New Teacher Advice: “Don't smile until Christmas”

“Don't smile until Christmas.” That used to be standard advice to any first-year teacher in secondary school. If you smile, they'll discover that you're human and then you'll really be in for it. You will have “discipline problems.”

It was one of those things that they didn't usually tell you in the Fundamentals of Teaching course at teacher's college, but rather was just practical, experience-derived, realistic, friendly advice.

I remember one particularly difficult student during my first month of teaching in a secondary school. This poor kid was constantly causing trouble, so I talked with him, respectfully, about it after school one day. The following were his exact words:

“You really want to know why I do it? You really want to know? It's because you have these big soft eyes that just ask for it.”

It was a magnificently human moment, for me, and I hope and believe for him, too. I would love to talk with him now, fifty years later, to learn whether or not our talk made a difference in his life.

I resigned from the job, and from secondary-school teaching, after Christmas. The world was too big, with too many people and places to see, for me to stay in that job.

One of my students, who was particularly funny, laughingly said to me after a study hall – one of my duties was to “patrol” a study period in the auditorium filled with 200 energetic high school students - “What you really need is a German Shepherd dog that will go after them as soon as they move.”

Some of my students felt by that time that I was “a prophet” - their word – and others felt that I was from outer space.

But certain parents became really hostile, demanding of the principal that I be fired. “I don't want my son to grow up to be a hippie.” Exact words. There had to be more to life than fighting this particular battle.

I laugh to myself now because I have come to feel, after all these years, that probably the large problem of “inhumanity,” of which the above is just a particular example, is the central work of my own life and our times.

There are two articles in today's New York Times - In Ferguson and Beyond, Punishing Humanity – NYTimes.com and How Righteousness Killed the World Economy – NYTimes.com - which were very much about our situation after thirty-five years of conscious, programmatic, considered, selfishness. These articles are only two among many new indications that the whole Margaret Thatcher “There's no such thing as society” and Ronald Reagan “Government is the problem” thing is showing cracks.