On my first day teaching at BRCC, it was raining. It was raining hard.
I stood outside the building that housed my first class, watching students file in and out, covering their heads with newspapers and notebooks, hoping to hold off the downpour. With each group that wandered in the door, I wondered whether they might be walking into my class.
I had been teaching for three years, but this was my first day on this new campus, in a different city, with different expectations. Although I was experienced, I still felt like a newbie. My stomach knotted itself into a ball on every first day as I wondered whether I would be able to convey the complicated combination of authority and assholery that my teaching mentors had said were necessary for garnering student respect. I was small and looked like a student myself - a friendly, bouncy student. I didn’t look down my nose at my class, didn’t want to shout or pretend to be stern on the first day. I wanted, secretly, to have fun with them. But that wasn’t what my mentors had suggested, and I was worried how my personality would go over with this new group of kids.
In order to hold back my nerves, I texted my best friend in California, also a teacher. “I can’t believe it’s raining,” I texted. “On my first. fucking. day.”
“So go in soaked,” she texted back. “They’ll get a laugh and it’ll distract everybody from feeling nervous.”
A laugh? But I wasn’t supposed to get a laugh! I was supposed to go in the door stone-faced and serious.
I sighed and leaned against a nearby brick column, preparing my response.
The column wasn’t as close as I thought it would be. I leaned a little further. I leaned a little further, distracted by my phone and my nerves and the rain.
And then I fell.
Alongside the entrance to the building were a series of giant bushes - the kind that only manage to grow in hot South Louisiana climates. They were tall and veiny, branches reaching out in every direction. And I had landed straight down in the midst of all these bushes.
My phone flew one direction, my laptop bag another, and me another. Frazzled and trying to fight off the rain, I reached for the edge of the building’s porch, where I had been standing just seconds before. My hand slipped. I reached out again, slipped again. Fine. Instead of pulling myself out, maybe I could crawl out of the bushes. I looked for an easy path out, crawling on my hands and knees and getting twigs stuck in my hair.
“Are you okay?”
I looked up to see what was clearly a student standing above me on the porch.
“Yes. Just a little - soaked. And stuck.”
“We can help you out.”
Two other students emerged from behind him. One of them reached down with a hand to pull me out of the snarled bushes, while the other two dug around for my bag and phone. As they handed my belongings to me, I tried to brush the twigs from my hair and clothes.
“Thanks.”
“No problem,” they said, laughing a little.
And with that we parted and turned to walk into the building. It only took me a few seconds to realize that we were all walking in the same direction. As I walked behind them, they turned and realized we were all about to walk into the same classroom - me to the front, them to the desks.
“That’s our teacher!” I heard one whisper.
Now I had no idea what to do. These were my students, and they had just seen me at my absolute worst - soaking wet and covered in twigs and scratches.
They sat at the back of the room, snickering but respectfully avoiding telling their fellow students about the incident. I could tell they wanted to, though.
“It’s okay,” I relented after a moment. “You can tell them.”
And with that, the boy who had offered me help first turned to the class and said, “We just dug her out of the bushes!”
He and his friends narrated the whole story, exaggerating my fall and my excavation. At first, I cringed. How were these kids ever going to respect me after this story?
As it turned out, they weren’t really worried about respect, or classroom dynamics. All they cared about was the story - and the story was funny. I had let them laugh at me. They knew I could mess up, could make mistakes.
On that day, those students became some of my favorites. We spend the entire semester feeling free to talk to one another. They asked more questions, talked more in class discussions, than any other group I’ve ever had. They proved my old mentors wrong: sometimes, being vulnerable is the best way to go.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
The Tale of Miss M - Sample Essay
When you work in retail, you make a lot of snap judgments about people, even if you don’t mean to. Everyday you’re faced with hundreds of customers in all shapes and sizes, customers who can either make or break your day. When they exit the doors of your store, they likely have very complex private lives that indicate their identities as multi-faceted human beings. But when all you know about them is the way they treat you in the span of a few minutes, it’s difficult not to make judgments about who they are. As an employee at a local gift store, I was certain I had a knack for understanding who my customers really were. I didn’t realize how wrong I was until the day I was faced with someone whose story disagreed with mine, despite the fact that we were making our judgments based on the very same information.
Our store played host to a handful of regulars, mostly older women who came in a few times a week while walking the mall. The most infamous of these regulars was Miss M, an 80-year-old woman who visited us once, sometimes twice a day EVERY SINGLE DAY of the week.
