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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Bad Teaching Habits

Having a Fake Ass ‘Mick Hucknall’ as a TA

23 Thursday Jul 2020

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, music, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Anti-Theism, Atheism, Bad Teaching Habits, Existential Philosophy, Karma, Mick Hucknall, Pitt, Simply Red, TA, Teaching and Learning, Teaching Assistant


Mick Hucknall of Simply Red, circa 1989. (https://pinterest.com via Rolling Stone)

I have talked quite extensively about the nature and evolution of my own teaching, about the best and worst teachers I remember from K-12, about my profs and their teaching (or lack thereof) more than a little bit while on this blog. But, outside of Paul Riggs, I have not written much about TAs and the good, bad, and ugly there. I haven’t really discussed my own times as a TA, except to point out the pushback I’d sometimes had to deal with from students, the emasculation I had to deal with from my professors who “supervised” me.

Trying to learn how to teach and evaluate students while taking grad-level courses and preparing for oral exams, writing dissertation proposals, doing conference presentations, writing the occasional publication, and serving as a gofer for professors working on their own projects is overwhelming. Add the personal and familial to it, and it’s a wonder than anyone who isn’t from a family with a net worth of at least half-a-mil still decides to earn an advanced degree and teaches along the way. And all for less than peanuts, not even close to a living wage.

All of this is context for my one-time TA from my Existential Philosophy course from Spring 1989 at the University of Pittsburgh. You see, he was the polar opposite of the professor who taught this course. The newly-minted PhD and assistant professor for Existential Philosophy (and soon to jump ship for Georgetown that year) was a dynamic, exciting, and insightful thinker in his mid-30s, one who could take the thickest philosophical text and break it down for even students who didn’t care about the philosophical at all. The sandy-blonde version of the lead singer for Simply Red, by comparison, was boring beyond belief, and could make even the most obvious interpretations of Nietzche, Kierkegaard, and Camus sound like some theoretical mathematics he barely understood and could hardly articulate. It made our required discussion sections on Thursday afternoons a form of torture.

Mr. Australian version of Mick Hucknall, though, also had an agenda, the kind that most progressives would call problematic in 2020. He reined it in somewhat most Thursdays, but on at least two of our days, he couldn’t control himself. It didn’t really matter what the topic was, but frequently the TA would turn the discussion toward anti-theism. This was more than just atheism. One can certainly not believe in God for themselves and still respect those who do. But anti-theism is more along the lines of a Christopher Hitchens or a Bill Maher, people who love to loathe higher-power worshippers, with bits of Islamophobia and racism thrown in.

An example of fake-ass Simply Red’s behavior, courtesy of Boy @ The Window

He spent discussion after discussion railing on Christians as “people who refuse to believe that God doesn’t exist.” One of our discussions was so anti-anything other than atheism that I found it just as bigoted as anything I’d heard from Hebrew-Israelites or out of a televangelist’s mouth, and said as much. I was ignored.

But it wasn’t just the ideological bent that was obvious in this discussion section. It was the racial component. Me and the other three Black students in the section — all three were Black women — were usually quiet when sandy blonde Mick Hucknall described religion as “nonsense.” But the White students who were anti-theists chimed in like they had been suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church’s Inquisition for the past 500 years.

One class in March was really awful. It was after the professor had lectured about Kierkegaard and the “teleological suspension of the ethical” in his consideration of Abraham’s moment of decision between obeying Yahweh and killing his five-year-old son Isaac or not. Right from the start of our 50 minutes, the TA went after religion like he literally hated worshippers. He referred to monotheists as “fools” and “crazy.” The White students talked about “not putting up with religious oppressors anymore” and being “tired of [us] flaunting our Christianity in their faces.” If it had been even a year later in my education, I probably would have gone directly to the professor or the Philosophy department about this very biased form of education occurring in this classroom.

I was so glad when I didn’t have to be in sandy-blonde-Simply-Red’s discussion section anymore. But that wasn’t the last time I saw him. For at least two years afterward, I’d see him on campus, usually outside Hillman Library or the Cathedral of Learning taking a drag on a cigarette, and he recognized me, but never said hello (thank God). But, after I began grad school at Pitt, the aging fake Mick Hucknall didn’t seem to recognize me at all.

It was interesting that as I got older and made more steps to my PhD, his run toward his own must’ve stalled. The last time I saw him at Pitt was in 1998. I overheard him complaining to another grad student about his committee still not ready to declare him done with his dissertation. As burned out as I was from my own dissertation process, at least I was already done.

