The ephemerality of teaching.

Occasionally I tell my students, if something strange happens, "I have the weirdest job in the world." (Un)fortunately, strange things happen pretty often inside classrooms, so I get to reflect on that thought fairly often.

In a broader sense, though, being a teacher brings with it this bizarre confluence of extreme intimacy and, paradoxically, extreme fleetingness. Let me explain.

With this gig, we teach students for five months and then we change 'em up. Each semester is about 88 days long, and each period is about 75 minutes long, give-or-take, which adds up to a lot of time spent together (just over 100 hours, by my calculation).

Have you spent a hundred hours in a room with someone? Even if it's in a group of 30 or so, and even if you're going to be moving around and doing stuff and they're doing stuff and it's a little crazy sometimes, you (hopefully) interact with each kid a little bit every day, almost 90 times. Sometimes it's a hello, sometimes it's a oh my god stop driving me up the wall, sometimes it's a 15-minute conversation describing why their family came to Canada. You cover a lot of ground in five months.

In addition, if you work with kids in extracurriculars such as teams, clubs, tutoring and the like, you get to know them on a totally different level. Plus, they might open up to you in ways that they wouldn't if they were in a classroom; I've coached kids I taught at the same time before, and it really is a different dynamic.

Finally, of course, one's colleagues. It's a weird dichotomy; we have co-workers and colleagues and brothers-in-arms, but in the end, it's just you, alone, in a classroom with the kids. But, these are people you get to know, either superficially or, in my own personal experience, extremely well (for the most part); these are people you're with through babies, weddings, divorces, deaths, house purchases, and everything in between.

But, of course...

• the semester ends with exams, and you bring in a new group of kids
• the season ends, usually with a defeat, and next year's team will be different
• colleagues come and go, move around, retire, and whatnot

And then, when the new comes in, the details of the old fade away, and sometimes quickly. There's no room in your brain for all that detail: it's scrubbed-out and sanitized, and the new pushes out the old. That kid whose name you swore you could never forget? Well, you just saw them in the hall/the plaza/on a subway, and you knew that face, and what was their name, anyway? Gah. Sat in the back corner. Always diddling-away on their phone. Dyed her hair blue after a long weekend.

...hold on, it'll come to me.

...nope. Got nothin'. Jenny? Siyami? LaFawnduh? Baaaaaah. Something like that.

It's an interesting gig in terms of meeting new people, that's for sure. Every walk of humanity comes in and sits down. I heard an old colleague say once, "Some people say that teachers aren't in the real world, but I get more of the 'real world' walking through my door in one day than the average person experiences in a year." I think he was on to something.

But, alas, they come in, and they go. You might see them again, but who knows? It's a small world, they say -- but I wouldn't want to paint it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson says wise things.

In an interview with Larry King -- who is, somehow, still alive -- Dr. Tyson said something that I think rings really true. I'll paraphrase heavily, of course; I've watched another 30 minutes of this interview (it's a good one, natch) and other things crept into my head in the meantime.

Space is a way to get kids interested in thinking about their world differently. Whether you ultimately end up doing something space-related as a career or not, it gets them interested in the STEM subject areas -- Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. What you end up doing is creating a set of kids that grow up thinking differently about things, and that's a good thing.

I've seen this myself, many times. Kids are absolutely drawn to space; they're fascinated by it, have questions about it, think about it, wonder about it. I had a class full of Grade 9 characters in semester 2 this year -- to my knowledge at least 3 of them spent a night in jail during the semester -- and yet every day during the space unit, it was 75 straight minutes of jamasmanyquestionsaboutspaceasyoucaninthere.

It was a little exhausting, for sure, and it made getting through that day's material a little trickier, especially when the questions got off-topic (as they usually did). But, consider...

1. I find space pretty interesting.
2. I enjoy talking about it with others.
3. I know a fair bit about it, and hope I can pass some of that knowledge on.
4. Especially for these kids, if they have science-based questions, you'd better believe I'm gonna satiate their curiosity as thoroughly as I can. I know there's this idea that the teacher shouldn't just be the answer-box, and I usually take that advice, but when a kid has a question about a black hole and blurts it out when I'm in mid-sentence because he just can't wait, am I going to tell him, "Gee, sonny, that's a great question, why don't you go home and find out the answer and share it with the rest of us?" Like that would fly in my class.

Anyway, Dr. Tyson said something else pretty profound as I was typing, and I managed to get this one down pretty much verbatim.

We spend the first year of a kid's life teaching them to walk and talk, and the rest of their life we tell them to sit down and shut up.

So long as nobody's cranking-up to punch anyone else, calling them a "dirty gypsy" (yup, that happened) or anything like that... it's probably a pretty good teaching philosophy.

. . .

JESUS CHRIST I'M ON HOLIDAYS AND I'M THINKING ABOUT TEACHING.

SOMEONE COME OVER AND SLAP ME, PLEASE.*

_____________________
* mmmhmm. Please.

The kids are alright.

It's not just a mod anthem from the Who, it pretty accurately describes how things are going down at the ol' schoolhouse this year.

Class #1: Grade 12 Earth and Space Science

Whenever I tell anyone that I teach this class, their first response is usually, "That's a thing?" And when I respond that, yes, indeed, it is -- although not all schools offer it, and it's only been around for the past eight-ish years -- people wonder what's in it. Technically it's 3 units of earth science (rocks and minerals, processes, earth's history) and 2 space (cosmology, solar system)... but, let's face it, I'm an astrophysics guy, it's half-and-half.

With 20 kids in it, this might be the biggest one we've had so far. But I'll tell ya, these are 20 of the quietest kids I've ever seen. Normally you can count on any given class having 3 or 4 real characters to liven the place up, but this class really doesn't have one. Having it in the morning doesn't really help either, because a lot of kids are still half-asleep, especially if the schedule of the day makes it first period. Also, I may or may not have called this assemblage of kids "a bunch of cardboard cut-outs." To them.

Class #2: Grade 9 Science (morning)

They're young, they're dumb, and collectively they have the worst taste in music I've ever seen. They were born in 1999 (excepting the couple of kids who are in grade 10 and taking this course), which is ridiculous -- and also explains their terrible taste in music.

But alas, I think about myself at their age, and... well, yes, I knew some Beatles songs. But I clearly recall the summer between grade 8 and 9, practically wearing out my Poison album -- and no, I don't mean the hair-metal band, I mean the album by New Jack Swing vocal group Bel Biv DeVoe. (Look, it was a dark time in my life.)

I can't go around judging 14-year-olds by adult standards. They don't know what the hell they're doing. I just don't really know how best to point them, musically, in the right direction without just straight-up making fun of who they listen to. Perhaps I'll figure out five songs they need to hear, and dispatch them to YouTube. But that's tricky; you can't just give them a huge dose of awesome right off the bat, you've gotta work up to it.

As for the actual science-y stuff? They're doing fine.

Class #3: Grade 9 Science (afternoon)

It's bigger, louder and perhaps not as academically strong as its morning counterpart. But that's alright; their friends in the morning class probably tell them what's on tests and whatnot. Believe me, they need the help.

One thing I refuse to do is yell. Remember the mom from "Malcolm in the Middle"? Her normal speaking-voice was a yell, and the kids learned to tune that out pretty effectively. Same goes for teaching. Hell, when I really wanna rattle 'em, I pause for a long time and then speak really quietly. Freaks 'em out good.

High school teaching: Psychological warfare with teenagers, three times a day.