I am an easygoing teacher. My equilibrium may not be as developed as that of the professor my colleagues and I affectionately call “the Buddha of the English department,” but I am by no means a bitch. That is, until recently. The other day I almost lost it, which means that I did not become a bitch but rather contemplated becoming a bitch, which means that I was still a step away from being a carping crab but way past being at one with my students in that sublime state of pedagogical nirvana.
The cause of my nearly fatal fall? If you answered “cellphones,” you’d be right. Or partly right. There was the student with the rapid thumbs that I needed to remind, once again, not to text in class. There was the student I had to ask, again, to put away what looked like her sociology textbook, and the three students who left the room to use, I presume, the bathroom. There was more.
After class I gathered my books and headed to my office, where I did what any self-respecting English professor would do. I wrote a sonnet. My creative-writing students were working on sonnets—maybe iambic pentameter is contagious. I call it “Riot Act, in Verse.”
I recommend this form of therapy to everyone. Organizing emotions into 14 iambic-pentameter lines with an A-B-C-B rhyme scheme (OK, I cheated on the rhymes) helped me process the anger and frustration that I harbored toward my students. More important, the exercise helped me forgive myself for having lost control of my class. I hated to admit it; it is not something that often happens to me, but my class had become unmanageable.
I am proud of the fact that my creative-writing class attracts some of the most talented, respectful, and engaged students at my community college. However, this semester the class had become dominated by a disturbing collection of unmotivated, easily distracted, and rude individuals.
Like most of us, I bring my work home with me. At the dinner table that evening, I related my story of woe and read my sonnet. The conversation turned to what I should do at the next class meeting.
Noah, one of my 5-year-old twins, said I should “tell the students three times not to [text], and after that ask them to go home.” I followed up with, “And if that doesn’t work?” He told me to send the students to the dean, “who should give them candy they don’t like.”
Ari, the other twin, felt that I should let the students “go out and do texting and come back when they’re ready.” Then he asked, “What’s texting?”
“When they go to the bathroom,” Noah declared, “they’re really talking to someone on the phone.”
My 10-year-old daughter, Esther, took the most lenient position: “Just give them a warning, that’s all,” convinced, I am sure, that this would be the least embarrassing course for me to take—me, who had suddenly become extremely embarrassing.
My partner, an adjunct professor at another community college, told me that I should remind them of the civility policy in my syllabus. Practical advice, which is why I married her.
My mother-in-law suggested that anyone who misbehaves should get named in the article she already guessed I was planning to write.
I liked the advice my partner’s cousin gave. Kira, a Canadian free spirit in her late 20s, thought that all students should put their phones on their desks. The first to reach for theirs brings coffee and doughnuts to the next class.
“I’m going to read all of these to my students,” I tell my family. “And let them vote.”
The next piece of advice came from my father-in-law, a retired college president: “Don’t have too much fun with it.”
Aye, there’s the rub. Perhaps my problem is that I have too much fun with discipline. I had been lightly scolding my class during the past few weeks, using my own brand of humor laced with gentle sarcasm. That usually works. It also feels most comfortable. Didn’t the educator Parker Palmer say we teach who we are? There is also a part of me that refuses to believe that students need to be told these basic rules of etiquette: Don’t text in class; don’t get up and leave in the middle of class; listen while others are speaking.
Part of our role as educators is to help students learn how to behave in professional settings, but how do we teach those skills? I suppose the student’s final grade will settle the matter. In my experience, students who do not consistently disrupt the class with tardiness, texting, and toilet use do better. However, we’re only halfway through the semester. Isn’t there time to turn things around? But how? If I am too unenlightened to access my inner Buddha and too much of a mensch to rely on my inner bitch, what part of me can I call forth that also begins with a “b” because I like alliteration?
Perhaps I need to call forth my inner bard and read the sonnet to the class.
Riot Act, in Verse
Just come on in and sit right down with us.
To write and learn’s the reason we are here,
but do beware that once you’ve come inside
you’re here to stay, so do not disappear.
Take care of business before we start the class.
Go pee, buy tea, grab a bite, text a friend,
but once the class begins, I’d like to ask
that you stay with us, right up to the end,
in body and in mind. So turn off your phone
and take your thumbs and rest them on your desk.
As for that test in sociology,
don’t study for that here; I do not jest.
And if it’s not to learn that you have come,
Please, go away, our great work has begun.
If that doesn’t do the trick, what do I call on next? My inner beagle? My inner butch? My inner Bolshevik?