At that moment, I thought about saying, Ain’t karma a bitch? But I didn’t, mostly because I didn’t see the point. The golden rule of “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” applies to the just and the unjust, the believers, the non-believers, and even the anti-believers. Or, to quote Simply Red, “I, oh I, oh I, I’m gonna do the right thing.” Still, a bemused smile did make its way on my face, because he was such a terrible instructor, and likely one who had traumatized hundreds of students over the years.

David Wolf, A Teacher I Hope To Never Become

27 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Sports, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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1986 World Series, 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, AP Physics, Bad Teaching Habits, David Wolf, Escapism, Humanities, Jesse Orosco, Mets, Mother-Son Relationship, MVHS, New York Mets, Senioritis, Teaching and Learning


Film critic Gene Shalit (closest approximation I could find to David Wolf), circa 1980. (http://imdb.com).

Film critic Gene Shalit (closest approximation I could find to David Wolf), circa 1980. (http://imdb.com).

This date was one of the great ones during my Boy @ The Window years. It was a day (and evening) that almost made me forget the role I’d been in since the spring of ’81. One as the sometimes adult male with adult responsibilities on the one hand, and as the nearly ostracized emotional equivalent of a twelve-year-old on the other. But yes, even small miracles (at least in my mind at the time) did happen. The New York Metropolitans, my Mets, won Game 7 of the 1986 World Series thirty years ago on this date 8-5, a biting cold Monday night at the end of October! My Giants beat and beat up the Redskins that same evening 27-24, on their way to a 14-2 record and their first Super Bowl. My underdogs weren’t anymore.

Within three days of that ultimate day of vicarious escapism, the reality of having neglected my studies had sunk in. Or, to be completely honest, the reality of needing much more time to study than I could’ve ever devoted, even without the distractions of senioritis, my Mets and Giants winning or on their way to championships, set in. Because that’s what it would’ve taken for me to have a successful senior year at Mount Vernon High School academically. A greater commitment to AP Physics C, AP English, and AP Calculus AB than my bifurcated life would have allowed. Between four siblings ages two to seven, college applications, and constant errands and chores for my Mom, my weekends of tracking down my father at one watering hole or another, I should’ve gone off to college after my junior year. I should’ve used the summer of ’86 to take gym or something to get the one-quarter credit I needed to graduate.

Instead, here I was with the one teacher who was probably the one most ill-equipped to handle any students other than near-genius devotees to AP Physics. I had David Wolf the year before in high school Physics, so I knew how intolerant he could be toward students who were unprepared, or “just [didn’t] get it.” Or, at least I thought I knew. The week before the Mets’ Game 7 win, Wolf had given us our end-of-marking-period exam on mechanics, and the day after was when we received our exams back with grades. I had the fourth highest score out of seven students, a 22 out of 100. You can look at any grades I’d earned prior to and since this exam in any course between kindergarten and doctorate, and none come close to a 22.

But it obviously wasn’t just me.

David Wolf was another character who was sometimes funny but otherwise sucked as a teacher. It would’ve been hard for me to know what Butler had been like as a teacher when he was happily married. Wolf was a mediocre teacher on his best days because he simply didn’t care if we learned anything in his class. Of course that didn’t make him much different from most of our other teachers. What made Wolf different was the fact that he went out of his way to embarrass students, as if the shock of being outed by him would somehow make us better.

Wolf “taught” us the more difficult AP Physics C version of this Physics course, involving mechanics, electricity and magnetism. It was the equivalent of second semester Physics right from the start, and most of us needed at least a semester of Calculus to keep up with him. Had I known this was Wolf’s plan, I may well have taken my former classmate Laurell’s advice (eight years too late) and switched to AP Biology. Instead, I chose to see this as a new challenge I could take on and will myself through, just like I had in every other difficult class I’d taken up to that point. But after the first two months of the year, it crossed my mind that struggling through this course wasn’t worth it.

Sink or Swim Republican Lifeguard Cartoon, Mike Luckovich, March 14, 2013. (Luckovich/Atlanta Journal-Constitution; http://luckovich.blog.ajc.com).

Sink or Swim Republican Lifeguard Cartoon, Mike Luckovich, March 14, 2013. (Luckovich/Atlanta Journal-Constitution; http://luckovich.blog.ajc.com).

