The Look

I wish I was one of those teachers with “the look.” We all have been caught, or more aptly, run over, by the look. You know the one your mother stung you with when you were talking too loudly in church or when you were interrupting an adult at the dinner table. My fiancé, as a mother, also has developed “the look.” She can just glare at Casey or Koko and freeze the words right in their mouths or cause them to straighten right up and cease whatever it is that they are doing.

I have no such look. In fact, now that I think about it, most of the people I know who had the look were women. Many of my elementary school teachers could sting you with the look worse than any detention or verbal reprimand. Though in high school I do recall one time in science when my friend Lon and I were talking and laughing about some stupid thing while Mr. Lundeen was busy grading tests. I don’t know how long we continued acting like idiots. I only recall feeling this silence fall on us. I looked up and saw everyone staring at us. Then I continued to peer forward and saw Mr. Lundeen, seated behind his desk, glaring at us. Of course, his glare was magnified by his coke bottle thick bifocals. When that laser beam look hit me I dropped my gaze and let my sentence die in the middle of my mouth.

For me, the look is useless. I can stare, but I feel foolish. I can furrow my brow, but I feel even more foolish. So I resort to the next best thing - when necessary (and it isn’t often) - I yell. Since I yell so infrequently, when I do it tends to get the job done. Though whenever I do yell, most of my students have a totally different kind of look on there face - that of shock - and I end up feeling guilty about it.

In fact, I think there should be a class devoted to teaching 'the look' to prospective teachers in college. I would love to sit in on that class. Of course, that is a ludicrous idea. But so was learning the crap that I did in most of my education classes in college, such as ICP training (I think that was the name of it) which was part of my discipline class. We learned how to rub just beneath a student's nose in case they were biting us. Supposedly, it is human instinct to stop biting when they are rubbed just beneath the nose. The other technique we were taught was to grab the back of their head and hold them to us. That way we don't pull away - as one unfortunate teacher did - or so our instructer said - and ended up pulling loose all the tendons in her arm. Other than to laugh at the uselessness of most of my college education classes, that training has been worthless to me. Now if they'd have taught us how to use 'the look,' that might have been different.