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A fourth grader called me over to his lunch table. “Mr. D, listen to this,” he said, as he and his group began pounding their cookies against their lunch tray in unison. 

 

As the tapping grew louder and more fierce, I shook my head and gestured frantically. “I get what you’re saying,” I exclaimed. “You’re saying that you all want to start a band!”

 

They laughed. That was not what they were saying, but I leaned into it. “Ten years from now, I’ll go see Taylor Swift open for Ellie Byron and the Cookies!” Ellie laughed so hard she dropped her crutches from a lingering gymnastics injury. 

 

Matthew rapped his cookie against his tray again. “You’re telling me it’s a hard rock band,” I continued. 

“It’ll be unbreakable!” added their third friend, Millie. 

 

I shrugged and pointed to Ellie. “Well, if Ellie’s your lead singer, it’ll be a… at least a little bit breakable.”

Then another group chant interrupted me. “Mr. E!” they called. “Mr. E! Come here!”

 

Yesterday, I told them I wasn’t Mr. D, but was actually my twin brother, Mr. E. When this confused them, I told them I have multiple twin brothers - Mr. E, Mr. C, and Mr. Z that all rotate days that we come to school. When you’re really in trouble, you have to deal with Mr. P. 

 

“How do you have different last names?” a girl asked. To which I explained that we come from a family that passes our name down through our first name. So, we all have “Mister” as a first name, and then our last names rhyme. 

 

“What about Mr. Q?” asked one who thought she could trip me up. 

 

I frowned. “We don’t talk about him,” I said, walking away from the conflict. 

 

That was yesterday. Today, I denied the whole thing even happened. 

 

“Remember yesterday when your twin brother, Mr. E, was talking to us?”

 

“What are you talking about?” I asked, dumbfounded. “I don’t have a twin brother! I do have a younger sister who is Mrs. C,” I added, which is 100% true, but now they don’t believe me. 💭 Some might call this "gaslighting." I call it "the reason I'm the cool teacher."

 

I was interrupted again by Matthew, long-haired bassist from The Cookies and one of my Extended Learning Program (ELP) students. “You’re the best ELP teacher at this school!” he exclaimed, walking past to dump his tray. 

 

Another fourth grader, still eating, asked, “Aren’t you the only ELP teacher at this school?”

 

I nodded. 

 

“So, that makes you the best and the worst!”

 

I frowned. “I liked the way Matthew said it better.”

 

He tried and failed to walk back his insult. “No, no! I mean, you’re not the best, you’re not the worst…”

 

“...just what you’re stuck with,” I interrupted.

 

Now, despite our best efforts, some people just struggle to figure out this whole school thing and frequently find themselves in trouble. Lorenzo’s a nice enough kid, but I suspect he sees me more like the cool uncle since he’s not on my roster and I don’t have any direct responsibility over him. That’s fine, because it’s important for kids like this to find an adult in the building with whom they can build a positive relationship. I’m thrilled to be Lorenzo’s cool uncle. 

 

I sit down next to him at the lunch table. “Hey, Lorenzo, here’s what we’re gonna do…” I whisper. “I want you to start calling me Mr. E. When you call me Mr. E, I’ll wave and say, ‘Hi,’ like we’re besties. When anyone else calls me Mr. E, I’ll act totally confused, like I have no idea what they’re talking about.”

Lorenzo slyly smiles with a slice of pizza hanging from his mouth, excited to be a part of something his classmates aren’t. 

 

As I said, he’s a nice enough kid, except when he thinks the whole world is after him and everybody hates him, which is nearly all the time. 

 

The next day, as I’m walking through the office, his teacher stops me. “Hey, Mr. D,” she says with a slight bit of puzzlement in her voice. “Lorenzo’s up here in the principal’s office for the morning, and he says he’d like to talk to you?” 

 

I looked over her shoulder and there he was, sitting in a chair at the principal’s desk. “Alright,” I shrug to show I share her curiosity, “I’ll go talk to him.” Sure enough, the whole world is out to get him. He wants his cool uncle to come to the rescue. 

 

He wiggles in his seat as I settle into the principal’s chair. She’s at Central Office, so what she doesn’t know can’t hurt her. “Did you look at my math scores?” he asks. “Can I be in your class?”

 

In my mind, I sigh. I’m the Extended Learning Program, or ELP teacher, which is what my school calls Gifted and Talented. The longer I do this job, the more I find myself bothered by the club-like perception of ELP. Some kids walk around like they’re wearing a special-access “ELP” badge and the kids without one internalize that they’re not smart enough. I’m working hard to banish the phrase, “I’m in ELP” from our vocabulary. I provide a service to kids who need more; I don’t run a country club. But this is an uphill battle for another chapter. 

 

Right now, I have Lorenzo, who wants to be in his cool uncle’s class, but isn’t ready for it. 

 

“Why do you want to be in my class?” I ask. 

 

He shrugs. “I just don’t like my class.”

 

Now, since he’s been asking me for a week, I have actually looked at his math scores. “Lorenzo,” I explain, “You should be proud of how much you grew in math last year. But, my class isn’t for people who are bored because they don’t like it; it’s for when you’re bored because it’s gotten too easy. I don’t think you’re there yet, but I believe you can get there.”

