HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION

It seemed like such a wonderful idea, a new career in which I’d atone for writing ads promoting alcohol, gambling and canned meat. I decided to become a schoolteacher.

I stumbled upon a program appropriately called The New Teacher Program that trains college graduates over seven weeks in the summer for a license to teach our nation’s youth in the fall. Half of most days was being taught to teach. In the other half I was tossed into a real, live classroom with real, live future 4th graders.

I like children, and they generally tolerate me, at least enough to not embarrass my daughter. But one week of preparation wasn’t enough.

I was equipped only with a workbook not appropriately called Math for Love and links to Google Docs, Google Meet, Google Classroom and Google Ad Nauseum.

They did arm us with mildly clever attention getters. When the teacher says, “1, 2, 3, eyes on me,” students say, “1, 2, eyes on you.” There was “hocus, pocus...everyone focus,” and “hear ye, hear ye...all hail the queen.” I figured, dang it, I’ve written punchy themelines for national television, so I made up one of my own. “Zip, zap, zop...everybody stop.” You’ll be hearing that at Cannes.

I always hated the first day of school. I was excited for this one. I drew a multiplication table on a goat, bought giant game-show-sized dice and brought a picture of me with Abe Lincoln. Boy, this was sure to wow the youngsters. I discovered 4th graders may not know much, but they do know Abe passed away some time ago.

Right away, I had a serious problem. I tended to transpose names. I mixed up Luke and Dora. And Braxton and Tyler.* And Liam and Nathan. And Hayden and Evangelina. The third day in, I started keeping track on the whiteboard. I promised 25 cents in treats whenever “Mr. Neumann makes an oopsie.” It reached $7.50 before I improved.

The kids, stuck in summer school, obviously needed help, specifically with multiplication and writing. One small challenge: I wasn’t taught how to teach multiplication and writing. We had tiles of different shapes and colors to help with the former. Teachers call them manipulatives, more commonly known as projectiles. I know long multiplication, but that’s passé, and long division with the bracket dealio was roundly mocked by our instructors, though not replaced.

Then there was writing. I had no clue of how 4th graders should write. Junior AE level? David Mamet level? All I could do was have them practice. One day when the topic was someone you love, one boy, Robert, couldn’t get started. He planned to write about his brother, but didn’t know what to write. He had not seen him since he was three. I asked about him, but Robert’s pencil wouldn’t budge.

I tried an analogy. The moment I said it, I knew it was not the best analogy. I asked Robert, a Black kid, if he likes basketball. Fortunately for me, no one was transcribing the exchange. He does, however, like basketball. I told him Steph Curry shoots like crazy, but he has to start with one shot, then two, three and he’s on a roll. Finally Robert wrote. It was about Steph Curry, but he wrote.

I soon realized I had several special-ed kids in my class. “SPED kids” sounds like a mean thing we’d say on the playground, but that’s actually the term used by politically correct teachers. Usually these kids have a paraprofessional with them. We did not have paras. This did not help the class hocus, pocus and focus.

Tyler is on the autism spectrum and wanted to be apart from other kids. I didn’t know this at the start, however. A form I received three weeks after school started said “Keep Tyler away from Liam. Liam picks on him.” Out of five 4th-grade classes, they ended up in the same one. How schools divvy up kids is a well-guarded mystery.

In my second week, he tried to stab the boy across from him in the eye with a pencil. The boy went to the nurse and came back with both eyeballs intact, thank God, but you know, this can rattle an adult.

A couple days later, Liam hurried up to me at the end of recess. “Tyler tried to strangle me.” Other kids backed up this account. Liam’s face was pink and a little sweaty, but I didn’t think Tyler was capable of a successful strangulation.

When I returned to our room with the stragglers, half a dozen other kids had circled Tyler’s desk and had him surrounded. They were mocking him with words that didn’t even make sense. Seeing this brought out my loud stadium voice. This made an impression. Tyler apologized to Liam, the classmates apologized en masse to Tyler, and a couple even asked if they could go to Tyler and apologize individually.

It seemed we were past it until a boy named Braxton wanted to make a point. Braxton has special needs. He’d wriggle and wiggle and could only do a lesson with one-to-one help. He also had a habit of repeating something over and over. Right now it was, “Tyler tried to kill Liam! Tyler tried to kill Liam! Tyler tried to murder Liam!” I couldn’t deny the accusation. I could only hope to quiet it in the cause of criminal rehabilitation.

After kids’ class finished at 1:00, teacher school took over until 6:00. The day after my student nearly lost an eye, we were told to roll Oreos down our noses into our mouths. I didn’t find this the group-buildin’ fun they intended.

The coaches teaching us teachers used our classes to model techniques we could use with the young people. We’d have “turn-and-talks” and take turns reading sentences aloud from a screen. Being an adult, this, too, became annoying.

