Sometimes I draw cartoonish stick figures on the notes we write in class. Stick figures pointing up at a table and saying, “Hey, we did that last week.” Stick figures holding a figure in the air and saying, “Yes! That’s right.” Stick figures pointing at a logarithm and thinking “Yuck!” in a big red thought bubble off to the side as an explicit acknowledgement that logarithms look weird.
Sometimes I tell stories from when I used to develop software. Stories of working in Houston on space projects. Stories about Mission Control and about programming languages. Stories about raising a son when I only got to see him every other weekend, as an explicit acknowledgement that teachers aren’t perfect and that life is hard.
I keep a notebook for each period. A notebook with a table of contents that has page numbers and dates. A notebook that has a banner at the top of each day’s work, summarizing what we’re doing that day. A notebook that students can take pictures of or get from classmates if they miss class. A notebook that shows indirectly what it means to be organized, what it means to think clearly, what it means to communicate.
Sometimes I trip over myself in class. The students giggle, and they see that I couldn’t care less. When students get up to sharpen pencils while I’m making a few announcements at the beginning of class, I smile and roll my eyes slightly and tell them to go ahead and sharpen their pencils, because heck, “They’re sharpening a tool that they’re about to use to follow my lead,” and why would that upset any teacher? To teach humility.
Once, I confessed that I like to spell the word, through, as “thru” but that I’d never do that in the classroom. And I step back and look at the word on the board and ask “What’s up with that -gh!?” and explain my pseudo-history of English when Anglo-Saxon germanic merged with Norman french and how the German word for “through” is “durch” and I walk them through a pseudo-linguistic derivation: durch → thurch → thruch → thru at which point I widen my eyes in mock shock and put my hand over my mouth. And some of them chuckle. To demonstrate the value of understanding even little things.
And every day of course, I teach them some algebra. Because that’s what I was hired to do.