by Phillip Done
After I reviewed where to put the commas and where to make the indent one last time, the children began writing their own letters. When they were finished, several lined up at my desk for me to check what they had written.
Gina was first. She indented in the correct place but also indented every line after that.
I rubbed my forehead. “Gina, next time you only need one indent, okay?”
“Okay.” She handed it in.
Dylan was next. He signed his letter Love From Your Favorite Son.
Smiling, I turned to him. “What will your brothers say about this?”
He giggled then played with the stapler on my desk as I read more.
“Dylan, how many commas in a letter?”
“Three.”
“Good. But I don’t see any in yours.”
He leaned over his paper and stared at it. “Oh yeah.” He snatched it back and ran off to fix it.
David was third in line. My lips scrunched into a pucker when I started reading. He had only written Welcome to Back to School Night!
“Uh… what happened to writing at least half a page?”
“It is!” He pointed to the words Love, David in the center of the paper. “See!” Between Welcome to Back to School Night and his signature, there were six inches of blank space. I gave it back.
Sarah stepped up and set her letter on my desk. I smiled when I saw it. A thick dotted line ran from the date to the closing. In her margins, she had drawn pixies and butterflies.
“Honey, your letter is beautiful, but this dotted line is supposed to be imaginary, not real.”
“Ohhhh!”
She picked up the paper and skipped back to her desk. A couple of minutes later she returned and handed it to me. The dotted line had been transformed into a giant beanstalk. Fairies hid in the leaves. More butterflies and pixies flew all around it.
“Well, honey,” I said, fighting back a laugh, “that’s the best imaginary dotted line I have ever seen.”
CURSIVE
Apparently, fewer and fewer people are using cursive these days. On a recent SAT exam, only 15 percent of teens used cursive. The rest wrote in block letters. Could this mean that handwriting may someday end up the way of filmstrip projectors, record players, and hairnets on the cafeteria ladies? I hope not.
If my school got rid of cursive, I’d have to start going to the gym. Teaching handwriting is my daily workout. I get my stretching in by forming giant loops and curlicues in the air. I lean to the right like Jack LaLanne so my kids will slant their letters. I work up a good sweat racing around to each desk turning pieces of newsprint at an angle, correcting pencil grips, checking that feet are on the floor, and making sure that their lowercase ’s go all the way up to the dotted line and only have three bumps. Not seven.
For children, learning cursive is right up there with trick-or-treating, getting a new hamster, or writing “Clean Me!” on the teacher’s car. They love it. Kids’ first handwriting lessons are like losing the first tooth, taking off the training wheels, or getting bedtime extended half an hour. It’s a rite of passage from being a little kid to a big one. Few things make children feel more grown up than writing for the first time without picking up their pencils.
You should hear my students when they learn new cursive letters. They squeal. They ooh and aah. They laugh when I show them that capital in cursive looks like a 2. When I point out that the only difference between a capital and a capital is that little line in the middle, you’d think a flower just popped out of the tip of my overhead marker. When I showed this year’s group that is just a lowercase with a tail, they applauded.
Whenever I introduce the letter formations, my students always tell me what they think the letters look like. Gina thinks looks like a Hershey’s Kiss. To Chloe, a row of ’s resembles waves. David says the bottom of a looks like a banana. Laura claims that the loop inside the looks like a fish. Dylan thinks it looks like a corn dog.
The one letter that I get a bit nervous about teaching is . It’s a tricky one. If I say, “And now we are going to make .” I might as well cancel school for the rest of the day because half my class will be rolling on the floor. It is always best when introducing to say, “We are now going to learn the LETTER .” By saying letter really loudly you will cut down considerably on all rolling.
If schools wiped out cursive, what would children look at in the front of the classroom? Every third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade teacher in the universe puts the cursive alphabet over the whiteboard in the front of the room. It belongs up there. Just like the clock and the overhead screen and the American flag! And what would kids do without the laminated strips of manuscript letters that are taped across the top of their desks below their name tags? What would they fiddle with and pick at and scribble on while the teacher is talking? What would they blow their pink erasures on? Where would they put their stickers?