We were also told that if kids are talking and not paying attention, it’s not the students’ fault, it’s the teacher’s. Children aren’t disrespectful or lazy, they are “independent” or “uniquely motivated.” It’s like calling the fatty orange goop atop a can of Hormel chili the “flavor layer.”

Halfway through July, coaches’ evaluations started. They found that my kids were often—usually?—talking and not paying attention. I must agree it was largely the teacher’s fault. I tried my darnedest to rein them in. I’d switch their seats around, but these kids would talk with anybody. They were just too darn sociable. In my career, I’ve had to hold the attention of 25 unruly and distracted regional bank managers while reading radio scripts. This was harder.

I discovered most if not all the other candidates worked in schools already, just not as official teachers. One teacher had spent 18 years in classrooms. They knew how to fill lesson plans with education-speak and even herd kids into a quiet line to the bathroom. We were asked if, back when we were in school, our teachers showed a lot of videos. I had to say no, we watched films and filmstrips.

My coach—the kids called him Mr. Beard, ignoring his real name—told me I probably wouldn’t be granted a teaching license. I already figured I wasn’t cut out for it. He was pleasantly surprised when I said I wanted to finish summer school, though. I loved the little hooligans.

Evangelina wrote this glowing and unsolicited review. Her mother emailed that the poor little thing has a weak bladder. Whenever she raised her tiny thumb in the air, the international symbol of needing to be excused, I’d weep inside.

Emily latched onto my long habit of saying, “Say...” and started imitating it. Hayden couldn’t be any cuter or nicer, but she talked more than Rachel Maddow. She’d also fall into fits of giggling and couldn’t explain why. I wondered if it was a medical condition. Nobody’d heard of it. They pointed out that laughter is probably not something you need to treat with drugs and therapy.

When I called on one boy, he’d look up with big round eyes and a face like a full moon. Frequently I’d be interrupting his sleep. Once when asked to use “loudly” in a sentence, he wrote, “My mom was banging her hammer loudly at 1:00 in the morning.” I felt for him. I’ve been dealing with remodeling myself.

I may be naive. Someone in education has since pointed out that it may not have been the hammer that she was banging.

One day I arrived to a Post-It from a coach that she was taking over that day’s reading lesson, a book about young Albert Einstein. She maintained actual order! Even with Braxton! Even with the avid smart aleck! She got them to make Venn diagrams. She’s training the account planners of tomorrow!

She was nice enough to point out she taught for 35 years and I’d been teaching 10 days. When I asked my students how she was different from me, they exclaimed, “she’s strict!” At that point, I dialed up the totalitarianism. After that, guess what, Mr. Beard said I was improving.

It also helped that halfway in, we were instructed in bribery. Check that, “incentives.” I tracked points for each kid they could exchange for treats and prizes. They stated their disappointment that the prizes didn’t include an Xbox, a $300 Lego set or hundreds in cash but ultimately caved.

At lunch I asked kids what kind of candy they liked. When I asked Braxton, his eyes lit up. He said Kinder Eggs. It was the first good talk I had with him.

A day later, though, he returned to the “Tyler tried to kill Liam!” charge. Mr. Beard, a special ed teacher during the year, saw it. He took Braxton and Tyler away for a summit conference. Instead of Camp David, the site was an all-blue sensory room.

Braxton confided he didn’t have any friends. He joined in the teasing because he wanted to get in with the other kids. Tyler, despite his usual tendency to fire back projectiles or insults such as “you banshee,” made up with him. Mr. Beard told them they should shake hands each day to check for daggers. Brilliant!

The armistice held. All week I reminded them to check for daggers. I asked Braxton if we should move Tyler’s desk across the room next to his. He was sensitive enough to say he better move his to Tyler instead. He also very politely mentioned another prize he’d like, Finders Keepers, sort of an upmarket Kinder Egg, and helpfully mentioned their availability at Cub and Target.

Good teachers aren’t supposed to care about being popular, but heck, I was delighted. When the last day arrived, we had pizza and watched Pink Panther cartoons (the good ones where he didn’t speak).

We also shopped for prizes with the points. One prize was a potato. The young people didn’t know what to make of it, which delights me to no end. Braxton earned his Finders Keepers. Some kids thanked me, some didn’t. Braxton’s thank you was as heartfelt as I’ve ever heard. 

My reward came earlier in the day. I’d had them write down something they were thankful for. Most wrote that school was over. Tyler wrote, “I’m thankful that Braxton is my friend.”

Today I’m running, screaming back to advertising. I was kind of glad on the day after Labor Day I could still jeer at children, “You have to go to school and I don’t! Nah nah, na-na nah!” I miss summer school, though.

As I was cleaning up six weeks of spent worksheets, Robert stayed behind for some time. Despite my forcing math on him and insisting he stay still during the book about a Russian grandmother, he wanted to hang out. When I was finished packing up my teaching career, he walked with me and asked, “Mr. N., can I give you a hug?”

My new goal is to hear that in a focus group.