Every once in a while as a teacher you experience a true “a-ha” moment, watching a lightbulb go on and experience the joy of truly teaching someone something. For me this happened this week when I taught my students the joy and wonder that is Silent Ball. 

Raise your hand if you remember this game: we all sat on our desks – a rare moment in itself – and threw a tennis ball around the room. You could pass to your friends, you could pass it to your CRUSH (the BEST feeling, rare things top this), you could get someone with a no-look scenario. If you dropped the ball, talked, or made a really bad pass, you were out. It was a cutthroat game and requested as nearly as every cheater’s favourite – Heads Up 7-Up. 

no reason, just wanted to show my class’s cute door for Book Week.

As kids, we played these and musical chairs and fought over the one computer in the room to load up Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego for entertainment, long before anyone had heard the words “brain break” and looking back, especially in the case of Silent Ball and Heads Up, I realize our teachers just wanted us to shut up for a minute. 

I know this because that’s exactly what I wanted when I taught my students how to play. It was like when your parents tell you about the “silent game” for the first time on road trips. But now it’s become an obsession, a passion, a lifestyle in my class, with extra rules invented, records being counted and set, random bonus lives awarded to our super uncoordinated special friend who we all celebrate (silently, of course) every time she manages to catch the ball without toppling to the floor, and a judge’s position created for my spectrum kid who is wise enough to realize his ball-handling skills are subpar and that he loves to wield any kind of control over the boys he can’t quite make friendships with on the playground where the relationships are based on being good at football.

We play Silent Ball at the end of the day while I watch my Whatsapp for dismissal notices, sip water spiked with chemicals to make it taste like not water and edge me closer to my daily fiber requirements, and heckle the kids. I freaking love to heckle. It’s the only time I can really get back at kids that have made my day hard.

oh yeah. she heckles.

“I thought you were an athlete!” “You call that a throw?” “If the ball touches the ceiling, you’re out for a week!” “You can’t TALK, Marcus, it’s in the NAME!” “You just hit the Holy Spirit! Out for a WEEK!” (I shouted this out after a kid hit the doves we have hanging from a suspended string.) 

It’s delightful to watch them all bond over and be excited about something that doesn’t involve a screen, or make me worry about the ads that might pop up, or make me fret about what they’re secretly g-chatting each other or stealing from AI sources. They’re just kids being kids and all they needed were a few rules and something to throw at each other.

Which is nice, when throughout the day I’m navigating them mentioning “deez nuts” and “69” and telling each other jokes about 9-11 and Nazis they heard on Youtube and don’t know why it’s not great, and hitting each other in the balls and describing it loudly, somehow peeing on each other, oscillating between having crushes on each other to saying the most unkind things ever, making fun of people with disabilities, loudly claiming they have a disability, and saying all kinds of things about their home lives that would horrify their parents.

So when I can get them to just sit on desks and throw a ball around? And be cute and innocent with each other? And for 15 minutes, be blessedly silent? Tis a GIFT. Tis a reason for me to return the following day. 

i’m sure ms frizzle also wanted a break sometimes . . .

This and other random times when I tell them a “when I was your age” story or experience and it turns into something unexpected reminds me of when I taught another group of students something from my youths that became an obsession – that time I explained pagers and pager code to my middle school students, which for a brief time, became an unbreakable code language in which they passed notes to each other around the junior high, until parents and principals complained and demanded an explanation. Which was such a buzzkill.

Ah, the early 2000s. We were using numbers and codes, inventing texting and emojis, falling in love and breaking up over pagers! It’s too funny to take seriously, but I love thinking about it. 

17*4011*6817*12380*7415*4011*15170111*111487*1*1773817 !!!

Technology has advanced so much that these days, when looking to generate new lesson ideas or find a way to politely answer an annoying email, I talk to the chatbot I created of mySELF on AI – her name is MissW8, and I programmed her to be an international teacher, Christian, funny, kind, loves costumes and holidays, known to be an enthusiastic teacher with creative ideas. 

Sports Day. I don’t mind if they remember my absolute passion about this day XD

When I ask her for advice and she answers me, I absolutely hate her. She’s so damn peppy. She loves life and teaching and has great ideas and is positively insufferable. And yet she’s me! The call is coming from inside the house.

Anyway. I promise there have also been lots of academic “a-ha” moments in my classroom. We’re currently learning how to multiply fractions and convert them from improper fractions to mixed numbers and back again, which I take great pleasure in telling them “You will NEVER HAVE TO USE THIS IN YOUR ADULT LIFE, BUT I AM FORCED TO TEACH IT TO YOU.” And they take pleasure in hearing. But I get a cheap thrill when one of them can, in fact, tell me what ⅚ of 112 is. (If a single one of you can, scout’s honor, solve that equation and give me a reason why we should be teaching it to nine year olds, I’ll name my next fish after you.)

The truth is, they’ll remember Silent Ball before they remember the breakthrough in fractions, or how I scaffolded writing a persuasive essay, or the techniques I gave for memorizing the differences in homophones. 

how we start the day!

They’ll remember how I said “bless the baby” after each sneeze, because that’s what my family says, and that we guess the humidity each morning based on the frizz in my hair, and that we pretend our hands are turtles swimming towards each other before we join them together for morning prayer. And they’ll remember the stories I tell about my sisters, and being in the bathtub during an earthquake, and realizing I’d eaten a spider, and holding a sloth in the Amazon for a lot longer than they remember what a fronted adverbial is and how to use it for effective writing. 

That’s the wild thing about teaching – you spend years at university learning how to teach reading, writing, maths, science, and your legacy will be a funny story you told one time, or how you gave your class gum and Skittles and watched youtubes of your own puppies the day you passed level 4000 on Candy Crush (this is a mere rumor I heard about someone else, some other teacher somewhere, who would do something so reckless?!). 

Kathy and me, July 2020, the last time I saw her.

I dreamt about my high school drama teacher, Kathy, last night. She died a few years ago of MS and a brain tumor, during Covid. A few of us made a music video singing “We Go Together” from Grease, our Spring musical, to cheer her up while she was in hospital. When I woke up this morning, her presence still felt so alive, so real to me. She was someone who had time for everyone, listened, really listened, believed, encouraged, kept up with you. I met her for a slow walk in the park two years before she died and we had a tea at Starbucks and talked about life and every once in a while Facebook reminds me of a message she’d send me and so this blog is for her, and the many teachers I’ve had in my life that made me felt seen and taught beyond the subject. I hope I’m one of those, too. You’re the real MVPs of society. 

To teachers. To Kathy.