Miss M was a small woman with fragile, bone-sharp features. She had the heavy wrinkles of an elderly woman, but none of the customary fattening and softening that often comes with ages. She was thin and angular, and her dyed-brown hair was generally pulled into a tight bun and wrapped in an old-fashioned snood - a kind of fancy hairnet that held the bun in place. She wore expensive tailored blouses and pants, and several large diamonds on her fingers that she insisted on turning upside down so that they faced her palms because, as she put it, “You never know who might see it and decide to beat you up for it.” Her lips were thin and often pursed into a look of disapproval.
I was not a fan of Miss M, as you can probably tell from my description. To me, the expensive clothes and fancy rings were a means of showing off. “If she’s so afraid someone’s going to steal her ring, WHY does she WEAR IT??” I’d complain to my co-workers. “She WANTS someone to steal the damn thing, just so she can complain about it!”
But her upper-class presentation wasn’t the thing that really bothered me. I felt justified in hating Miss M because - in my eyes- she thought that she was better than us. She ordered us around and made absurd demands. On one particular occasion, she came into our store to purchase one of several glass oil lamps that we had on display in the window. She pulled me aside and told me that, while she liked the lamps we had on display, she really needed one to match her bathroom - one that came in a very specific shade of purplish-pink called “thistle.” When I explained that the lamps we had on display were the only ones available from the company, she told me that I needed to get on the phone right away and demand that they make her one in the specified color. “Miss M, I just can’t do that,” I said, trying to be polite but forceful. “They just don’t make them in any other color.”
“Just because they don’t RIGHT NOW doesn’t mean they CAN’T,” she said. “All of these lamps were clear at some point. I know how these things work. They just have to be told what to do; so call them and tell them.”
While I continued to insist that I couldn’t call the company for this special request, customers were piling up at the register and my coworker, Jenna, was motioning for me to come and help her. I tried to shoo Miss M away, but she insisted that I get her what she wanted. I told her that I would need to step into the back room and speak with the manager to see if calling the company would be possible. My plan was to gather my wits and find the best way to approach her before returning to the sales floor. But I had only been in back a few seconds when she marched through our Employees-Only door, told me she would be leaving, and that I was clearly “not in the shape to provide the best customer service” that day.
I was fuming. I ran to the front to help Jenna with customers, then reported to my manager about the situation with Miss M. “I just can’t stand her!” I whined. “She’s so demanding! She thinks she’s so much better than everyone, that we have to help her and ONLY her, not anyone else!”
Before I could finish my rant, my manager - a kindhearted woman I’d known for years - stopped me. “Sharon, she’s lonely. Haven’t you ever heard her talk about her children? She has five of them, and they’ve all moved away. Her husband died last year, and she’s clearly in the early stages of alzheimers. She just doesn’t know how to conduct herself. It isn’t badly intended. She just wants someone to pay attention to her, to talk to her for a while. And she wants to be helpful. She tells you all those things about calling the company because she really thinks she’s telling you something useful. She thinks the company SHOULD do what you’re asking. She thinks she’s helping you give better customer service.”
I was baffled. I’d spent weeks complaining to my coworkers and friends about the mean old wealthy woman who wanted nothing but to boss me around. And all that time, my manager had seen someone completely different - a helpless victim of loneliness and dementia, a fragile person who needed our help and our attention. We had been looking at the same person, had heard the same words, but had interpreted them completely differently. Through the story of Miss M, I realized how much our descriptions and stories are influenced by our opinions - and how easily those stories can be shaken by the presence of an opposing viewpoint.
Our store played host to a handful of regulars, mostly older women who came in a few times a week while walking the mall. The most infamous of these regulars was Miss M, an 80-year-old woman who visited us once, sometimes twice a day EVERY SINGLE DAY of the week.
Miss M was a small woman with fragile, bone-sharp features. She had the heavy wrinkles of an elderly woman, but none of the customary fattening and softening that often comes with ages. She was thin and angular, and her dyed-brown hair was generally pulled into a tight bun and wrapped in an old-fashioned snood - a kind of fancy hairnet that held the bun in place. She wore expensive tailored blouses and pants, and several large diamonds on her fingers that she insisted on turning upside down so that they faced her palms because, as she put it, “You never know who might see it and decide to beat you up for it.” Her lips were thin and often pursed into a look of disapproval.
I was not a fan of Miss M, as you can probably tell from my description. To me, the expensive clothes and fancy rings were a means of showing off. “If she’s so afraid someone’s going to steal her ring, WHY does she WEAR IT??” I’d complain to my co-workers. “She WANTS someone to steal the damn thing, just so she can complain about it!”
