Dear Charlie Brown Teacher,
If you’ve ever watched Charlie Brown, you know what Charlie Brown’s teacher sounds like. As any fan of the cartoon knows, viewers get the humorous perspective of hearing what Charlie hears in class, which isn’t much. His teacher sounds like garbled, echoey nonsense.
To pandemic students, I suspect every teacher in a mask sounds like Charlie’s teacher.
But truthfully, I’m not sure that’s a huge shift for educators.
We are fully accustomed to being mere white noise in the room. For example, when I say, “Take out a sheet of paper and number 1-10,” I am not sure what kids hear, but I know it has nothing to do with paper or numbering because three minutes later ol' dingbat Donna is nudging a neighbor with, “What are we supposed to be doing?”
Then lughead Lester has the audacity to ask, “What are we supposed to be numbering to?”
It’s enough to make a teacher want to check the job line. That is until one little angel rolls her eyes at the wayward ones and throws the teacher a bone by saying, “Dang y’all listen. She said, ‘number 1-10. She shouldn’t have to repeat it ten times.’”
This girl will be a teacher one day. I know because she already is, and she’s not Charlie Brown’s teacher either. She’s the teacher who keeps her classmates in line and won’t let them copy her homework because she’s worked too hard to allow others to cheat their way through life on her tab.
Throughout her life, she will be respected and appreciated for her hard-working attitude and tenacity of spirit. She’ll have the world by the tail.
Then one day she’ll stand before a group of teens with disproportionate bodies and underdeveloped brains, and she’ll make the grave mistake of asking them to number their papers from 1-10.
Invariably someone will ask, “What are we supposed to be doing?”
-CDB