You can read her five weird things over at Seedlings in Stone. Cher Chariot and Lightning Craver already responded, so I figured it was time to get on board. As per L. L. ’s odd rules, here are five odd things about me.
1. I was an exchange student to Germany when I was 16. I won a contest to go, but I didn’t speak a lick of German. Turned out to be a pretty cool year. My host family let me do some wild stuff: We tore down a three story house with our bare hands (and a sledgehammer). I joined them in the town festival play Der Meistertrunk or The Long Drink, the only onstage extra who couldn’t understand the dialogue of the play he was in (and I carried a six foot spear). There are some other things I did that I won’t mention here. I was Lutheran that year. It was a good year. (On the first link, in the third picture, you can see several very tall poles in the corner behind the actors. Those are the spears. That is where I stood.)
2. My wife and I met in a church play. Elijah the Musical. She was Jezebel. I was Ahab. We sang and danced. We parted the Jordan river with two baggies of blue colored water on an overhead projector. During the curtain call, I kissed her for the first time, but her boyfriend wasn’t in the audience that night. (You can see it on video.) How many people have their first kiss on video? Be sure to watch me strut out later on all proud of myself. Now we run the drama ministry at our church.
3. I made my students sing and called them sinners. When I taught High School AP English, I used to do some wacky stuff. I would dress up like Jonathan Edwards and preach “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” to them in all earnestness. Slapping a stick on their desks and damning them to hell. Good times. I also made them line up in military formation and sing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as we marched up and down the halls. That was part of the Grapes of Wrath unit. Some of the other teachers didn’t like me very much.
4. In college I had the weirdest job in the world. I was part of an ergonomic study to measure the long-term effects of standing on the human body. So I would go to work every day for six hours and just stand around. They had a table that was chest high, so we could work on homework and stuff. Part of the study measured the longterm effects of typing. We all worked on Mavis Beacon typing tutorial, and I learned to touch type really well. Four hours of practice every day for six weeks. You can learn too!
5. I accidentally converted a German Muslim exhange student who was in my high school English class. As a teacher I tried to be really careful to be honest about my faith but never proselytize. After 9-11 this student was very upset with her host family. She was ethnically Afghan and her host father was grilling her about the Taliban on a regular basis. She felt attacked. “And they won’t even let me go to church,” she said. I took that to mean Christian Church. So I started reading the Bible with her at lunch and on break. It was several weeks before I figured out that she was Muslim. Had I known I never would have been so bold. I baptised her at the same church where I had played Ahab in Elijah the Musical. She and I are still very close.
It’s all true, Senator. Really.
{ 12 comments }
Good stuff, Mark. Each one of them is odd, but in a good way, of course!
…and awesome about the exchange student and the ministry and friendship you had/have with her.
Well, the assignment was odd.
You know, I had fun thinking back for those weird things I’ve done. That student’s story is even more amazing than I went into here. She was born on September 11, 1985. Which means she had brought a birthday cake to share with her friends in school that day. She had an uncle living in New York City. And another uncle living in Kabul, Afghanistan. And she was quietly Muslim.
By May she had become a symbol of hope and life for our entire community. It’s put her in an awkward position ultimately. No one makes a good symbol, but she is a good person. And I love her dearly.
Regarding #5: (conversion to Christ)
Praise God! That’s amazing!
Regarding #3: (eccentric teaching styles, singing/marching)
(weeping) I’ve finally found my long lost brother–my twin, separated at birth!
So, what were the long-term effects of standing? I’m sitting on the edge of my seat . . .
I always get myself in trouble when I mention all the weird names I get called. Somebody (there’s one in every crowd) always decides to start calling me one of them on purpose!
Several of your odd things had redeeming value (marriage, conversionj, learning to type). I guess I should have dug a little deeper on mine.
Craver, brother, I knew I had a twin!
Charity, odd almost always has unsettling depth for me.
For everyone, the long term effects of standing were actually never revealed to me. But my experience was that the first weeks were much harder than you might expect. My legs would swell. And my spine would twist–they had this huge machine that mapped our spine with a little roll ball. But towards the end of the study, I think I must have toned up my “standing muscles.” Things got quite a bit easier.
What a brave English teacher you were. Listening to your class sing battle songs.
L.L., brave is not the right word. I was just scared of boredom. Theirs and mine. And I learned pretty quick that their respect for institutionalism generally caused them to go along with anything I told them to do. They’d grumble, sure, but they’d do it. We had so much fun.
I only got one piece of hate mail in a ten year career! And only one parent verbally accosted me for over an hour. All of the other abuse was significantly shorter in time duration.
On the other side of the things, I can’t count the number of students who I love and think of as “my kids.” I can’t count the number of times they email me out of the blue and hope that I’ll go back to teaching. I think the image of me still in the classroom gives them hope somehow–if nothing else than just that the experience they loved may also be loved by others. Although I also think they worry that my turning away from education is a kind of rejection of all those good memories we built together in the classroom.
But of course, I never turned away from education. I just got a different job.
Yes. A different job. Educating all us writers out here. And keeping us from boredom. (Just don’t ask me to sing the Battle Hymn, okay. Oh, and, go Bears. (Ask Craver, if you must know.))
Marcus
Thanks for sharing…you don’t happen to have a video of you as Jonathan Edwards, do you? It would make great You Tube fodder.
L.L., you are a constant encouragement. No one will force you to sing, but you may get asked.
Andre, good to hear from you man! I’ve been needing to spend some time over at EverySquareInch… Alas (or perhaps thank goodness) there is no video of me as Jonathan Edwards. Sometime I need to tell the story of the 31 Hell Cakes I received one year. Along with the cardboard hand of God sculpture which sits on my office window sill. I’ll post a picture and share as soon as we get this blog network setup for everyone. Things should slow down for me then.
Hey Mark,
So great to read about the crazy antics of another former teacher – I did my 7 year tour of duty with middle school. Made my kids immigrate into my very own world (humanities lesson). I guess perhaps I’ll get to meet you at IVP too. Yay. And Go Bears!
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