Teacher Tricks

When I was a classroom teacher, I knew a lot of great teacher tricks. 

I would show up to English class as the guest speaker, Evinrude the Poetry Dude. Dressed in a black turtleneck and beret and sporting beatnik sunglasses, I spoke entirely in rhyming couplets while I introduced our study of poetry to my freshmen. 

Another of my tricks involved spending hours transforming my room into Dante’s Inferno, with creepy lighting, diabolical music, and nine circles of hell. I was Virgil, the tour guide, who would explain the layout, share some background info about the author and the time period, and introduce my students to some of the medieval celebrities inhabiting this unpleasant version of the afterlife. 

Another of my teacher-trick disguises was the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift. I’d slip out of my humanities class while students were answering some boring questions and return in a powdered wig, spectacles, and 18th century clothing to read my latest work, “A Modest Proposal,” which—to my students’ horror—seemed to advocate the selling of small children to be used as food as a solution to the problem of overpopulation. 

Speaking of reading, that was definitely one of my better tricks. For years, I performed Great Expectations five times a day, trying to embody every character as I read nearly all of that dickens of a novel to aloud my English students who “couldn’t read it themselves.”  I also received rave reviews for my in-class performances as Iago in Othello, the title role in Tartuffe, and nearly every character in Romeo and Juliet. 

Over the years I stuffed fortune cookies and balloons with writing prompts, staged a full-out Renaissance festival, hosted the Academy Awards of Literature, recreated a medieval monastery, and led sing-along renditions of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” in Latin. I created videos, PowerPoints, webpages, lectures, mnemonic songs, review sheets, and elaborate bulletin board displays.

My teacher tricks were numerous, and I received ample praise and recognition for performing them. 

I’m proud of some of my teacher tricks, but, in hindsight, I’m not proud of others. You see, I was working hard— entertaining, creating, emoting, performing, decorating, crafting, producing— while many times my students weren’t doing much at all. Many of my teacher tricks were about me, not about my students’ learning. I confused engagement with learning, and I failed to build capacity in my students to do the thinking, reading, performing, and creating themselves. 

It’s weird and a little awkward now when I run into former students who praise me for one of my teacher tricks but don’t mention anything about what they remember doing or learning in my class. I don’t dislike that they have fond memories of the time spent in my classroom; however, I do hope they can look back and say that they are better at learning, thinking, reading, writing, and communicating because of something they did, not something I did for them.           

I don’t want to put a damper on teacher enthusiasm and creativity. Not all teacher tricks are undesirable. A teacher who goes the extra mile to engage students and who puts forth effort to cultivate a memorable classroom experience sets the stage for some high-powered learning. Looking back, I missed some opportunities to shift more of the work to my students. At times I could have redirected my energy to facilitate more student thinking instead of focusing on how I could deliver my thinking to them. 

I wish teachers would receive less recognition for what they do and more for what their students are doing. Teacher tricks are great as long as they teach students to devise some tricks of their own.