When I wrote in Boy @ The Window, “Laurell was practically using third-semester Calculus to build the Great Pyramids by comparison,” it was hyperbole, of course. Partly because Egyptian calculus was likely more complicated. And partly because Laurell had done something that I couldn’t do. She had gone to Wolf at the end of eleventh grade and borrowed from him a copy of the AP Physics textbook. She had devoted much of her summer to studying up on AP Physics and AP Calculus BC (once the harder version of AP Calculus) before day one of twelfth grade. So Laurell was going to do well, no matter what. Dozens of hours to study wasn’t sometime I had at chaotic 616, textbook weeks ahead of time or otherwise.

However, me doing well or terribly wasn’t my issue with Wolf. It was his sink-or-swim approach, with no attempt to help struggling students in any way. It was his dickish attitude, where he would literally lean on his stool or against the chalkboard insulting us as we attempted to answer a Physics problem.

Wolf’s class remained the most painful academic experience I’d have in Humanities. Period…Wolf continued to berate and belittle us, wondering, ‘Why are you still here?,’ or exclaiming ‘You decided to show up today!’ On the rare occasions I managed to solve a problem at the chalkboard, he gave me a Bronx cheer, the kind good Yankees fans gave when their team was down ten runs and a Yankee hit a home run to close the gap to nine.

Now, some would say this was good preparation for college. Where? While I certainly have known indifferent professors regarding my own abilities or their distance from other students in general, I’ve only known a few who even threw out the rare bit of sarcasm in the classroom. Plus, for courses like Physics, there were TAs who could walk students through problems better than Khan Academy. Even saying that Wolf was good preparation for graduate school would be a stretch. Quiet exclusion, rather than insults and ostracism, is the rule at the doctoral level. And having an advisor like Wolf would’ve led to blood, and not my own, plain and simple.

After years in the classroom with high school, undergrad, and grad students, I understand that being a professor isn’t the same as being a K-12 teacher. Most of the time, I’m not dealing with parents (except as students), I don’t teach five days a week, and I have the expectation that my students should behave as college students. All the more reason that as I have grown older and more experienced as an educator, the more I’ve found Wolf’s behavior objectionable, even almost unforgivable. In all seriousness, why even show up to teach if your primary form of solace at work is yelling insults at students while standing in the hallway in between class periods?

Middle School Teachers, Middle School Memories

14 Thursday May 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon New York, music, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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A.B. Davis Middle School, Algebra, Bad Teaching Habits, Duquesne University College of Education, Good Teaching Habits, Humanities, Humanities Program, Life Lessons, MCPS, Middle Schools, Montgomery County MD, Montgomery County Public Schools, Mrs. Mignone, Ms. Jeanne Longerano, Research, Science, Silver Spring Maryland, Sligo Middle School, Teacher Expectations, Teaching and Learning


A.B. Davis Middle School, Mount Vernon, NY, November 21, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins). Built in 19226, it used to be Mount Vernon High School before Black migration, the Brown decision and ending some discriminatory ability grouping practices forced the school board to build a new high school after 1954.

A.B. Davis Middle School, Mount Vernon, NY, November 21, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins). Built in 1926, it used to be Mount Vernon High School before Black migration, the Brown decision and ending some discriminatory ability grouping practices forced the school board to build a new high school after 1954.

There’s a reason why much of the recent research on middle schools has called for the elimination of middle schools long-term, that instead, K-5 or K-6 ought to become K-8. It’s a transitional period for kids, one that even with the best of parents, most preteens face mostly unprepared. It’s based on a system that educators and policy makers designed a century ago, when the average student completed their formal education in seventh or eighth grade (only one in five students living in the early twentieth century went on to high school).

The teachers traditionally prepared by schools of education really aren’t prepared specifically for sixth, seventh or eighth grade, but for secondary education. Meaning, teachers either have higher social and emotional expectations of 10-to-14-year-olds than they have prepared for, or they have higher academic expectation of their students than the students have been prepared for, or both. These are among the reasons why middle schools can easily become a black hole for students too young to be dealing with teachers trained really for high school, and a black hole for teachers who simply aren’t as prepared for tweeners and thirteen-year-olds as they like to pretend.

Sligo Middle School, Silver Spring, MD, August 2014. (http://montgomeryschoolsmd.org/).

