That’s why so many motivational speakers begin with a zinger.

Get the audience awake and with you, and they’re putty in your hands.

Know who you’re speaking to and speak to them.

Advice to teachers: Do the same. Get the students on your side at the outset, and you’ve got ‘em all year.

One reason teaching is so hard is that you have to keep ‘em focused all day long, day after day, week after week, month after month.

It’s exhausting, even if you draw strength from the excitement you generate.

That’s why they have recess.

Everybody needs a break.

After a long lunch and an hour on the playground, my fifth graders would come in, tired and sweaty and smelly and happy, I’d turn off the lights, they’d put their heads down on their desk, and I’d read to them from the book we were currently experiencing. I had them take notes to be sure they stayed awake.

We went through a lot of books that way. The Hobbit. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. The Tripod Trilogy, Volume One. Charlotte’s Web. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. D’Aulaire’s Illustrated Book of Greek Myths. The Sword in the Stone. Tom Sawyer. Little House on the Prairie. That sort of thing.

Sometimes I was mean and stopped before the end so they’d have to go to the library, find the book, check it out, and then read it to the end to find out what happened.

Teachers are amazing, and I was constantly learning to do it better.

I loved learning, and wanted the students to love it as much as I did. They told me they did, and showed me, and I believe them to this very day.

Sometimes I’d try something and I could see it wasn’t working. Their eyes would glaze over, their heads drooped, they watched the clock and looked toward the door.

That’s when I had to learn to dance, the fancy footwork to shift gears.

Sometimes I’d give them a break from me, and let them do exercises from a book.

There are more ways to do anything, everything. We learned to diagram sentences. We explored algebra in the fifth grade before the textbooks got around to it. We sang the songs of civilization and history. We built Greek temples out of construction paper. We generated hydrogen. We did the egg in the bottle. We got the egg in as the book recommended, but I got the egg back out when even the book didn’t know how.

When you have your audience with you, they don’t want to let you go.

You say, “Show’s over,” and they say, “No! Encore!”

Even in high school, they’d say, “Can I repeat the class?” or, “I could fail just so they’d let me take it over,” or, “Don’t make me go to college unless you go and take me with you.”

That sort of thing. It’s extravagant and extreme, but only a paraphrase.

It reminds me of the lecture workshop I gave at the Conference hosted by a leading Educational Fraternity or Sorority. I was in demand. They signed me up and let me choose my content and audience.

I decided ex is to cover everything for everybody, all grade levels K-12, all subjects, all teachers.

I put work and effort into it. I planned with cunning. I had handouts. I had lessons everybody could use at any level.

They thanked me profusely when they wrote up the Conference in their booklet.

Elementary teachers sat next to high school teachers and intermingled curriculums. There were two sessions scheduled, morning and afternoon. Some teachers skipped the other offered sessions and came back to me for a second dose, bringing friends who missed the first one. The auditorium was full to overflowing, twice.

It was a triumph, a career high.

The reason I mention it is because I started with a song. I passed out the score with text, sang the first verse so they’d know the tune, then we all sang it together, and every verse after to the last. My students had written the words.

We were together at the outset, a happy choir. It was immediately obvious to everyone that this is what we can do in the classroom, and many already do, it’s not so hard, it’s fun, and we were living democracy, of by and for the people whom we loved as neighbors as we loved ourselves.

There are many ways to capture the attention from the very beginning.

I’ve written about it, and will continue to do so. We need to cherish and support our teacher colleagues, now more than ever.

I know how hard it is to work an audience and still find time and ways to meet with groups, and individuals one by one.

It burned me out and used me up, but I kept coming back for more.

And I was in the audience myself so many times that I learned what is on both sides. The non-passive audience becomes part of the show.

It reminds me of famous jokes. Everything always reminds me of something else.

Famous jokes. The stripper comes on stage, dances around, the audience cries, “Take it off!”

She does, and they cry, “Put it back on!”

Then there’s this famous town in Italy, I don’t remember which one, that had earned the reputation of being such discriminating opera lovers that they would settle for nothing less than perfection which they knew intimately from frequent experience. The stage manager had to keep the back door open so singers who didn’t measure up could escape.

The audience came to a performance smuggling in rotten tomatoes at the ready. Their aim was accurate from frequent practice.

There was this one time when the tenor, seeking fame and approbation, sang the famous aria and the audience yelled, “Encore! Encore!”

So he nodded to the conductor who started the reprise.

He sang it again, and they yelled, “Encore!”

He said, “I thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your kind response. But, as you know, I just sang a difficult aria, twice. I’m not sure my voice is up to a third time.”

The audience cried, “You’ll sing it again until you do it right!”