The Principal Look

I may have forgotten to mention in last week's Halloween post that during one of my freshmen classes I made a girl cry. But it wasn't my fault! Let me explain.

Usually, I am pretty lenient if a student pulls their cell phone out during a writing or reading activity because 90% of the time they are using it to look up English words they don’t know. I can always tell when they are using it for this purpose rather than texting, because if they're goofing off they give it away by sneaking guilty glances my way. But since I don't speak Chinese, sometimes the English-Chinese dictionaries on their smart phones are entirely necessary to get a point across, and most of them don't abuse this privilege.

Last week, however, one girl was not only texting in class while we were watching a video, but she was blatantly distracting three or four of her friends by showing them her texts and reading them out loud. She knew I was watching her because every time I would glance in her direction she would try and put the phone behind her back. Finally, after she continued to pull it out whenever my attention was diverted, I went over to her and asked her to put it away. When she just put it on her lap, I insisted that she actually put it inside her purse and close it. She looked appropriately ashamed that I had to have this talk with the class looking on, and I thought the problem was solved. But not two minutes later she had it out again. This time when she saw that I had caught her, I knew what I had to do.

Growing up in my house when you did something wrong you were rarely yelled at. My dad, who was a middle school principal for most of my childhood, would instead just give you what my sister and I called his “Principal Look”. This look meant, “I am extremely exasperated and disappointed in you. I thought I raised you better than that, and it hurts me that you would think it was okay to act that way. Don't ever let me catch you doing that again.” The Look was always super effective.

This was my first time utilizing The Look, but I directed the best version I could summon right at her. This time she looked horrified, and I felt sure that the problem was really settled. I was secretly patting myself on the back for using The Look and gaining the same effective results it had always gotten my dad. Until a second later I saw her hiding her head behind her friend's shoulder. At first I thought she might have the phone out again. Then I noticed she was instead hiding the fact that she was wiping away tears from her eyes.

Oops. I guess my look was a little more potent than I thought. I'll have to work on that.