Editorial March 22, 1993 Issue

"If you smile, the kids will think you're a pushover"

Mary Metzner Trammell

"Whatever you do," she told me, "Don't smile on the first day." This was the advice a longtime teacher gave me just before I taught my first class at a Miami high school. "If you do smile," she said, "the kids will think you're a pushover, and you'll never get control of the class again."

I took her counsel to heart and walked into my new classroom that first day determined to look forbidding. But when I looked out at that roomful of sixteen-year-olds—eager, tentative, and definitely more scared than I was—I felt overwhelmed with a desire to reassure them. And then, before I knew it, I smiled. I just couldn't help it.

Somehow, though, my heart told me I couldn't lose control of the class because of this candid act of love. I remember thinking briefly that, as the Bible says, "God is love." So, by expressing a little bit of love through that smile, I'd really let the very presence of God be expressed in my classroom. And, I thought, if God can't control these kids, no one can!

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