I used to teach French to kindergarten through 4th grade. None of them knew my name, I was just The French Lady. This was my teaching technique:
“You guys won’t remember anything I teach you. ”
“Oh yeah? We will so!”
“Nope, you won’t. I’ll prove it to you. If you remember these four words, you get a point. If you forget them, I get a point.” Then I made the scoreboard.
This generally put them into a feeding frenzy. If any classmate had dared to forget a word they would have lynched him. Every point I got took up the whole board. I made their points tiny dots on the board. If they started to win, I would say,
“You know, I really hate kids.”
“Oh yeah? Then why are you here teaching kids? You don’t hate us. You LOVE us!”
I first heard my dad say this to my daughter when she was four years old, and I was appalled.
“Why should I give you lunch? I don’t even like you.” She didn’t even bother to look up from her book.
” Yes you do Pop Pop. You love me lots and lots.”
So I tried it. The kids don’t believe me either.
One day a first grade class got very rowdy.( I’m sure I had nothing to do with that at all) The teacher was mortified and made every child make me a card with an apology. One card said this:
Thas it. Thas all I’m getting.
Ten years later a student stayed after class to talk to me and mentioned where she had gone to grammar school. It was where I taught ten years ago. And then it hit me. “Did you have really blonde hair and a ponytail?”
It was her. And I still had the card. Which I of course brought to class and told this story to her mortification every chance I got.
THAS ALL FOLKS.
