An Interesting Way of Teaching

English: David Sedaris at WBUR studios in June 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's 4:05am, and I still can't sleep, so I decided to do my reading for this blog.  I read David Sedaris's essay, "Me Talk Pretty One Day," and something about it hit home.  Not what the title suggests -- although I feel the same way about Spanish that he does about French (I took three years of Spanish in high school, and I'm too embarrassed about my lack of fluency to say more than thank you and hello to a native speaker).  

What got me about his narrative was the teacher he had in France.  When I was in fourth grade, this kid in my class -- I think his name was Bobby -- used to get fed up by about 1 o'clock every day and start trying to irritate our teacher, whom I will call Mr. Smith, since I can't remember his name either.  Anyway, one day we're all sitting there, an hour after lunch, with the sun beating in on us through the windows, and Bobby starts humming.  I think it was the song from Titanic.  He kept stopping just before the end of the verse and starting again.

Mr. Smith told him to knock it off, and he would, for a few minutes, but then it started up again.  Unlike Sedaris's French teacher, Mr. Smith was usually pretty calm, even when Bobby would do much more annoying things (spitballs, etc.), but this day he had had enough, and he hurled an eraser at him.  I think he might have done some pitching before this, because it hit Bobby square in the face and bounced back about ten feet.  It was a whiteboard eraser, and it left a greasy black oblong in the middle of Bobby's face.  Again unlike the French teacher, Mr. Smith looked kind of surprised that he had done that, and he was probably going to apologize, but the whole class started cheering and applauding.  

I'm guessing that Bobby decided not to complain about it because he could tell that he would get no support from the rest of us if he did.  He cleaned up his act after that, so I guess he really did learn something in that class, even if it wasn't that week's vocabulary list.

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