“Anyone? Anyone? Something d-o-o economics…”
I gave a really stupid lecture the other day about the value of money. It would not have been notable had I not been observed by my supervisor, the scary hardliner vice principal that all the students absolutely hate.
The topic itself (the value of money) is not a strength of mine. My co-operating teacher suggested (read: insisted) that I cover this topic. “You know,” he said cavalierly, “commodity currency, fiat, where money gets its value, that kind of thing.” Basically: “Where does money get its value?” We’re not talking the simple answer (“from the government” or even “from limited supply,” though those things apply). We are talking about complex, abstract concepts about the idea that we can formulate a medium of exchange so that if you and I make a transaction, for example, we know that we both understand the unit of account in the same way.
So, my first problem is that the topic is, on its own, kind of boring as fuck and also not something that I can expound on very eloquently. But, in order to prove to both my co-operating teacher and my supervisor that I can write lessons and lectures that conform to state standards with precision and excellence, as well as take an abstract topic and help students make the connections between the words in their textbook and the real world around them, I wrote a stringent lesson on the value of money, using Ithaca Hours as the case study. We even watched a corny little video about people buying massage oil and espresso at the Co-Op with their Ithaca Hours. Boring, yes, but we can’t watch Sundance Channel documentaries and gaze at photographs of the Civil Rights movement every day.
My second problem was that I had kept myself up past my bedtime not only the night before, but the night before that, leaving me hazy and confused. The large coffee with 2 shots of espresso went absolutely right through me with no buzz or caffeine orgasm whatsoever (prompting a 10 minute tantrum in the teacher’s lounge, during which I claimed that the coffee place had given me “broken coffee” and I ate a lemon Danish in an attempt to eke out a sugar high), and so when I started this lecture, I probably looked like I’d been run over by the Tired Truck. (After my performance at high school, I went to BC and took a disco nap in the library, and then groggily went to class where I had to give another presentation on ideas about a historic field trip to the Back Bay Fens. The professor asked me about 10 million questions and I kept wanting to ask him to please, if he could, just shut the fuck up. )
So, anyway, the value of money: I knew I wouldn’t have them jumping out of their seats in delight, salivating at the word “fiat,” or immediately rushing the door to get on the Federal Reserve announcement mailing list. The students are very adept at looking like they are paying attention or doing seatwork even when they are doing neither, so my goal for this lesson was moderate/feigned interest, cursory completion of the worksheet, and actual mastery of 3 key concepts. But, res ipsa loquiter: boring topic + tired teacher + the roaming restless, underslept mind of said teacher = you’re sleeping before I even open my mouth. What saved me from having 20 dead-asleep students on my hands was the fact that they knew I was being observed. That they acted in solidarity with me is sweet; they struggled, despite the oppressive banality, to keep themselves awake. My favorite student propped his eyes open with his fingers at one point, and then when that didn’t seem to work, he (I am not making this up) shoved an entire Snickers bar in his mouth and stared at me wide-eyed.
The thing about my supervisor/vice principal is that she is one of these classically intense people. She seems to like me a lot (probably because I am totally intense, even though I hope, for the sake of all relationships past, present and future that I am not intense in the same way that she is), but she is, as one of my co-teachers said, a hard-liner. She sends out multiple email reminders about upcoming assignments (with increasing hysteria nearing the due date), listens with a wide-eyed and penetrating gaze that seems to have origins in soap opera dramatics, and – on a completely unrelated note – has the biggest, heaviest-looking engagement ring I have ever seen. I often see her at 2:30 pm, running around in her stilettos, still clutching her paper Dunkin Donuts bag that still has her ham and egg breakfast biscuit that she never got around to eating for breakfast. And then she often sits in the afternoon meeting picking apart that sandwich, ejecting the biscuit into the trash and then eating the ham and the egg patty separately.
Also: Once, when I was talking about a long-distance lover, she for some reason revealed that the pet name for “having sex” that she and her boyfriend use is “the hot dog sandwich.”
So, anyway, all that really happened was that everybody was trapped by my underslept and nearly excruciating lecture. Bored as fuck, sick and tired of money, and cognizant of sleep and hysteria as sly enemies, one’s only option in that room was either to observe me or observe me being observed. In honest reflection, I feel like I was just a cuter version of the teacher in Ferris Beuller’s day off ( “It’s called a Laffer Curve. Anyone seen this before? Anyone, anyone? Class?” ). I was even wearing a sweater vest and loafers. I almost went for the bow tie, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.
At one point, I mentioned that other cities had Ithaca Hours, but to name some examples, all that I could remember was Santa Cruz and Arcata.
“Isn’t that where you’re from?” my favorite (pet) student said. “Did you use the currency dollars things?”
“No, I didn’t,” I replied. “There weren’t many places to use them. Just massage therapists and head shops, really.”
Students either didn’t hear me, didn’t care, or chose not to laugh at head shop. At first I was horrified by what was really a faux pas (head shop? Please), but then I was disappointed that what could have been a funny-haha score-one-for-the-subtly-cool-subcultural-teacher moment went nowhere. Like everything about this fucking lecture! It was one of these total “is this thing on?” moments. Someone mentioned that Ithaca is “a pretty nice town.” I said, dryly and dead-pan, “Ithaca is Gorges,” thinking that I was so clever. Ha ha, like the t-shirt. Ithaca is Gorges. Get it? Hmmm. Hey, Ivy: they’ve probably never seen the t-shirts, and, really, that joke doesn’t fucking work if you just say it out loud.
I sat through my post-observation reflection with my supervisor, while she asked me what was going on, just laughing and laughing on the inside. When she asked how I felt about the lecture, I honestly said, “You know what. We win some and we lose some. Shit happens.”
She said, “Ivy, you’re a pretty smart cookie.”
And gave me the highest marks that I could receive on the lesson observation. Score another one for the eccentric teacher.
