Why do we like our teachers a little unhinged?

The most beloved fictional teachers are all passionate, kind, and a little bonkers

This week in one of the performance classes I was teaching, I sat on a 4-wheeled dolly and scooted across the performance studio on my butt.

Well, okay, that leaves out some key context:

First, I first asked the students to guess how far they thought I could get across the space with a single kick.

(Note: about halfway.)

Why did I do this? Literally no reason. I saw the dolly offstage during a break between class exercises, and I thought it would be fun, and that my students might think it was funny.

It was! They did!

Did it help me communicate the curriculum in any way?

Nope!

A colleague who was sitting in on the class told me afterward that I reminded her of a Labrador retriever.

I don’t know whether this was a compliment, but I chose to take it as one.

Since I started teaching last year, I’ve become aware of a certain “persona” making itself more and more pronounced in the way I engage with students.

It’s — how do I put this? — a little bit crazy.

I skip around from place to place rather than walking. I randomly sing phrases from the lesson. I tell non-sequitur stories between discussions on the curriculum. I get very hyped up and, yes, sometimes very loud. I’m sort of a wild card — not in a cool, rebellious way, but in a dorky oddball way.

Having never formally taught before, I find it interesting that this instinct is so strong and has manifested itself so consistently. What is it inside of me that naturally feels this belongs in the classroom setting?

This all led me to reflect on some of my favorite teachers from my past. I immediately thought of Ms. Stocking, my 6th grade English teacher back in the U.S. She was sweet and kind and supportive, and also sort of nuts.

She once performed a reading of a short story I wrote to the class about an island of killer squirrels, including multiple voices, mussing up her hair to portray one of the wilder characters, growling and stomping around the room, and shrieking in pain to portray one of the squirrels who was impaled by a flying knife before writing on the floor in a dramatic death scene.

(I was into Lord of the Rings as a kid, okay?)

Twenty years later, I still remember that experience vividly. It was also the first time something I wrote was publicly presented to an audience.

Ms. Stocking had this look in her eyes, the wildness of some kind of mythical creature trapped inside a normal human’s body.

When I recently asked around for the favorite teachers of some of my friends, I got similar responses. They were passionate, supportive, and unpredictable. There was this sort of electric buzz in the classroom at all times, that unspoken question: What is Ms. _______ or Mr. ________ going to do today?!

Which, if you think about it, doesn’t seem to make much sense. Shouldn’t we want our educators to be solid, and dependable, and unflappable, and calm?

Why do we like teachers who are a touch unstable?

I recently watched a few episode of the rebooted version of the educational cartoon The Magic School Bus with my six-year-old. This one stars Kate McKinnon as the voice of Ms. Frizzle — in my opinion, the role she was born to play — taking over from the also-wonderful Lily Tomlin, the original Frizzle.

All the same dynamics from the original show are still there: the zany adventures, lessons in science, constant threat of danger, and that one mopey student who lives in a perpetual state of anxiety over what bonkers gauntlet of educational insanity Ms. Frizzle is going to put the class through that day.

In the episode I watched, the children are sent to the triassic period, turned into dinosaurs, killed by a volcanic eruption, reduced to skeletons, and then subjected to millions of years of fossilization and continental drift in order to learn about plate tectonics for a game show.

In the episode’s opening scene, Ms. Frizzle is absent from the classroom for the first few minutes as the students chat. She then suddenly appears from beneath a desk mid-sentence, replying to one of the students’ comments as if she’d been there the entire time.

Robin Williams’ character jumps up on a desk and makes his students do funny walks in the courtyard in Dead Poets Society. Jack Black shows up hungover and starts a rock band of elementary schoolers in School of Rock. Yoda speaks backwards and raps his student on the head with a stick. Dumbledore is, well, Dumbledore.

We love these fictional teachers for their love and passion, but we also love them for their endearing off-kilter strangeness. Why?

A coworker of mine offered an interesting theory.

She thinks that those somewhat unbalanced teachers tap into the unbalanced mania of childhood. Because what are children if not passionate, loving, and unpredictably insane?

When we’re in a learning environment, we crave that childlike mindset, because it’s that mindset that puts us into a headspace to learn. That openness, curiosity, and lack of preconceptions all benefit us as we try to take on new information and ways of thinking.

A teacher who’s somewhat bonkers, who embodies a sort of disregard for convention, inspires us to do the same — which is the mindset that opens us to change how we think.

Anyway, it’s a theory.

Or maybe I just like scooting around on dollies.