Survival Day

Our current principal has a term for the day before any holiday or vacation - Survival Day.  As I look back at the decades of teaching I have encountered, I realize that the term fits.  When you look back yourself, try to remember what your experience was like as a student.  My guess is that you can actually transport back to the excitement that you felt and how much you wanted to be done with that day.

Now imagine what it had to be like for your teachers.  I may be giving away a trade secret here, but I don't really care.  Almost all teachers feel the same as their students on that day.  Especially at Christmas.  Not only did they need to teach that day, but they had to be prepared for whatever Christmas held for them when that final day before vacation ended.  I remember one teacher, in the days before cell phones and phones in classrooms, who could be seen sprinting down the hall to the office to make phone calls to family about changes that need to be made due to a busted water pipe in her home.

So what happens on "Survival Day."  Most of you probably remember movies.  I know that over the years during my plan period I could hear everything from "Hamlet" to "Beethovan" (the dog not the composer).  Of course, many classrooms had theme parties.  The best were always in two subject areas: home economics (now called Family and Consumer Science) and foreign language (now called World Languages).  In the foods classes it would be fresh baked cookies, cakes, and fudge.  The language classes would have representative foods of the cultures that they were studying.  I was always invited, and how could I refuse, although, in retrospect, I should have paid more attention to who had prepared the food.

Because I taught English and Humanities, I had to be more creative.  The English classes were hard for me.  Some years I would have a review game that related to what I was teaching.  Others, I was just plain lazy and threw on a movie that I manipulated to work with the curriculum.  In later years I made the day an "Amnesty Day."  A day that allowed students to make up work that they hadn't completed.  No matter what I tried, each day was truly a survival day.  The students and I were just trying to make it to the end of the day.

The class that I didn't have trouble deciding what to do was Humanities.  In this class the students chose the units that we studied, so I could manipulate their choice to do what I knew would work just before a holiday.  In a future blog I will explain the Humanities class further and relate stories that came from the class.  Every single one of the 56 different sections of Humanities chose one particular unit every time - Reality and Fantasy.  That gave me the opportunity to place it just before a holiday or vacation.

One of my favorite choices was the Paul McCartney is Dead story.  As a Beatles fan my whole life, I had been able to piece together this story from the moment it broke while listening to CKLW out of Detroit while studying in my dorm room after midnight.  Now, this story was obviously a hoax, but I pulled out my Beatles albums as the evidence was presented to me that night.  As an impressionable boy of 19, I was drawn in as each new clue came to me.

So, when I pondered what to do with the day before Christmas in the late 70's, I turned back to that night in my dorm room to recreate what I had learned with the focus on whether this was real or a story that was created by either the Beatles or a disc jockey who was bored.  It went so well the first time that I carried this on for as long as the class met.  Because it was a semester course, that means at least twice a year (more when we went to block 4) for over 25 years, I presented the story verbatim from my memories, and the discussion came naturally from that.

In the last few years, I have become very active on Facebook because I truly enjoy tracking the lives of former students.  Invariably, when a former Humanities class student finds me, one of the memories that they relate back to me is the day that we discussed Paul is Dead.  I doubt if there are too many educators that can say that their former students remember what was taught on the day before Christmas vacation.  Did it make a point?  I will leave it to my readers to let me know.  What I do know is that it got me through Survival Day.