Sligo Middle School, Silver Spring, MD, August 2014. (http://montgomeryschoolsmd.org/).

Despite the advances in teacher preparation in the past couple of decades, this reality still exists at most middle schools, including my son’s Sligo Middle School in Silver Spring. Common Core, PAARC assessments, a wide variety of fatty lunch options, all make students feel that education matters and yet it really doesn’t. My son has already had a couple of teachers whose first and second instinct for controlling their classrooms has been to yell early and often, to the point where I’m convinced that at least one of his teachers this year had Tourette’s (at least, until we had the school move him out of that class). At least two others could be accused of unconsciously labeling their students, as their expectations of their students have gone unmet.

Through meeting these teachers, I’ve re-recognized something that used to be wrong in my own teaching, back when I first started teaching in Duquesne University’s College of Education in the late-1990s. To have high expectations and standards of conduct isn’t enough. Teachers need to communicate it, through examples, through their lessons, through a rubric, quite frankly, and not just a laundry list of expectation. Simply put, given the age of the students, teachers need to positively and consistently encourage students to meet those expectations, and lay out why these expectations will help them, academically and practically.

I had precisely two teachers at A.B. Davis Middle School in Mount Vernon, New York in the early 1980s who did exactly that. My eighth-grade science teacher, Mrs. Mignone, and my first-year, eighth-grade Algebra teacher, Ms. Jeanne Longerano were the best two teachers I had in two years of middle school Humanities-style. Both were committed to the idea that every student in the classroom deserved their undivided attention, which meant that we as students — even us fidgety ones — had to give our maximum preteen attention to what was happening in the classroom as well. Both had high expectations of us, academically and otherwise. I don’t think I got away with much of anything in their classrooms that 1982-83 school year, not even as much as scratching my pubescent balls because the hair was coming in that year.

I learned a life lesson about internalized racism and having high standards for human decency from Mrs. Mignone at the end of eighth grade. Not to mention, the applications of math to science, and science to history, which I carry with me to this day. From Ms. Longerano, I renewed my love for math, began my technical understanding of computer science (we had a computer science club that she started that year), and had a neighbor that I talked to from time to time. Ms. Longerano had given us such a strong foundation in Algebra that it wasn’t until AP Calculus in twelfth grade when I ran into any serious math troubles again.

In all, though, I had twelve different teachers in two years of middle school. I had an art teacher who was also the Humanities coordinator for A.B. Davis in Doris Mann who graded us on the quality of our art, “not just for trying,” to use her words. I had a seventh-grade science teacher whom I’d based some of the nutty stories I told my son over the years, about him eating raw clams in class or coming in after being sprayed by a skunk that same morning. I had a music teacher in Mrs. Mallory for two years who was flat-out goofy to the point of seriously immature, only to find out years later that she had done her same song-and-dance when she taught second-graders. I had a seventh-grade social studies teacher in Mr. Court who was the teacher who probably made his class the most fun, but not necessarily the most educational.

In contrast, Ms. Simmons (seventh-grade math), Ms. Fleming (Italian), and Dr. Demon Travel (eighth-grade social studies), were teachers who cared more about discipline and/or quick-and-dirty rote memorization than anything else. Simmons actually intimidated me, until one day near the end of the school year, I stood next to her. Only to find that I’d grown two inches, to five-foot-four, and that I was now at least an inch taller than her curly mini-fro. Mrs. Sesay, my homeroom and seventh-grade English teacher, was the opposite, a teacher who had little control over her classroom. Almost every incident of taunting and humiliation I experienced in seventh grade had its origins in 7S homeroom or English first period.

Still, I survived, mostly because of a crush in seventh grade, more maturity in eighth, and two really wonderful teachers in that latter year. I don’t want my son, though, to look back at his middle school years and go “Meh.” Unfortunately, he can already do that for sixth grade. Seventh and eighth will have to be better, even if it means I have to home-school him.

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window

There's a few ways in which you can read excerpts of, borrow and/or purchase and download Boy @ The Window. There's the trade paperback edition of Boy @ The Window, available for purchase via Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Window-Donald-Earl-Collins/dp/0989256138/

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Boy @ The Window on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-The-Window-Memoir-ebook/dp/B00CD95FBU/

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Barnes & Noble (bn.com) logo, June 26, 2013. (http://www.logotypes101.com).

Boy @ The Window on Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/boy-the-window-donald-earl-collins/1115182183?ean=2940016741567

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