The most powerful tool you possess as a teacher is not your frown. Not your yell or scream. Not your ability to take away recesses. Not your ability to make a call home or initiate a referral.
It’s your smile.
Some teachers smile all the time, which diminishes the power of the tool.
As I matured as a teacher, I refined the “tabula rasa” countenance – the blank slate: not happy, not sad, not mad – and used it most of the time in class.
Leave something to mystery. Don’t reveal everything all at once.
As one of my kids once aptly remarked, “I don’t know if you’re Harry Potter after he grew up or Severus Snape before he got old.”
Consider me a calm, black, three-piece suit with the countenance of the Sphynx.
The tabula rasa sets up the smile.
My lack out ubiquitous facial signaling to students made me refine my verbal communication skills.
You see, in my world, nothing was more worthless, banal, or cliché as a grinning teacher repeatedly blurting “Good job” to a class as if they were an animatronic character at Chucky Cheese.
Better to tabula rasa the moment and say something to the effect of, “I really admire how you were able to keep the rhythm so accurate when you were playing those chords with three mallets on the xylophone.”
Hundreds of times I called kids up to the front of the class with my tabula rasa physiognomy firmly in place to tell them exactly what a wonderful impression their music had made upon me.
I would usually close with a firm “That was fantastic”.
Many times they would say, “But I thought you were angry with me” to which I would respond “Do I have to drip of sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows when I tell you how impressed I am with your work? No, I don’t.”
“So, Holmes”, you may be asking, “did you ever smile?”
Of course I did.
Whenever I played piano, guitar, or when I sang.
When kids smiled at me, you could detect the faintest elevation in one of the corners of my mouth.
Did I ever emit a bat-blippy crazy smile?
You bet!
When?
When kids made honest music.
When they sang, or played rhythms or melodies, or chords, or pianos, or guitars.
When the music they made traveled through their hearts.
My smile told kids that they had finally gotten to me, that they had found the hidden button, that they had actually done something to influence how they were positively percieved by someone else.
Then I went nuts. I opened the classroom door so that the whole school could hear the wondrous sounds they created – and I told the kids that’s why I was opening the doors.
I would jump up and down and laugh Scrooge’s laugh from Christmas morning when he realized it had all been a dream and that he could live his life forward in the manner consistent with his newly found heart.
And I could get silly – but usually only closer to the end of class.
I smiled a lot at chorus rehearsals – which was the time most chorus directors need a whip and a chair to keep the masses in control.
But I approached it more like a rite of passage: they were now out of the classroom, getting ready to gig, which signifies that they are like me - a musician!
All you music tech heads out there know that MIDI control data runs between 0 and 127.
Think of your smile as fluctuating somewhere between those two numbers. Aim for nuance – not “all or nothing at all”.
Did I break my own rules on smiling? Yes. Sometimes too much, sometimes too little.
The important thing was that I had a concept of the power and significance of my smile on others, how and when to use it, and how to elicit a smile from my students.
Is your smile doing all it can in your classroom? Are you maximizing its effectiveness?
Now that I’m not teaching anymore and think back on my students, I embrace the lyrics of Paul Francis Webster to Johnny Mercer’s melody just a bit more tightly:
“Now when I remember spring
All the joy that love can bring
I will be remembering
The shadow of your smile.”
It’s your smile.
Some teachers smile all the time, which diminishes the power of the tool.
As I matured as a teacher, I refined the “tabula rasa” countenance – the blank slate: not happy, not sad, not mad – and used it most of the time in class.
Leave something to mystery. Don’t reveal everything all at once.
As one of my kids once aptly remarked, “I don’t know if you’re Harry Potter after he grew up or Severus Snape before he got old.”
Consider me a calm, black, three-piece suit with the countenance of the Sphynx.
The tabula rasa sets up the smile.
My lack out ubiquitous facial signaling to students made me refine my verbal communication skills.
You see, in my world, nothing was more worthless, banal, or cliché as a grinning teacher repeatedly blurting “Good job” to a class as if they were an animatronic character at Chucky Cheese.
Better to tabula rasa the moment and say something to the effect of, “I really admire how you were able to keep the rhythm so accurate when you were playing those chords with three mallets on the xylophone.”
Hundreds of times I called kids up to the front of the class with my tabula rasa physiognomy firmly in place to tell them exactly what a wonderful impression their music had made upon me.
I would usually close with a firm “That was fantastic”.
Many times they would say, “But I thought you were angry with me” to which I would respond “Do I have to drip of sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows when I tell you how impressed I am with your work? No, I don’t.”
“So, Holmes”, you may be asking, “did you ever smile?”
Of course I did.
Whenever I played piano, guitar, or when I sang.
When kids smiled at me, you could detect the faintest elevation in one of the corners of my mouth.
Did I ever emit a bat-blippy crazy smile?
You bet!
When?
When kids made honest music.
When they sang, or played rhythms or melodies, or chords, or pianos, or guitars.
When the music they made traveled through their hearts.
My smile told kids that they had finally gotten to me, that they had found the hidden button, that they had actually done something to influence how they were positively percieved by someone else.
Then I went nuts. I opened the classroom door so that the whole school could hear the wondrous sounds they created – and I told the kids that’s why I was opening the doors.
I would jump up and down and laugh Scrooge’s laugh from Christmas morning when he realized it had all been a dream and that he could live his life forward in the manner consistent with his newly found heart.
And I could get silly – but usually only closer to the end of class.
I smiled a lot at chorus rehearsals – which was the time most chorus directors need a whip and a chair to keep the masses in control.
But I approached it more like a rite of passage: they were now out of the classroom, getting ready to gig, which signifies that they are like me - a musician!
All you music tech heads out there know that MIDI control data runs between 0 and 127.
Think of your smile as fluctuating somewhere between those two numbers. Aim for nuance – not “all or nothing at all”.
Did I break my own rules on smiling? Yes. Sometimes too much, sometimes too little.
The important thing was that I had a concept of the power and significance of my smile on others, how and when to use it, and how to elicit a smile from my students.
Is your smile doing all it can in your classroom? Are you maximizing its effectiveness?
Now that I’m not teaching anymore and think back on my students, I embrace the lyrics of Paul Francis Webster to Johnny Mercer’s melody just a bit more tightly:
“Now when I remember spring
All the joy that love can bring
I will be remembering
The shadow of your smile.”
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