,” a student says of the school in Little Men. “It’s the nicest place in the world.” And so. Like Alcott, I tried to bring nature into my classroom and paintings and music and drama. I tried to create corners that were calm and counters full of mind-wrenching puzzles and activities to get bodies moving.

Rereading Alcott’s books gave me a chance to ponder my teaching. Were the ever-ringing bells and the constantly-changing school terms and the passing years wearing me down? Or was I holding to my ideals?

You can tell you’ve lost them. It’s the far-away look, the doodling pencil, the hand that never raises, or the head on the desk. The signals are clear. They’re begging for a break.

You’d be wise to listen. Breaks, especially those with physical movement, boost brain function. The change of pace increases blood flow, which in turn brings more oxygen to brain cells. And while brains may seem to idle during downtime, they are actually filing information into stored memory. This clears the brain for new learning. These brain breaks, I found, not only increase the academic performance of my students. They also decrease disruptive behavior.

So what are some simple ways to call back wandering minds? You’ll find lots of ideas for brain breaks on the internet, but here are a few of my favorites:

• For college students:
  • Enrolling Questions—Ask a series of questions in which students stand for a yes answer and sit for a no. You can ask relational, non-content questions: Have you decided on a major? Do you and your parents and siblings agree on politics? Or you can ask content-based questions: Did you agree with the basic premise of last evening’s assigned reading?
  • Class Continuums—Say, for example: After reading the chapter comparing functionalism and conflict theory, what do you think? If you identify closely with functionalism, move to the left side of the room. If you identify closely with conflict theory, move to the right side of the room. Or if you are somewhere between, move to the place in the room that shows your thinking.
• For high school students:
  • Timed Talk: Invite students to silently cluster in sections of the room with two or three friends. Signal with a bell for free talk time to begin. At the second bell, students should return immediately to their seats.
  • Music: Play loud dynamic music or soft soothing music while students stretch and relax.
• For lower-grade students
  • Silent Ball: With students standing, toss a beach ball over their heads. The goal is for students to keep the ball aloft as long as possible—and all without talking. For increased challenge gradually toss in another ball or two.
• Exercise Countdown: Ask students to stand silently by their desks and call out the exercise: 5 jumping jacks, 4 toe touches, 3 knee bends, 2 leg lifts, 1 sit up.
• For active reviews:
  • Roving Review—Tape a numbered review question on each desk. Give students a paper numbered to 30. Students move from desk to desk to answer the different questions.
  • Racing Review—Have students jog in place by their desks. Ring a bell to stop students. Read a review question to student and have them sit to write their answer answers. Repeat.

Fatigue seems to fade when students move, laugh, and mingle with their friends. After all, they’re now high on dopamine, the happiness hormone, ready once again to learn.