 

He stares straight ahead. At least he didn’t slump over. Perhaps we’re making progress. 

 

“But,” I add, “the first step is you need to stay in class.” 

 

Because of his behavior yesterday, he has thirty minutes of work to do in the principal’s office, and then he can rejoin his class. I happen to have thirty minutes of free time, so I stay with him, helping him with his writing assignment and teaching him how to calculate how many minutes he has left on the wall clock. 

 

For now, at least, I get an opportunity to protect Lorenzo’s emotional safety. 

 

For some unfamiliar with how education works, they wish we would spend more time on our ABCs and less time worrying about our students’ emotional safety. These calls, I suspect, come from the same people who insist it’s okay to jump start a car by connecting positive-to-positive and negative-to-negative (a method that is quite likely to blow up in your face but, because it doesn’t always do that and is easier to connect, are just fine with ripping the negative clip out of my hand while I’m looking for a proper grounding point and just connect it to the other negative terminal). 

 

Every year, we are required by the state to administer the Conditions for Learning survey, which asks students about their physical and emotional safety in their school. In the 2022-23 school year, the latest for which data is available, only 20% of students statewide answered positively to questions regarding emotional safety. Emotional safety questions cover various types of bullying, teasing, exclusion, and friendships. 

 

Here’s where this is important: if you don’t feel safe, it triggers your “fight or flight” response. When you’re in survival mode, your brain is preoccupied with scanning for threats, and learning is only an afterthought. In this state, your ability to remember, comprehend, process, and recall drops significantly. I can’t teach you if you feel threatened. You can’t ponder the theme of a poem while your brain is on high alert expecting an imminent attack. 

 

Some of these threats come in school (think, teasing about your weight or whether you pick your nose), and some kids have so many threats outside of school that they come into our buildings already in a constant state of alarm. We may have out-evolved having to worry about sneak attacks by tigers, but our brain stems can’t differentiate between surprise tiger attacks and cruel classmates or imminent evictions. The physical and hormonal response is the same.💭 A lifetime of being in a constant state of alarm actually causes physical changes to the structure of the brain. Imagine growing into adulthood with a brain stem that has booby-trapped a ten-foot space around you with flaming arrows on a hair trigger.

 

Every day, kids are bombarded with examples of how cool it is to bully and belittle. Cruel practical jokes and random acts of vandalism go further on Tik-Tok. We even elevate our bullies to positions of status. Some of our most famous people and those we choose as our leaders get where they are by being the exact opposite of who we’re trying to teach our kids to be.

 

And when their example is emulated, we have schools where 80% of our kids walk around all day in survival mode, their brain power dedicated to scanning for threats instead of learning how to multiply. This is just one of the many headwinds that undermine our ability to educate. 

 

This week, I sat in a learning session regarding the way we teach reading, identify progress, and plan our course of action for kids not making progress. We engaged in deep discussions over methods and the cognitive neuroscience behind them. I am absolutely astounded! I felt like I was in a doctoral seminar in my elementary school cafeteria. With the amount of knowledge and expertise on our staff, our collective knowledge of teaching reading is not the issue.

 

We face powerful headwinds. These headwinds are the only reason for kids not learning as well as they should. 

 

We have the knowledge on how to teach and these kids come to us at an age biologically primed to absolutely soak up new knowledge and skills. If their brain can’t, something is getting in the way:

• Emotional threats (think racism and discrimination, or constant belittlement by caregivers)
• Physical threats
• Poverty
• Nutrition
• Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES)
• Exposure to learning experiences as infants

 

We have a thousand influences on a child’s ability to learn, and schools can control about seven. And so we do. We build every moment of our day around positively influencing all seven of those things. Emotional safety being paramount.

 

And that’s why Mr. E comes out. Mr. E’s good-natured jesting, in the end, left everyone with a smile and uplifted everyone’s mood. Mr. E never belittles or makes someone feel inferior. When the first grader wants Mr. E’s help opening their Oreo’s, and Mr. E pretends to think they’re just giving him their Oreos… the whole table smiles (and the kid eventually gets his Oreos. Mr. E isn’t no thief). 

 

Ten years ago, I was a seventh-grader’s cool uncle. A colleague directly told me, “We’re going to read about him in the paper someday while he’s on his way to prison.”

 

Today, he’s a software engineer with a finance company and living his best life.💭 Don’t make the mistake of thinking Mr. E single handedly interrupted the school-to-prison pipeline for this student. It was a team effort that continued long after he left seventh grade. That said, I can still take credit for being a cool uncle. That’s why it’s okay for kids like Lorenzo to have a cool uncle. All around the building, almost every single adult is someone’s cool aunt or uncle.

 

Mr. E likes everyone, whether you’re a “problem child” or Mother Theresa or anything in between. Not just Mr. E, but all his brothers and sisters, the Misters, Missuses, and Misses Alphabet Soup in the classrooms and hallways around the school. 

 

If you’re reading this, consider giving Mr. E and his teaching family a hand. They sure need it. 

 

______________________

David Dubczak is an educator and writer documenting his final year in the classroom before transitioning into school administration. Follow David Dubczak - Writer on Facebook to keep up with semi-weekly posts. 

 

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