Just like children have a favorite color and sport and ice cream, kids have their favorite cursive letters, too. Lowercase is popular because it looks like a roller coaster. Capital is always well liked because it begins with a candy cane. is a big hit because it looks like a big belly if you draw a belly button in it. Poor . I feel sorry for that little guy. No one ever picks as his favorite. It’s just too dang hard.
One day when the children were practicing their letters, I overheard a couple of my girls talking.
“ is my specialty,” Jennifer declared, admiring how beautiful it looked on her paper. “What’s your favorite?”
“,” answered Gina.
“Why?” Jennifer asked.
“It’s my first initial.”
“Mine’s lowercase ,” Sarah chimed in.
“How come?” Jennifer said.
“It’s easy,” Sarah replied.
Chloe joined the others. “I like little and big .”
“Why?” said Gina.
“They’re loopy. I like loopy letters.”
Jennifer turned to Sarah. “What’s your second place?”
“,” Sarah answered.
“Me, too,” said Jennifer. “I’m really fast at it.”
Some children become very attached to their own ways of writing those letters. Just this week, I noticed that Rebecca was forming her ’s incorrectly.
“Rebecca, let me help you with that.” I wrote a properly on her paper. “There. You see?”
She pulled the paper back. “I do it differently than you.”
It’s not just students who take pride in their cursive. Teachers do, too. Bankers and lawyers and engineers have their fancy homes and Lexuses and stock options. Teachers have their perfect slanted writing. It’s our badge. It’s how we’re identified. I know the one thing I have that my doctor doesn’t is my nice cursive.
A few days ago I was in the grocery store and found a yellow sticky note in a shopping cart. When I picked it up, I knew immediately that it had been written by a teacher. Her ’s were not backward. Her ’s were crossed. The slash in her was not slanted the wrong way. The top of her was not collapsing. Her wasn’t too fat. And her did not look pregnant. Of course I could have identified the list as a teacher’s even if it had been written in print. It said: Excedrin, graham crackers, and beer.
October
I’ve just decided to switch our Friday schedule to Monday, which means that the test we take each Friday on what we learned during the week will now take place on Monday before we’ve learned it. But since today is Tuesday, it doesn’t matter in the slightest.
— Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
WHAT IS A TEACHER?
Mark Twain once wrote that teaching is like trying to hold thirty-five corks underwater all at once. But what I’d like to know is — who drank those thirty-five bottles of wine in the first place? My bet’s on the teacher.
What exactly is a teacher anyway? A lot of different things. Teachers are like puppeteers. We keep the show in motion. When we help children discover abilities that they don’t know they have, we are like talent scou
ts. When we herd kids off the play structure at the end of recess, we are like shepherds.
Teachers are like conductors. We try to get everyone to play together nicely. Some years it’s like leading the entire navy band. When I take the lunch count, I feel like a waiter. Once in a while, I feel like the dust jacket on a popular book in my classroom library — well worn, rarely untouched, more wrinkled than last year, close to falling apart.
When my students are tapping on me, I feel like a tree trunk that a flock of woodpeckers has just landed on. When the kids are buzzing around the room in all directions, I feel like a beekeeper. When we’re walking in line, I feel like Daddy Duck leading his chicks.
When I have two minutes to finish my lunch, I look just like a squirrel eating in fast motion. When someone leaves treats in the staff lounge, I turn into a hyena. When a lesson tanks, I feel like a gutter ball.
Teachers are like birds. We use a variety of flight strategies. Sometimes we glide. Some days we soar. Most of the time we flap our wings furiously trying not to crash-land.
Teachers are like farmers. We sow the seeds — not too close together or they’ll talk too much. We check on them every day and monitor their progress. We think about our crop all the time. When we see growth — we get excited.