But her upper-class presentation wasn’t the thing that really bothered me. I felt justified in hating Miss M because - in my eyes- she thought that she was better than us. She ordered us around and made absurd demands. On one particular occasion, she came into our store to purchase one of several glass oil lamps that we had on display in the window. She pulled me aside and told me that, while she liked the lamps we had on display, she really needed one to match her bathroom - one that came in a very specific shade of purplish-pink called “thistle.” When I explained that the lamps we had on display were the only ones available from the company, she told me that I needed to get on the phone right away and demand that they make her one in the specified color. “Miss M, I just can’t do that,” I said, trying to be polite but forceful. “They just don’t make them in any other color.”
“Just because they don’t RIGHT NOW doesn’t mean they CAN’T,” she said. “All of these lamps were clear at some point. I know how these things work. They just have to be told what to do; so call them and tell them.”
While I continued to insist that I couldn’t call the company for this special request, customers were piling up at the register and my coworker, Jenna, was motioning for me to come and help her. I tried to shoo Miss M away, but she insisted that I get her what she wanted. I told her that I would need to step into the back room and speak with the manager to see if calling the company would be possible. My plan was to gather my wits and find the best way to approach her before returning to the sales floor. But I had only been in back a few seconds when she marched through our Employees-Only door, told me she would be leaving, and that I was clearly “not in the shape to provide the best customer service” that day.
I was fuming. I ran to the front to help Jenna with customers, then reported to my manager about the situation with Miss M. “I just can’t stand her!” I whined. “She’s so demanding! She thinks she’s so much better than everyone, that we have to help her and ONLY her, not anyone else!”
Before I could finish my rant, my manager - a kindhearted woman I’d known for years - stopped me. “Sharon, she’s lonely. Haven’t you ever heard her talk about her children? She has five of them, and they’ve all moved away. Her husband died last year, and she’s clearly in the early stages of alzheimers. She just doesn’t know how to conduct herself. It isn’t badly intended. She just wants someone to pay attention to her, to talk to her for a while. And she wants to be helpful. She tells you all those things about calling the company because she really thinks she’s telling you something useful. She thinks the company SHOULD do what you’re asking. She thinks she’s helping you give better customer service.”
I was baffled. I’d spent weeks complaining to my coworkers and friends about the mean old wealthy woman who wanted nothing but to boss me around. And all that time, my manager had seen someone completely different - a helpless victim of loneliness and dementia, a fragile person who needed our help and our attention. We had been looking at the same person, had heard the same words, but had interpreted them completely differently. Through the story of Miss M, I realized how much our descriptions and stories are influenced by our opinions - and how easily those stories can be shaken by the presence of an opposing viewpoint.
Essay Two Prompt
Length - 1 1/2 to 2 pages
Typed, double-spaced, times new roman 12-pt font
Must hand in HARD COPY - emailing just isn't working, y'all
Heading:
Name, SID
ENG 110 section number
Ms. Tohline
Date
For this paper, you must choose one individual to describe. Your person can be anyone - someone you know, someone who is a public figure, or even someone you only know a little. Your goal should be to choose a particular aspect of that person (that they are kind, that they are strong, that they are two-faced, that they are lazy, etc.) to organize your paper around. Then, all of your descriptions should go towards supporting that main idea about your person. You can use physical description, tell stories about the person, talk about their actions and about their words. The only requirement is that all of the things you choose to describe should point back in some way to the focus that you've chosen.
You will be graded on your ability to describe your person in detail, with a clear focus, and by SHOWING rather than TELLING. (The "other" grading category for this essay will be "Show vs. Tell", worth 10 points).
Typed, double-spaced, times new roman 12-pt font
Must hand in HARD COPY - emailing just isn't working, y'all
Heading:
Name, SID
ENG 110 section number
Ms. Tohline
Date
For this paper, you must choose one individual to describe. Your person can be anyone - someone you know, someone who is a public figure, or even someone you only know a little. Your goal should be to choose a particular aspect of that person (that they are kind, that they are strong, that they are two-faced, that they are lazy, etc.) to organize your paper around. Then, all of your descriptions should go towards supporting that main idea about your person. You can use physical description, tell stories about the person, talk about their actions and about their words. The only requirement is that all of the things you choose to describe should point back in some way to the focus that you've chosen.
You will be graded on your ability to describe your person in detail, with a clear focus, and by SHOWING rather than TELLING. (The "other" grading category for this essay will be "Show vs. Tell", worth 10 points).
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