IMPRESSIONS

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Middle School Teacher Followed Student Home to Ask About Missing Homework, Police Say. Now They're on Leave

REMEMBER: THINGS AREN’T ALWAY AS THEY SEEM

The idea that a middle school teacher followed a student home for missing homework makes me laugh. Of course no teacher should be following a student home. Let alone in a car, behind the school bus. I get that. Bad move on the teacher’s part, but I’m guessing – hoping – that the teacher’s actions were impulsive, their motives harmless and maybe for the good.

I don’t think I ever cold-called a student at their house, but I sure did stay on top of their homework. I wrote notes home, I called and emailed parents, I sent weekly missing work reports, and for those parents who asked, I even sent out texts. And pre-internet, my students had my home phone number and could check in with me after hours, which occasionally they did.

That’s the serious side of teacher me.

As for the rest of me, I’ve long struggled to restrain my impulsivity, those moments when some new idea or connection plops in my head and takes control.

In a career spanning decades, there were times when an inadvertent quip, a thoughtless gesture, a poorly previewed lesson, or one gone sideways, could have landed me, too, in People’s police beat.

Once, I was teaching tips for writing funny, when I remembered I had a worksheet of humorous words somewhere, so right then and there I rifled through my files and found the list. Perhaps two minutes elapsed from the time the list popped into my head to the moment every student was laughing at it. Great, I thought, these words – bamboozled, persnickety, noggin and the like – are truly funny. Relatable and motivating.

Choose five of them for your story, I instructed.

Then amid the tittering I heard “What does “floozy” mean?”