Insomniac's blog

In my YA novel, No More Dead Dogs by Gordon Korman, there are few teachers. The setting for the book is in a school, so naturally there would be a few teachers throughout the text. One of the teachers, actually the main teacher, was Mr. Fogelman. Mr. Fogelman teaches English and assigned the horrible book that Wallace Wallace hated. Anyway, in the beginning of the book Wallace and many of his friends can not stand Mr. Fogelman. They are mad at him for putting Wallace on detention for not completing his homework the way Mr. Fogelman wanted.
A part in the book that affected me most as a reader was how uptight and unreasonable Mr. Fogelman seemed to be. He wanted the book report assignment to agree with his own opinions and not necessarily reflect what his students thought of the book. I wonder how many teachers like that are really out there. I know both as a student and as a mom that I have run into quite a bit of these egotistical teachers who think their opionions are facts. It reminds me to be aware of my own personal biases that I may bring into my future classrooms. Many pupils will take whatever the teacher says about anything as the God's honest truth, and they will never think to differ from a teacher's obvious likes and dislikes. I want my future pupils to know that I value their opinions and as long as they can back up what they say with either articulate answers to questions or with more material, I must and will respect that.
Anyway, the kids in No More Dead Dogs finally begin to realize that Mr. Fogelman may not be so bad after all. And, as the kids look at him differently he begins to mellow out (to use his words) and become more human to them. How many times as a kid in school did you run into a teacher outside of school and think, "Wow, Mr. So and So goes shopping at Meijer? And, he actually owns jeans?". This is the sort of transformation that happened to Mr. Fogelman. No longer was he viewed as some irrational teacher who couldn't handle anyone challenging him, but he became more than just a one-dimensional person to the characters in the book. I think Gordon Korman did a wonderful job of getting the right perspective on how pupils respond to teachers and how teachers can change that perspective.