With the close of last school year, I completed my 30th campaign in education. Each of those years has been filled with joy and sorrow, challenges and successes, ups and downs and a ton of stories worth sharing. My (True) Life in Education Thus Far will detail 30 or so of those stories. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed living (most) of them!
WE GOTTA HAVE SOME FUN!
August 17, 2022
I was lucky enough to teach at Bishop McNamara High School for the first two years of my teaching career. They were formative years and, like the imprinting that a mother bird does on its children, I am sure that who I am as a teacher and administrator today was developed in the crucible of imprinting that went on during those years in Maryland.
I can point to all manner of philosophies that I think are mine which are, more than likely, the outgrowth of my experiences at Bishop McNamara. They are the results of my respect for the people with whom I worked. They are the guiding principles of my career.
One that I know was planted at McNamara and took root in me was pranking. When you were pranked by someone at McNamara, you knew you had made it. The most frequently employed prank was the rearranging of one’s classroom. In my case, this took the form of my coming to school one Monday morning in my second year and finding every piece of furniture – every. piece. – turned upside down. My teacher desk and chair, all the student desks, everything. Even the one bookshelf I had in the room was flipped over with all the books still in order, but upside down.
No one spoke of who masterminded these pranks, though I always suspected Mr. Hunt, the music teacher, as the force behind the hijinks.
The day I saw my room pranked was the day I felt fully initiated into the profession.
I have not forgotten.
In the years that have followed, I have taken many an opportunity to good naturedly prank someone. I have been involved in putting a teacher’s car in the school lobby, slowly adding more weight daily to a colleague’s briefcase day-by-day, taking and wrapping a teacher’s completed final exams under the school Christmas tree and, perhaps my favorite, perpetrating an ongoing annual prank on an unsuspecting new educator, telling them that they had to process in and stand with the “school flag” throughout graduation ceremonies – and that the harness they had to wear was not too heavy at all.
I still include false information in the first April edition of every newsletter I write for school.
At Bishop McNamara, I found right away that the work we do in schools can be long and it can be challenging. Laughter helps. It helped when I was a brand new teacher and it helps now.
I really do love a good prank.
