Always be slightly weirder than the kids

Students, young people, are looking for difference, for challenge, for inspiration. They do not want you to be cool or hip or whatever other street word you can think of to describe the socially acceptable. There is nothing worse for a student than a teacher who thinks they are one of them. They do not want an equal; they want a teacher, a mentor, someone to look up to.  The reality is that young people want rules and regulations, a structure to their world and people they can see, forever and a day, as ‘sir’ or ‘Miss’. No matter how long you are in this game nothing will top the weirdness (and frankly cool) of someone only four or five years your junior returning for a school reunion and refusing to use your first name.

Being weirder than the kids allows you to set a social and sometimes spatial boundary between you and them, and this will be important. Boundaries are important in any kind of education.

Use whatever you can. Some teachers I have known use a way of speaking or their vocabulary. They insist on utilizing language properly, allowing the student to see their speech pattern as the ideal, or the ‘other’. The dual benefit is of course that every day the students were exposed to language being used as it ought to be, but they were also in a room with someone who was definitely different.

Some teachers will use their delight in obscure texts, novels, plays, film or music. The fact that you have experienced these things and can talk about them freely enables the students to see the other parts of the world without having to leave the security of their own world view.

A previous incarnation can be helpful. What have you done, where have you been, what hobbies do you have, how do you dress, what is there of you that allows them a window to the world?

You will fascinate the people you teach or train. You may not think you do, but you will. They want to know and understand who you are and more importantly why they should listen to you. Being slightly weirder than them allows you to add colour to the drab framework the student will automatically see, to stand apart from a group who will be in need of leadership and to reveal in yourself a unique humanity that they will hopefully connect with.

If you can be yourself in the classroom and wear your differences as a badge of pride you will win their hearts and inevitably their minds.

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