Walking half-barefoot in 4 inches of snow--for a pencil

I’m a wise person. I steal as many good ideas as I can from other people. And I’m pretty darn good at it.

What’s the most common-heard phrase by any teacher? “I forgot my pencil.” I wanted to be a “nice” teacher and not stress about little things that really don’t matter, so at the beginning of the year, I’d just tell students to go up to my desk and grab one when they didn’t have theirs.

Enter the “learning from others” idea. I realized within a week or two that that wasn’t going to work, or I’d be out of pencils by mid-term progress reports! I’d heard of several teachers making students leave something at the teacher’s desk so they would remember to trade the pencil for their article at the end of class and not walk out of the room with the teacher’s pencil. It sounded non-threatening and would accomplish the goal without making a big deal out of such a menial thing.
I decided on a shoe. I’ve heard of several teachers doing this. It’s necessary enough that no students are going to walk out of my class with my pencil and one shoe on. They’d surely remember to give the pencil back so they didn’t have to walk out of the room in their sock.

Or so I thought. Until today. With 4 inches of snow on the ground.

I had 2 students—yes, two, from completely different class periods—come back into my classroom 20 minutes after they had left to get the shoe they had left here.

This would be silly enough if I didn’t work out in a modular (“trailor”) across the parking lot and a small grassy area from the rest of the school. These kids had to walk across the snow-covered grass and ice-covered asphalt—on a shoe-less foot. THEN they remembered.

Go figure.

I asked one girl, as she tied her shoe, “But where’s my pencil?!” She said, “I put it back at the end of class.”

Maybe it’s not as effective as I’d thought.