I’d like to share my most embarrassing moment (so far) as a teacher with you while it's still fresh in my mind. Think of it as a gift to be remembered next time you feel like you’re having a rubbish day at work. Hopefully it will make you smile or at least think - thank fuck that wasn’t me.
Let me begin by sitting the scene… I only work three days a week at the Tech school while I continue to run my design business on the remaining two days. My three days are a 50/50 split between helping to co-ordinate our pathway programs (Student Leadership, Girls/Boys in STEM and STEM Academy) and being a class room teacher for our regular programming. Given my natural creative inclination, I’ve ended up running a lot of our prototyping classes which I love because it makes use of my design skills using illustrator as a designer.
In our prototyping classes we don’t use illustrator but a program called X Tool which comes with the X Tool laser cutters that we use at the Tech School. It's basically a simplified version of illustrator that we need our students to be comfortable using in order to use the laser cutters properly. We have a pretty standard class that we run through where we make small stadium sections out of precut cardboard to explore how cardboard can be used to make 3D structures. Once we’ve completed the stadium, by joining up each team's section, we jump on laptops and we do a session on X Tool.
Side quest: One thing that is shocking/interesting/surprising is the amount of students who have never used a mouse. As a designer who has used a computer for the last 20 years with a mouse or a wacom tablet I find this news distressing. It’s so common that now every class I do a quick ‘mouse 101’ to show students how the left/right mouse click works, especially considering most of the extended menu actions are available with a right mouse click. Most of my students will also try to swipe the screen at least once or twice throughout the class before they realise it's just a standard laptop and not a touch screen. They have bypassed entire swathes of technological developments and arrived at tablets having never used a mouse or keyboard before! Wild!
Anyway, back to X Tool. I walk the students through a small project together where we build a little christmas tree. It's cute and simple enough that I had a group of Grade 6 students a few weeks ago that did a great job. I’ve found that stepping the whole class through the process at the same time means that everyone arrives at the same (ish) outcome together. Some students race ahead but I get them to help their classmates who might be struggling / haven't listened to instructions.
Once we’ve drawn up the plans for our tree, which is built using combined triangles and rectangles, I then take the whole class over to a laser cutter and show them how to set up their design ready to be cut. It's always a bit messy because I normally have around 24 students huddled around one laser cutter showing them what to do on a 14inch laptop screen. Most of the time, this part of the presentation is easy, it's fun and I get to talk about lasers but not this week…
On Wednesday this week I had 24 Year 9 students from Grammar. We've had ALL of their Year 9 classes in over the last few weeks as they’re getting two of our loan laser cutters for an upcoming project. I was doing my safety spiel in front of the laser cutter and didn’t have a lot of room due the crowd surrounding me when I realised I needed some actual cardboard in the laser cutter for my demonstration.
There were a few pieces to the right of me so I scooted past the front of the laser cutter to grab some while the class was positioning themselves. I had to stick super close to the bench as I quickly squeezed passed students when I heard a MASSIVE RIP. Not a little, dainty, innocent rip, but a loud, angry rip. I was so squeezed in that I couldn't even really see what had happened until I got back into my clearing in front of the laser cutter with my fresh cardboard.
When I looked down I had ripped my cords from my hip pocket to below the knee. I’ve attached a picture so you can understand how noticeable and unignorable this rip was. I now had all 24 students full attention. It was so shocking that all I could say was that this was the most embarrassing thing that has happened to me as a teacher and I hoped the students appreciated how important this moment will be in my career. It was so ridiculous that I wasn’t quite sure what to do so I just pinched the fabric together, leaned awkwardly against the bench and tried (to the best of my ability) to continue on with the demonstration.
Luckily the supporting teacher went out and told our awesome admin lady, Kerryn what happened and all of sudden staff from all over the place (who were all trying so hard not to laugh) started coming in with anything they could find that might help. A needle and wax thread from the leather working kit? Some duct tape? We ended up going with some bull dog clips while I quickly rang Matt and simply said “I need more pants babe - now - please” 10 minutes later I had a pair of jeans delivered to me in class by Kerryn who was doing such a great job of remaining professional (and not crying with laughter) given the absurd situation.
I was super impressed with the students. They did a great job of keeping it together. I gave them all the opportunity to laugh because it was funny. Ripping your pants is slap-stick, cartoon funny. The whole thing was hilarious. If it was going to happen to anyone it might as well be me. From my perspective, it’s just more evidence that everything in life is either good news or good story.
