by JESSE SCACCIA
If memory serves, it was the poet-philosopher Sir Mix-a-Lot who gave us the prophetic lines:
Little in the middle/but she got much back.
And then, much like the sound of the Muses turning King Pierus’ daughters into magpies, there was the sound of a whip cracking, and the image of a woman in golden spandex doing a sideways kick.
But I digress. The purpose of this post is to rejoice at the fact that we have, alas, made it past the horrible middle of the Fall semester of school. If you’re anything like me, you teach the worst in the middle. That beginning of the semester adreneline rush has subsided. You’ve already proven to your students that you’re not some dummy, or not some jerk showing up for the pay check. Finals seem months and months away. And shoot, you can’t keep it in fifth gear the whole time, can you? That’s a sure fire way to burn out.
But I’ve got bad–or is it good?–news for you. We’re finally in the home stretch, the back, the weeks where we really make our money. It’s time to kick it back into fifth gear.
Can a teacher get a whip crack up in here?
It’s an established fact that people remember most the stuff that happens at the beginning and the end. Be it movies, sentences, speeches, or your class, the middle just doesn’t matter as much as what you did those first few weeks, and what you’ll do at the end.
Take solace in this if you’ve been teaching dirty the past phase.
Let this motivate you if you’ve had the worst teaching term of your life. If you teach well from here to the final, all will be forgotten. You think they’re going to remember that you started slow? Of course not. They’ll just remember all of your innovative, impassioned, muse-infused classes the last few weeks.
So here’s to the home stretch, where we all should remember that we got into this profession not to be teachers, but to be great teachers.
