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Who'S Denny?

Diane O. Wright
Chesnee Middle School
Chesnee, SC

The homework assignment had been to look up a few vocabulary words in a glossary, write out their definitions, and study them before we would begin to read the story the following day. It should have taken all of fifteen minutes for even the slowest worker.

The class filed in, and when it was time to begin, I asked them to get out their papers and get ready to discuss the words. The first word was easy enough, I thought: "deprive - to take something away, deny."

"Who can tell use the definition of deprive?" I asked, intending to go on from the glossary explanation to some applications of things the students hated to be denied of, such as phone privileges. Not one student would reply. In fact, all eyes were suddenly diverted from contact with mine!

"Okay, who will volunteer to look at the definition on your paper and read it to the class?" Maybe no one had studied, but there were papers sitting right there, and I could see the writing on them. No one moved to reply. By this time, I was feeling the adrenaline beginning to rise, and Kenneth could probably see it coursing through me.

Kenneth, by the way, was an Opie Taylor look-alike. Bright blue eyes with a noticeable twinkle shone from beneath unruly dark red hair, and freckles dotted his nose like tan stars. Kenneth always looked as though he were thinking of something vaguely funny, the way his mouth curled up at the corners even when he was concentrating. Obviously distressed by frustration, he sprang to the rescue and blurted, "Well, I have it right here, but I don't know what they're talking about. My book said ‘ to take something away from Denny,' and I don't even know who he is!"

I lost it. All the emotion that moments before had threatened to explode in anger found itself re-routed into uproarious laughter. I couldn't even talk. When I finally had enough breath to apologize, I explained to Kenneth that I was not laughing because he had a problem understanding the word, but, rather, because his facial expression had been priceless! The look on his face had been perfectly situated between complete incredulity and total confusion. If there were a video rendition, it would be a winner in any candid video competition, hands down.

Having experienced the catharsis that I had needed to relieve the tensions of the day, we went on to discuss deprive and plenty in students' lives that would forever seal its meaning for them. The confusion also gave me a perfect opportunity to explain how very important punctuation is (specifically, in this case, the semicolon).

I learned far more than my class did that day, though. First, dry copying of definitions has a place in education but should not be a major focus without contextual application; perhaps finding the word in the context of the story would have been a wiser approach. I also learned not to assume that students do not want to cooperate just because they don't at a certain point in time; maybe they are confused or embarrassed and need more guidance from me. I also know now that students will not usually become angry if I laugh at a response, so long as I demonstrate my sense of humor all along and am not afraid to laugh at myself, too, rather than considering myself the end-all, know-all authority on everything. There are many other lessons that I learned from Kenneth that day, and probably many of which I have never become aware but which affect my teaching positively anyway.

I remember the "Denny" experience year after year, and though Kenneth is a young man now, I still see his twinkling thirteen-year-old eyes and cherish his willingness to risk his esteem to save me from the abyss of misdirected fury. I don't know who Denny is either, but I learned a lot from his brief stint in my classroom.