It's Picture Day (Genre Reflection #2)

It’s picture day.  Today’s the day to look your best, shimmer brightly, and make a permanent impression.

The newly refined young men and women file into the steamy classroom on the cramped third floor of Awesome High School with combed hair, tied shoes, and ironed clothes.

This picture is going in the yearbook.  This picture will follow you for the rest of your life.

With a tiny twinkle in their eyes, they all sparkle just a little bit brighter today.  Anna flashes a toothy smile at a compact mirror she carries in her purse as a final measure.  Jackson and Nicholas, two smiley boys who love making others laugh, scramble to get ready for their photographs.  Other students, also unashamedly, ready themselves for their pictures.  My eyes fixed on the students’ eager expressions, it finally hits me.  Mrs. Bradley follows the students with their picture packets as they walk down the hallway together in a messy line while I am left alone in the overheated classroom with William Shakespeare posters, a chalky blackboard, and haiku poems.  I am left alone to ponder my new discovery at 9:57 in the morning by myself.  I walk over to the window, gaze out at the busy highway, and it let sink in: these students care.  If they care about their appearance on picture day, they are bound to care about things such as grades, school, teachers, and their future.  That is all I need.

Before this exact moment, I was longing for affirmation; I needed to know that my students are even capable of caring.  It sounds awful, but makes sense after teaching The Creation of the Navajo People not to a class of twenty-one students, but to a class of twenty-one zombies.  Zombies who stare blankly and refuse to answer discussion questions unless directly called upon.  Today is different though.  I got a glimpse of what I was dying to see.

Students don’t care.  I’ve heard this and other variations of the idea many times.  Maybe, just maybe, I have even occasionally believed it, too.  I will never believe it again though. Not after today. Students care.  They may not care about Native American poetry, literature vocabulary, or 11-sentence paragraphs, but they care about something.  For now, they may only care about the exact placement of each strand of their recently colored treated hair on picture day, but I can use this concept to make students show me that they care about something deeper.  Not only is it my duty, but it is one of my goals as a teacher.  It will take time and might possibly make me want to rip the hair out of my scalp, but I must persuade students to show me the something they care about and when I can skillfully do this, I can make them care about dramatic irony, understatements, iambic pentameter, and American Romanticism, just like it’s picture day.

*All names have been changed to pseudonyms.