Later in life I aspired to become a high school physics teacher—this in the freedom-respecting aim of teaching at the nicely never compulsory physics advanced-placement level—having often stood in awe of the mathematics inhering within the laws and the mysteries of the physical universe. I hoped this fascination might prove contagious with the kinds of students who would naturally choose the subject. In pursuit of certification, and also in the hope of learning something worthwhile in the process, I enrolled in an evening course in classroom management at another school with a good reputation.

Far from offering a good introduction to the art of classroom management, the course itself became a prime example of the endless ways in which naive and cavalier educational innovations are liable to miscarry in the classroom social arena.

With no choice at all I was promptly tossed by means of random selection into a project entitled “Behavior Modification,” in which I and four others were assigned the future task of researching and then presenting to the class the model of classroom management based on the behaviorist theories of B.F. Skinner. “Group One” became our name and our fate on the schedule of group presentations on various models to be covered in the course. To this directive the professor added a role-playing exercise for which as her only guidance she urged us all to just “Relax! Enjoy!”

Unanimous aversion for the role-playing chore was apparently the only thing I had in common with the rest of the group—all of them women of the undergraduate years, a critical mass of peers indeed, all of them would-be teachers of the middle or primary grades. Meetings accomplished nothing beyond the parceling out of research topic requirements. The young collegians chatted each other up in the manner of a natural sorority, one to which this middle-aged male stranger could hardly be expected to belong. (A smidgen of worldly wisdom could have predicted as much.) And not being one to intrude, I soon lapsed into a condition of minimal participation that remained nevertheless polite. Little did I know that my awkward social circumstance would soon be instrumental to their eleventh-hour scheme for handling our jointly neglected theatrical obligation.

Scheduled as I was to lead off the presentation with a required biography of B.F. Skinner, I should have grown suspicious when on the eve of the show the role-playing question was briefly addressed with a cryptic reference to something they chose to call “audience participation.” Nothing more was explained on the following night as the supercilious clique arrived equipped with a batch of cutesy stars designed to go on a poster chart on which appeared a number of names of their other pals in the class.

To my complete surprise the audience participation commenced as soon as I began my talk. Spurts of laughter, airborne objects and other distractions abounded in a general atmosphere of comic expectation—all of which I had no authorized way of addressing, the others having arranged the show and established a monopoly on the ostensible instruments of behavior modification. The tittering and other disturbances continued at this merry pace for quite some time as I did my best to speak, and then one fellow stole the show by overturning in his chair on the floor with a crash.

Startled like everyone else, I tried to put a good face on this by smiling bravely and asking, “Was that in the script?”

The professor, our “guide on the side” as fanciful doctrine would have it, laughed along with my question as if all of us were marvelously engaged in a highly dynamic celebration of pro-socially cooperative interactive learning, or something as fashionable as all that, with a wonderful time being had by all.

The reality in my own case was that each and every word was now a struggle to enunciate in the ghastliest case of dried-up salivary glands that I can ever remember.

The furniture percussionist, flush no doubt with the triumph of his well-timed spill, now came forward, walked behind me and played behind my back some kind of role that drew astonished laughter from the class—impudence enough to leave this dutiful speaker feeling as demolished as that “Weekend Update” commentator who used to serve as the object of the stealthy scorn that Chevy Chase was famous for delivering on Saturday Night Live. It may have been something other than Chevy’s routine, but in any case I had been thoroughly upstaged in a way that others had found outrageously funny. I remained in dire need of a drink of water, not to mention a hunk of bubble gum or something to restore the normal ability to unglue one syllable of speech from another.

A story that I then went on to relate from Skinner’s memoir of his youth was in its own right funny, but the unremitting spasms of mirth remained in sync with other events in the room and not with this; few in the class were listening at all.

The world-renowned Faber College would ably serve as the flagship school for such an academic league as this. Aside from simply walking out on the whole affair (the best resort in retrospect), what was one to do about this game without a referee? This show without a gong? Retaliatory juvenility as an attempt at saving face would hardly have been the age-appropriate answer; it never even occurred to me as an option. The high road would have been to find some way to assert a scheduled speaker’s normal rights—a feat of non-cooperation far more easily said than done against this reign of what amounted to a flash mob facilitated by a magisterial school of education. A foiled attempt would only have made the bad scene worse, and something told me it would have been politically unwise. Choosing therefore to avoid disrupting the behavior-modification dramatization, I played the accepting good sport from beginning to end. Such is the occasional vulnerability of someone who defers to the airy-fairy theories and the slapdash group dynamics that all too often govern the training of America’s would-be teachers.

Throughout this activity my Group One colleagues were nonchalantly engaged in functions like sticking stars beside the names on the poster. The stars, I guess, were tokens awarded for cessation of misbehavior. Regardless of these and other charades, the distractions persisted for the duration of my talk—and then subsided rapidly when I was finished at last.

The role playing ended with that as everyone’s polite attention was then accorded the rest of Group One for the four remaining talks. In a masterstroke of inductive reasoning, one group member actually cited with a smile of precious innocence the nicely modified audience behavior as if this credibly demonstrated the efficacy of behavior modification.

Stunned at this development, I soon began to contemplate the none too sporting use that had just been made of me as a socially expendable outsider. Were these the proverbial college undergraduate types who rated their social standing on the number of people they could afford to cut? And had their sense of fair play been mangled somehow in the rites of passage of sorority-fraternity row? Or did they despise science “nerds” or hold a grudge against science teachers? Perhaps they considered this easily vanquished elder of theirs a legitimate casualty of the ever so creative exuberance of liberally empowered youth. Whatever the case, none of those future educators ever expressed the slightest regret (although I do acknowledge that one group member who was not as comfortable as the rest showed wisdom greater than mine by dumping the course after that).

“The first ones are always the guinea pigs,” the professor said in her smiling way as she expressed to the class a measure of regret that a solitary student had taken the brunt of the bush-league events of the evening. Damage control ensued as she generously then awarded me a grade of A for services rendered to her arduous cause, her written evaluation of my presentation even culminating with the grateful exclamation, “Going first takes courage! Thanks!” How sweet. And carefully to be overlooked by virtue of this device was a rather conspicuous issue regarding professional responsibility for a mismanaged class in classroom management, a topic apparently not in the scope of the course.

One week later, Group Two struggled through a skit supposedly demonstrating Lee Canter’s assertive discipline model. They drew a politely smiling and embarrassed silence from the rest of us, their diligence amounting to a painful exhibition of their lack of acting talent. Assuming they were mostly innocent of the cheap-shot fest of the previous week, I viewed them as additional casualties under the professor’s heavy-handed experimental ambitions for the class—ambitions in which the ivory-towered professor would have had no competence to lead or participate herself. Acting and the coaching of acting, at levels that speak to the reasonably discerning, are after all no everyone’s everyday abilities. (This awareness I incidentally submit as part of the multifarious case against one-size-fits-all education. Equation-heavy math and science are hardly the only things not suited for everyone.)

Role playing was given a rest after that, its recent malfunctions having illuminated nothing about how to manage a class. Most of the rest of the groups either ignored that part of the assignment or paid their dues with a number of minimal gestures. The clown who had used me as the designated straight man went on to enjoy the luxury of giving his talk without distractions, as did everyone else in the class for the rest of the semester. The young man delivered a bland summation of material out of the course-required reading, enhancing this achievement with perfunctory glances up from his notes—quite a surprising anticlimax in light of the smashing impression he had made on some of the young women with his prior performance as an authorized role-playing outlaw.