Occasionally I’m pretty good at my job. Unfortunately, it usually happens by accident.

For example, the other day I told a student to lie to me and it went so well I’ll probably have more students lie to me. Before class I’d prepared an article that listed ways to tell if a person was lying. I then had the student read a monologue twice. Once as he’d prepared it and once using all the lying tells. It went well and I think I’ll keep that for the future. Probably.

Back a thousand years ago when I first started teaching as a graduate student I was observed by my then boss. All I remember is the students were supposed to read three essays, one of which was by a fundamentalist Christian. As the students discussed the essays with me, I suddenly felt compelled put a chart on the board that summarized the various assumptions motivating the three writers. In his follow up comments, my then boss told me the chart was effective, but that I didn’t finish filling it out.

I think I used the chart again, but knowing me, I probably forgot about it. Teaching is like acting. Despite your preparation, there’s a lot of improvisation and that makes it easy to forget things you did the next time you would be able to do them. Also, things that worked brilliantly with one class will flop with another and you have to do more improvisation.

For example, after I started working at the school where I work, I used to make my junior high students make practice tests for their partners as a form of exam review. After 30 minutes or so they exchanged and took each other’s tests. This worked well for a few years until we got a group of students I dubbed “The Demon Seed Class”. They played rather than making the practice exams and I abandoned the entire activity at the end of that year and started giving them writing practice.

Sometimes, I only got one chance to do a trick. When I was at Ole Miss, I managed to get one of the coveted Introduction to Literature courses. (Explaining why these were coveted would require another post.) At some point I assigned Hamlet which is the happy play where a depressed Dane manages to kill the entire Danish Royal Court by pretty much being too afraid to kill one guy. I remember at one point putting all the characters on the board and eliciting a complete list of who loved who, who was related to who, and who wanted to kill who. I also remember being told it helped clarify some of the parts of the play.

For some reason, when I got to class on the day we were set to finish the play, I suddenly changed plans. Instead of the quiz I’d prepared, I gave the students only one question: “List everyone who’s dead at the end of Hamlet.” Now, I grant you, given that Hamlet has a pretty high body count, you can almost list any character and have a good chance of getting points but the students had fun and they still had to know the characters.

The next year I was in Japan and I never had a chance to teach Hamlet again. To rephrase Uncle Monty from Withnail and I: “It is the most shattering experience of a young teacher’s life when one morning he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself, ‘I will probably never teach the Dane again’.” Something like that.