Teachers are like doctors. Both have lots of tongue depressors and cotton balls. Both own human body charts and stethoscopes, and use white butcher paper. Both put on Band-Aids, hold bloody noses, and take care of kids with tummyaches. Doctors, however, don’t see twenty patients at a time. And they only see kids after they’ve thrown up on the teacher’s carpet.
Teachers are like actors. We work in front of an audience. We project our voices to the back of the room. We sing, dance, do our own stunts, and make jokes about pencils coming from Pennsylvania, ants living in Antarctica, and fractions being invented by Henry the 1/8th. For five hours a day, five days a week, we try to hold our audience’s attention. Come rain or shine, the show must go on. If it’s bad, the audience tunes out.
When I blow my whistle, I feel like Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music. When I hand out certificates for good deeds, I might as well be the Wizard of Oz. When I pass out percussion instruments for music time, I feel like Harold Hill in The Music Man. And when my students are absolutely bonkers because it has rained all day and they’ve been cooped up inside for six hours, I know exactly how Captain Hook must have felt at the end of Peter Pan when he jumped off his own ship.
Teachers are memory makers, too. We know that the stories, paintings, and plaster of paris handprints that children make at school will someday become family treasures. Each day we create experiences in our classrooms that our students will someday look back on and laugh over and talk about and perhaps even try to re-create in their own children’s lives. We understand that kids are like wet canvases. We help paint the backgrounds.
And so we collect the field trip notes and throw the parties and play the piano and pitch the balls and wear our shirts inside out on Backward Day. We set up the experiments and buy the pets and run to the store and clean the spills and fill the bird feeders. And when it is time to send our students’ artwork and craft projects home, we always make sure that their names and the date are written clearly on the back.
SPELLING
When I first started teaching, there were several things I did not expect. I did not know that Show and Tell would be the most important hour of the week. I never thought I’d have class rules about where children shouldn’t put their feet. I never imagined that the doorknob in the staff bathroom would have hand lotion on it every time I tried to get out. And I did not expect that I would become the dictionary.
“Mr. Done, how do you spell every?”
“Mr. Done, how do you spell special?”
“Mr. Done, how do you spell SpongeBob?”
“Mr. Done, how do you spell ponna?”
“Ponna?” I said, confused. “Use it in a sentence.”
“You know… like ‘once a ponna time.’”
My students think I’m the spelling genie. All day long they ask, “Mr. Done, do I drop the y?” “Mr. Done, does that word start with a capital?” “Mr. Done, is that a drop-the-e-add-ing-word?”
And all day long I sing: “I before e except after c.” “An e at the end of a word makes the vowel say its name.” “When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking.”
I repeat my spelling tricks, too: Eat is in the word great. Here is inside of there. Ear is in hear. Lie is in believe. Ant is in restaurant. Bus is in busy. And the principal is my pal.
Swimming has M&M’s in the middle of it. Tomorrow contains three little words: Tom, or, and row. Together has three words in it, too. If you draw spokes on the c’s in bicycle, they look like wheels. And if you put circles around the e’s in eye, it looks like the word is wearing glasses.
You know those circus performers who spin plates on long sticks and try to keep them up in the air? Well, sometimes that’s how I feel. Just this week I juggled three words at once.
“Mr. Done, how do you spell great?” Laura shouted out.
I began spelling: “G — ”
“Mr. Done, how do you spell swimming?” Kevin interrupted.
I looked at him. “S-W-I — ”
Back to Laura: “R — ”
Back to Kevin: “Double M.”
Melanie jumped in. “Mr. Done, how do you spell with?”
To Melanie: “W — ”
To Laura: “E-A-T.”
To Melanie: “I — ”
To Kevin: “I-N-G.”
To Melanie: “T-H.”
“Wait!” Laura broke in. “What was after the first letter again?”
I started over.
