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Published Monday, January 31, 2005
The Dance Instructor
By David Meadow

            The vampire was as good as dead.  Sunlight had hit him head-on, and he writhed in agony as it roasted him from the inside out.  Those looking on were terrified; the fiend might be gone for all time, but force of his evil chilled them even as he perished.  Suddenly, just as his eyes were about to close, he jerked himself a foot off the ground, uttered one last vile hiss, and collapsed.

            I burst out laughing.

“Michael, Michael!” I beamed at the scenery-chewing fifth-grader.  “That was brilliant!  I couldn’t have done it better myself.”  And it was true.  I had not done it better myself when I demonstrated “vampire getting hit with sunlight” for the young actors in the making.  It was Michael who would add the teaser at the end.  He just thought it was scarier that way.  It’s moments like these, when students can outdo me because they’re engaged and willing to take risks, that make me love my job.  And if any student specializes in outdoing me, it’s Michael.

            Right now, I am leading enrichment activities with fifth through eighth graders at an after-school program.  My task is very open-ended:  find where my interests overlap with the students’ interests, and keep them amused yet inquiring for the time that I am there.  Michael will go for almost anything I offer.  My boss swears that kids will be happy to count paper clips with you if they like you, but that the relationship has to be there first.  So far, she seems to be right – though there is a chicken-and-egg element to the building of relationships.  I think it counts for a lot that Michael and some of the other fifth-graders already liked bombastic speeches, weird voices, and enchanted suits of armor when I met them.

            I have to say that this one student has been a very stabilizing force for me so far.  Here I am working in the mainstream middle-school world, where people who don’t know sports don’t know anything, clothes are the ultimate mark of refinement, and everything bad is “gay.”  It is a tough place for a cultural snob like me to be.  A child who cares about movies made before he was born – never mind books – is a welcome rock in the storm.  It’s not that I don’t try to make the whole crew more literate, but Michael doesn’t require me to be as subversive as I have to be with the others.  During the unstructured time, he and I can comfortably have long drawn-out conversations, in which I remind him now and then to let me have about half the airtime (what a concept) and not to ruin the ending to the current installment of Harry Potter.  One time, when I was floating the idea of a speech and debate group, Michael pitched a speech to me that I couldn’t possibly transcribe fast enough, detailing how his innovative energy source would spare the consumer “hour after countless hour” of unnecessary effort. 

While there are many positive vibes between me and Michael, he is truly a handful:  he loses focus easily, has a surprisingly short temper, and is impulsive to the point of physical hazard.  His full-time teachers find themselves playing “bad cop” with him a lot more often than I do (which isn’t just a matter of job description; I play “bad cop” a lot in this job).  I think Michael just shows us very different sides of himself.  It helps him that he reminds me of myself at that age – precocious, an enthusiastic reader, and very much in my own world.  It’s a mixed blessing for him as for me.  I felt delight, annoyance, and extreme-déjà vu empathy when we were trying to write a story with some other boys as a group, and Michael threw out a long, rambling proposal about an evil wizard animating the dead and making them his minions – to the confounded replies of “What are ‘minions’?”

            Besides the obvious social friction that these breathless tangents generate for Michael, they also can take him away from schoolwork.  Most of it really does bore him to tears.  He knows he is supposed to do it all the same, but Michael is not immune to flat-out laziness, or, for that matter, the temptation to explain it away.  He got woefully behind on one workbook toward the end of the first semester.  Teachers were fuming at him and probably giving him the impression that he was never going to work his way out of debt.  Since I seem to be “good cop” for him, I sat him down and suggested a one-week plan to get caught up.  Though he perceived it as endless, it amounted to several extra pages a night and a few extra nags from me.  He was current by the end of the week.  I was proud. “I’ll bet it’s a relief to be caught up, huh?”  I asked.  Michael rolled his eyes and sighed, “I felt like a car with a potato stuck in the exhaust pipe.”

Despite all the drama, Michael displays a certain joie de vivre that is, I think, worth emulating.  The behaviors that are just erratic and irritating when I’m in the wrong mood have a joyous spontaneity when I’m in the right one.  Certainly, he needs more self-control.  However, that only begs the question, Do I have self-control – and is the control concentrated in the wrong places?  All teachers need to free up their spontaneity and joie de vivre; they go insane otherwise.

This thought, familiar to me, surfaces most strongly when I observe how Michael dances through life – literally.  He dances pretty much whenever any actual music comes on, and at other times, where others might simply fidget, he breaks out dancing to music only he can hear.  The kid will really bust a move for a few seconds, perhaps using a slight lunge and shimmy to glide from the door to his seat.  Then he’s going right along to the next order of business.  But the dancing manifests itself more subtly as well.  One day, during “down time,” when the students can do whatever they want that doesn’t bother the others, Michael fired up a typing practice game.  He wasn’t really playing the game; he was striking keys randomly and rapidly so that animated objects flew in a frantic hail across the screen.  I was tempted to ask him to do something more constructive, but the little guy was clearly soothed by all this anarchy after his long day at school, “dancing” as he sat with a tiny head bob here and a shoulder wag there.  It strikes me now that the dancing was mostly in his brain.

Do I dance enough with my own brain now?  Probably not.  But that’s what spontaneity is about – you duck and weave, somersault, or stand stock-still as the moment requires.  Though I am always trying to cultivate my mind, it is one thing to cultivate one’s mind, and quite another to dance with it.  I look forward to doing just that.  I've got to stay agile if I want to nurture young brains figuring out how to dance their own way forward.

David Meadow received his Ed.M. in 2004.