During graduate school, I became aware of a 2000 children’s’ book titled “Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type”. After reading the short little picture book, I immediately fixated on it, determining that I wanted to utilize it in my classes when I would eventually land my first middle school teaching job.

“Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type” is a book in which cows learn language and writing skills and utilize them as a method of civil disobedience in order to better their own status and conditions in the world. A short and simple narrative with a plethora of meaningful content for discussion buried underneath the surface, I thought reading it with my classes would perfectly set the tone for an empowering year of coursework with adolescent students.

Shockingly, this turned out to be a mistake.

The 13-year-old kids in my first independently-managed 7th grade English Language Arts classes immediately disdained the kid’s book—and me. The students weren’t interested in a deeper analysis of the tale at all; they asserted that they were too old for a “dumb kiddie book” and held the attitude that anyone who enjoyed reading a book of that sort (like me) must be a stupid baby.

This was conceived as an introductory lesson that would cleanly demonstrate the power and utility of written language skills, but the students took it as being childish and beneath them. It’s taken me 15 years to come to terms with and really understand why this transpired, but I think I finally do now. I was completely mind-blind to the reality that these 7th graders might respond to my carefully considered lesson in a different way than I had envisioned, and thus was caught utterly off-guard with a disastrous start to the academic year.

This disappointment—on my first or second day as a professional teacher—was my first major inkling that I might somehow be in over my head with this position. There would be ample more evidence to come of just how unprepared I was to manage a classroom of real, breathing children who wouldn’t necessarily dance to the beats that i foresaw.