In the different articles I've read about teaching, the third year is when the new teacher finally feels competent in the classroom. Year five is when the teacher begins on her journey to mastery. Very few teachers make it to the impact stage.
Call me precocious, but it was in my fourth year of teaching that I made an impact on my students.
Before I turned to the "dark side" a.k.a. library science, I was an 11th grade English teacher. The school where I taught had in-house subbing; that is, if a colleague was out, one subbed for him/her during her free period. One of my colleagues, a 10th grade English teacher, was out for the week and I was assigned to sub for one of her classes. Her sub plan was this: Have the student's watch Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet.
Mind you, I didn't preview the movie. I assumed the classroom teacher did. In fact, I barely remembered watching parts of the movie when I studied Romeo and Juliet as a 9th grader. I put in the tape, shushed the class and went ahead reading the research papers from my own students.
Throughout the movie, there was an undercurrent of murmuring conversation from the class. They obviously weren't paying attention. Every so often, I would glance up from my papers, shush them and go back to reading.
At one point, the whole class went dead silent. Much like having a toddler, when one hears silence, one knows something is wrong. I glanced up from my paper and got an eyeful of naked butt on the TV screen. I automatically blurted out, "Do not stare at the naked butt!"
This was a tactical error. Blurting out something like "do not stare at the naked butt" to a bunch of 15 year olds is not a wise idea. The class went wild. I fast forwarded the rest of the R&J butt scene, quieted them down and immersed myself back in correcting.
Fast forward a year. The students who were in the class in which I had subbed were now my 11th grade students. I had one particular student who would waddle up to the podium at the beginning of class and say, "Hey, Mrs. R! Remember when you showed us the naked butt last year?"
At first, I tried to deny it by saying I forgot about the butt. After the daily reminders, I finally said, "I didn't show you the butt on purpose. The butt was your teacher's sub plans. Blame your 10th grade teacher for the butt."
Alas, I still got the reminder.
Fast forward to a few years later when I had moved to my present school in my present position. I was talking to one of our teachers. She told me that her next door neighbor was one of my students when I taught ELA 11 and what he remembered most about me was that I showed him a butt.
It's nice to know that I have reached the level of impact teacher.
*One could argue that this also part of the fantasy phase of teaching--where one is going into the classroom, inspiring all the students and changing their lives together. Also, Dead Poets Society will be a post within itself at a later time.