Every year there are certain words that I am sure my kids will ask me to spell. These include: pirate, treasure, castle, blood, sword, chocolate, army, pizza, en garde, dinosaur, warrior, underwear, Frankenstein, fairy, lava, princess, guillotine, and Godzilla. Rarely am I ever asked how to spell Mississippi. I am convinced that most children are born knowing how to spell this word.
Sometimes the kids want help with words I can’t spell. I hate that.
“Mr. Done, how do you spell Philippines?” Dylan asked.
“Uh… go look at the map.”
“Mr. Done, how do you spell Ouija?” John wanted to know.
My eyebrows scrunched together. “Ouija? Why do you need to know that?”
“It’s on my birthday list.”
“Ask for something else.”
Stacy walked up to my desk. “Mr. Done, how do you spell piranha?”
“Look it up in the dictionary.”
“I did. It’s not there.”
“Bring it here.”
Stacy fetched the dictionary, and I watched her flip through the pages to the end then flip back through the pages to the front.
This could take years.
I offered to help. Finally, we found it.
“Why is it spelled like that?” Stacy asked.
“Beats me.”
Danny raised his head. “Mr. Done, how do you spell croissant.”
“WHAT?” I said, eyebrows arched.
“How do you spell croissant?”
I took a deep breath. “Why do you guys always ask me such hard words? Why don’t you ask me something easy once in a while?” I started spelling it out. “C-R-O…” I stopped. “Ahh… just write roll.”
I have also become an expert at spelling every conceivable sound.
“Mr. Done, how do you spell the sound pirates make?”
“A-R-R-G-H-H.”
“Mr. Done, how do you spell when a car brakes?”
“E-R-R-R-R.”
“Mr. Done, how do you spell when a lion roars?”
“G-R-R-R-R.”
One day Christopher shouted out, “Mr. Done, how do you spell the sound that bombs make?”
I squinted at him. “You mean like kaboom?”
“No.” He made an exploding nois
e. “Like that.”
The other kids looked up.
“Uh… I’m not sure,” I replied.
“I know!” Trevor announced, jumping up. “It’s P-U-H-H-H-H-H!”
“No, it’s not!” John piped up. “It’s C-H-H-G-R-H-H!”
Pretty soon every boy in the room was impersonating bombs and grenades and volcanoes. Trevor could only make the sounds while diving on the beanbag chair. Finally, the class settled on “pchhhhh!” and “ppPCHHchhh!!” for a really loud one.
Kids’ spelling mistakes never change: they will be thay, grandpa will be grampa, different will be difrent, every will be evry, goes will be gose, improve will be inprove, kind of will be kindov, and sandwich will be sandwitch. In December, ornaments will be spelled ordaments, and candy canes will be candy cans. Santa’s name can give kids trouble, too. After the movie Santa Clause came out, some children added an e to the end of his name. (I hate when moviemakers do that. Don’t they know I’m trying to teach spelling here!) Sometimes it’s Santa Claws. Last year when Abigail wrote in her journal that she visited Santa at the mall, she got her letters a little mixed up and wrote that she sat on “Satan’s lap.”
Over the years I’ve encountered pretty much every misspelling imaginable. I’ve seen insects spelled as insex, garbage as garbitch, tutor as tooter, peninsula as penisula, and our sixteenth president written as Ape Lincoln. I’ve read littel, speshl, butaful, grat, frist, rember, probly, and whith so many times that the misspelled versions look correct. I’ve received secret notes on my desk saying, “Mr. Done, you are the beast.” And once when the kids had to answer “Who discovered the New World?” Rachel wrote Colombo.
Grade school teachers are master code breakers. As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy who figured out the hieroglyphic mystery on the Rosetta stone wasn’t at one time a third-grade teacher. When a child writes uperd, I don’t have to think twice. He means appeared. I know immediately that ine is any, doter is daughter, exited is excited, fell is feel, and turd is third. Yesterday Brian wrote bowenairo. That was an easy one: bow and arrow.