I just hit the timer on my twenty minutes and I feel a bit of panic, the thought of what if I can’t say anything meaningful in the next twenty minutes? What if I get stuck in writer’s block?

Well, so be it. 

This format for this blog is that I will write for only twenty minutes, a hard twenty. I got this term from the concept of having a Hard Five if you want to be a stand-up comedian, five minutes of solid material, hopefully funny, that you can give an audience. My friend Sophie taught a class on developing your hard five at The Stone Independent School where I taught the last four years of my teaching career. 

Think of that, a school where you could have time in the day devoted to becoming a comedian? Amazing.

When I left my previous school for Stone I had been a middle school science teacher for twenty-two years. And I loved it. If you’d ask most people, even teachers, if they’d like to teach middle school kids their quick reaction is, often, “Are you kidding?”

Maybe that should go into my hard five, start off with the question, “So, how many of you would like to teach middle school?” Better, I could start with, “When I was born, my parents looked at me and said, ‘Look at him! I think he has the chance to become a middle school science teacher!’”

It’s hard to say whether that line might work on an audience. And it is all but certain that I’ll never try it. Every once in a while I think, “You know, maybe I would like being a stand up comic.” When I think back to my years as a middle school teacher, there were moments when that type of skill got me through, especially the idea of dealing with hecklers. If you want to teach middle school, if your parents’ first thought when you are born is that you could aspire to such a career, you better get a thick skin and develop a patter to deal with the other comedians in the room.

And so, so, so many middle school students are ready to pounce when you slip up. The best way to control this, of course, is for the students to be afraid of you. A fellow teacher early in my career joked that a good start to the year is to walk in the room to meet your students, accidentally kick the trash can, and then turn on the students and ask, “Who did that? Tell me now, who did that?”

Well, that wasn’t exactly the path I took, though there were many times in class I wished I could use such a fear factor to regain control of the classroom.

As when I was teaching my students the magic of static electricity one spring day. I had put a wooden meter stick on a watch glass, a shallow glass dish for mixing powders or chemicals, balancing the meter stick just right so that it spun on a table with almost no friction. Then I brought a charged balloon up to it, charged on bunny fur as I was and still am bald, and the meter stick would magically pull toward the balloon.

It really seems like magic, but is just static electricity. So, as I often did with demonstrations, I came up with a fun name. I called this demo “The Meter Stick of Happiness”. Except for that one day when I mispronounced the word “happiness”. I did things like that all the time, on purpose, on the spur of the moment, and thought it was funny every time, though of course that is a matter of opinion.

In this case, it was pretty funny. Well, really funny. Instead of saying “happiness” I said, “hap-penis”, emphasis on the word “penis”. If you start intentionally and randomly mispronouncing words wrong in front of middle school students, not knowing ahead of time what might happen, you deserve what you get.

And what I got was the loss of about fifteen minutes of instructional time. Gone. They couldn’t stop laughing at me. I couldn’t stop laughing at me. I went through many theatrics of lamenting this poor decision making, thinking out loud how long it would take to be fired, begging the students to not tell anyone, promising (bribing) the students with a donut party, all the while just laughing to myself, knowing I would give them a donut party and also knowing that they would walk out of the room regardless and tell everyone they saw what happened.

Which they did. 

And, I’m guessing, they still remember that particular class, and maybe smile a bit, which I do as well.

Twenty minutes is up.