This morning I acted in an industrial and the director of the shoot was a former student of mine… from back when I taught high school. So weird. His name is Matt and I remember him as being a good kid. He played the leads in the school musicals I directed and was interested in film and video production. He hung out with a few kids who weren’t as nice and I’m reminded of two things… 1.) How betrayed I felt as a teacher when I learned the students I thought were good, dependable and friendly were actually the opposite and just manipulating me, looking on me as a fool. And 2.) how bad a teacher I was a decade ago.

Nothing to be done about the first point, but the second point has, I’m happy to report, changed considerably. In 1999 I was a brand new teacher. I was one year out of undergrad and had no experience in education. Worse, I was hired after the school year had already begun. I came blindly into a suburban public high school to teach theatre. It was truly a sink or swim situation. Like any beginning teacher, that first year and a half was very painful and I look back with a mixture of wisdom and shame.

I am reminded of a certain Mark Twain quote. I met a series of fellow teachers, administrators, staff members, parents and especially students who “make a body ashamed of the human race.” I was convinced the public education system, all contemporary methods of parenting and my own sense of logic were irretrievably broken. All these years later, I’m not sure I was completely wrong about these things. I brought with me independence, common sense, enthusiasm for my field (the theatre being my livelihood) and a can-do attitude. These in turn were systematically beaten out of me through apathetic adolescents, the system and my own doings. I left teaching public school an incompetent, petty, vengeful teacher. I recall those first three semesters as a pure slice of hell.

I remember one young freshman girl repeatedly mouthing off. And I had a hair-trigger temper about misbehaving students. I clawed at maintaining authority with a vicious desperation. I was a hard teacher. One day I took this rude little high school girl out into the hallway to make a truce. She had my number.

“You’re too hard on us because you’re new. New teachers are always stricter. They don’t know yet how things work…”

And I didn’t want to know. It seemed 95% of my students were lazy, impolite and/or violently aggressive.  And while I was sure I knew what my role was as their teacher, they had no idea what their role was as students.

Listening to this young smart-ass girl shake me down, I felt only anger, pity and sorrow. I grew so tired of the elaborate power game just to get my students to listen to me at all. It was soon after this I stopped caring about my students. If they didn’t want to learn, fuck them. My job was to impart knowledge and they had shown themselves undeserving and unreceptive to the gifts I could give. I gave up. My job was not to convince them that what I had to teach was worthwhile. My job only kicked in after they did their part. They had to come to the table before they would be served.

It is only in hindsight I realized how pretentious and selfish this thinking was. My definition of a teacher was so narrow. A teacher should not only instruct, but should inspire, should develop, should guide students.

I had written them off. I worried about them doing their jobs while I clearly was not doing my own.

I eventually high-tailed it out of public school and tried my hand at community college. It was better, but the lessons I learned about myself as a teacher came slowly and it took many classes and many years before I gradually formed into a confident teacher. A couple of years ago, I walked through a final, ultimate test of fire by teaching in Hong Kong. This was a fresh, deeper hell. This experience in China made my suburban high school teaching days look like a stroll in a park on a sunny day. I came out the other side a much better teacher.

I still have a long way to go, but I understand the purpose behind my role as an educator now and, believe it or not, actually enjoy the experience. Most of the time…

There was, is, no way to tell all my former students – including Matt I worked with this morning - about this arc of growth. But I can only be in the now, with my eyes looking forward. Can’t change the past, can only learn from it.

As they say here on the internet... O M G !

I am a Sherlock Holmes afficionado from way back. I once spent an entire summer and into the autumn reading all the Sherlock Holmes stories back to back. I'm thrilled and frightened by this upcoming re-vision of Holmes. I love Robert Downey Jr, Jude Law and Guy Ritchie, but a Sherlock Holmes that knows martial arts?

I remember in the books he is familiar with the concept of martial arts, but this could potentially turn out like that steaming pile of embarrassment VAN HELSING. You know, where they take a perfectly fascinating literary character and then give him special skills and tricked out gadgets or something. I cry a little inside whenever the movie LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMAN is brought up. The idea and the LOEG graphic novel were great, but the movie was horrible and a disservice to the creations to all those characters now in public domain.

If you wanna touch up on your Holmes trivia, I found this great site. They have nearly all the Holmes stories as text versions as well as old BBC recordings of some stories.

Christmas... so long to wait...