Part 2: Middle School Kids are Hilarious
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*After my first day of student teaching, I was feeling kind of down because I wasn't connecting with the fourth period 7th/8th grade choir the way I wanted to (first day, mind you, and not the kids in general, just one specific class...yes I am a dramatic overachiever, nice to meet you). Some of the most dedicated choir students were in that fourth period class, these eighth grade girls who were incredibly loyal to my CT. I wanted to win them over, but no matter what I tried I just couldn't seem to break through. A couple of weeks went by and I just couldn't seem to figure it out.
"Your shoes are boring," one of the 8th grade girls said to me one day. "What?" I responded quizzically as I looked down at my black dress shoes.
"Yeah, you need cute shoes," said another 8th grade girl. "Mrs. Martin always wears cute shoes and yours are boring."
So that night I went out and bought a bag of those googly eyes you can get at a craft store. I glued two eyes to each of my dress shoes, and I walked into fourth period the next day proudly sporting my googly eye shoes. The girls saw them and freaked out. From that moment on, I had them. I had found my opening to start connecting with them. They still talked about those shoes for an entire year after I left my placement.
*My first teaching job, as a maternity leave sub at a middle school, I had a particularly unruly eighth grade group, and one day they were being really chatty (like they were most days). I finally got them quieted down, but before I could start the next thing they got really loud again.
"Hey guys come on. I just got you quiet, but then you got really loud again!"
Without missing a beat, an eighth grade girl replies with "That's a crescendo!"
As I get older I will forget a lot of things about that first job, but Amanda and her smartass remark are seared into my memory.
*In my second job, I created a running joke where I would wave an awkward flag whenever my students said or did something that made me uncomfortable. At the end of one school year, some of my kids made me a actual flag with the word "AWKWARD" written on it and gave it to me as a gift, along with a grab bag of other inside jokes. I still have it to this day.
From the beginning of my career, I have been fortunate enough to experience the weird and hilarious humor of the middle school child, and laughter has been a constant throughout my 12 years as a middle school teacher. Often it's because of the banter: I live for the banter. Matching wits with seventh and eighth graders as their personalities start to emerge has brought me a great deal of joy over the years. Sometimes I laugh at myself, at the utter silliness that I will employ in order to motivate and connect with my students. Usually I laugh because one of my kids did or said or wrote something so absurd that I couldn't possibly respond any other way. Middle school students are funny. They are silly and ridiculous and also often far more clever than you might think.
I've always loved to make people laugh: when I was a kid I would buy joke books and print out endless sheets of jokes that I found on a very early version of the internet (using Prodigy-shout out to anyone who remembers Prodigy!) and just read them at family gatherings to my relatives. They weren't particularly good jokes, but I loved doing it anyway. My high school best friend and I became best friends because of our constant back and forth banter with each other, and our mutual love of writing musical comedy songs that we would use to entertain our friends. A sense of humor, the ability to make people laugh and for people to make me laugh, has always been of great importance to me. Since my stand-up comedy career never really took off, I largely channel that into my teaching, which, by the way, has worked out really well.
It may be possible to teach middle school without having much of a sense of humor, but I can't imagine how difficult that must be. First of all, so many crazy things are going to happen in the course of a normal school day that a sense of humor is going to help you cope. Beyond that, though, a sense of humor allows you to connect with middle school students. By nature, they are often very silly individuals and so silly, absurd humor often really resonates with them. Additionally, as they emerge from sixth grade and start getting into seventh and eighth grade, they start to move away from concrete thinking and develop abstract thinking. This means they start to understand sarcasm, and this, my friends, is a gift.
You may have heard advice at some point along the lines of "don't ever teach using sarcasm," because it's mean, or it's a weak form of humor, etc. I don't fully agree with this. Your sarcasm shouldn't be mean-spirited (e.g. you should not say to your students "you know what I think would help? If you stopped sucking so much"), but if you can walk that line between playful and mean, then you can have some fantastic banter with kids, which is a great way to quickly build rapport. As I mentioned before, I live for the banter. The master of this style, who when she taught middle school choir walked that line like a damn pro, every single day, was my middle school CT and mentor Emily Martin. Emily has a tough demeanor as a teacher but it's combined with a deep compassion and an absolutely wicked sense of humor. She knows how to playfully give a kid crap without going too far, how to be sarcastic without being rude, and her kids absolutely adored her. The first time I watched her in action I was in a sophomore music ed class and we went to observe her. Some of my classmates walked away saying things like "well I just thought she was too sarcastic and I don't like that," and I walked away saying "Oh my God that was the most amazing thing I've ever seen and I must student teach with her!" Luckily that worked out, and I got to learn at the feet of the master about a good many things regarding having an excellent middle school choir program, including how valuable it is to have a sense of humor.
Engaging a kid in playful banter is one of the quickest ways to build rapport. When you can create running jokes with an individual kid or an entire choir it helps establish a sense of belonging and community. I had a student that I jokingly accused of breaking my clock (I don't even remember why I accused her in the first place), but she thought it was hilarious and it turned into a massive thing between the two of us over several years that took on a life of its own. Even when I saw her in high school for the first time in like a year she says with a big smile on her face "Drozda, I didn't break your clock!" Every year I end up with bizarre inside jokes with my choirs that we then call back throughout the year and it bonds us. Inside jokes are one of the best things about belonging to a group of any sort, and it's no different in a choir. My kids get a huge kick out of the fact that I constantly drink coffee, and they love to give me crap about it. Sometimes they keep track of how many cups of coffee I drank on the white board, or when I look tired or keep making dumb mistakes "Drozda, are you drinking your coffee?" One year my coffee thermos even got its own Instagram account.
Your mileage may vary on whether you think any of these examples are objectively funny, but they were funny to us and that's what mattered. We create our own little choral cultures with our singers, and just like any other culture, humor and shared experiences connect us and unite us.
I'm a little apprehensive over how my humor will play at the high school level. In fact for many years, one of the biggest things that stopped me from applying for high school jobs was the fear that I wouldn't get to be silly anymore. I do worry about that, that I won't be able to be as exuberant and ridiculous with the older kids as I have been with the middle schoolers. However, I am still hopeful that I can figure out how to adapt my humor to a different age level. My prediction is that the absurd silliness will decrease somewhat and the (playful) sarcasm and banter will increase, but who knows. Just because high school is more "serious" (what with the SAT and the college applications and the what are you doing with the rest of your life looming just ahead) doesn't mean we all have to take ourselves so seriously. I certainly don't plan to. Humor and unabashed silliness with middle school kids has kept me young, even as my humor has aged from the "sarcastic older brother" I was in my early 20s to the "total dad" that it is now. I plan to keep bringing my humor to the way I interact with my students and run my rehearsals as I move to high school (I don't really know how I would do anything else), and I am optimistic that my high school students will still give me reasons to laugh every day.
If you teach middle school or are going to teach middle school, my advice is this: embrace the ridiculousness, let them be weird and silly and laugh a lot. The world is an awful place, so let them be goofy for as long as they can, and recapture some joy by being goofy with them. It's a beautiful thing.
Coming next time, Part 3: Middle School Kids Are Inconsistent
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