Re: Helping a teacher

["George N. Schmidt" <Csubstance@AOL.COM>]

In a message dated 6/1/00 11:37:58 PM, susanharman@IGC.ORG writes:

<< My small idea this week is that one of my extremely low reading 6th
graders has become addicted to Nate the Great books, reading one a day
and now writing his own, starring him. >>

Let's never let us get too much into THE BIG IDEAS to forget the classroom
and those wonderful moments. Thanks, Susan, for the memories that flooded in
when you wrote those lines...

Ditto "Goosebumps" (for a while)...

Right now, anything about Pokemon...

Anything about dinosaurs...

Mortal Kombat -- especially the various "Fatalities" (uughh)...

Reptiles magazine (and any of the hundreds of magazines about various pets
and animals)...

Anybody out there remember "Duke Nukem"?

Anything about sports...

Collections of cartoons and comic strips...

"Love is..." scrapbooks... (annotated)...

One real test of your mettle is when your kids get into sports and you let
them read the Sports Illustrated annual swimsuit issue with a straight face
and no comment. (After all, they've been reading Sports Illustrated for
years, right?).

Muscle, fitness and health magazines...

But periodicals are always going to be a dangerous place to allow kids to
explore. Even Time and Newsweek can get you in trouble with our New Age
totalitarians.

My favorite challenge moment came when somebody slipped her mother's entire
collection of "Cosmopolitan" into my classroom library about fifteen years
ago.

I was always alert to things like Playboy and Penthouse from Dad's "library"
in my "bring in material you think we could share..." pitch for adding to the
library. Once or twice I caught the stuff just in the nick of time (democracy
has to have its limits). But I had never actually read "Cosmo" before that
teaching/learning moment jumped into my lap, so to speak. Back then, I might
have actually thought that anything that was not behind the counter and
shrink-wrapped at the 7-11 was pretty much mainstream enough for a high
school class. Hah!

So Cosmo wound up on the pile.

Then I noticed an increasing number of references to orgasm and such things
in general conversation, and once or twice in writing. We were working on
some major projects, and I am admittedly slow sometimes. By the time I
finally got around to reading some of the stuff in Cosmo I was miles behind
the kids on that track, and the cross country race was one.

What to do?

I didn't let the Cosmo pile disappear from the classroom (too obvious and not
in keeping with the classroom's ambiance).

We finally simmered the whole thing down, the kids and I, although I suspect
they were watching my every minutest response. Amazingly, none of the kids --
including the Pentecostals, who weren't even allowed to dance and who, in
their female incarnation, wore skirts down to their ankles -- ever generated
an official complaint to higher authority.

Anyway, I finally asked a bunch of the more precocious female students (by
then, the males were mostly scared to death of the Cosmo girls) to summarize
the typical Cosmo article and its approach to interpersonal relations between
male and female homo sapiens (that topic will cool off certain
discussions...).

The prize went to the one who said (paraphrasing here):

"It's about how to get him.
"How to get the most out of him while you got him.
"And how to get rid of him when he gets totally boring."

Last time I looked, free lance writers for Cosmo are still getting paid
$5,000 per article for stuff that fits into that very formula. So the unit
wound up a success.

Appropriate reading material depends on what piques interest at which point
in life. For two years, a good way to increase vocabulary was to do the
tarantula walk and then allow certain groups (usually males) to explore the
insect and arachnid books. The "tarantula walk" was to put your hand in the
tarantula cage and allow the little guy (in this case, a Chilean gray about
the size of a ten-year-old's fist) to walk up your arm slowly. No loud noises
please.

I can't imagine my growing pile of "Modern Maturity" interesting any high
school class, but if I ever get back I'll throw it into the mix just to see
what happens.

George Schmidt

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