What Are You Doing?
Once upon a Friday afternoon a fellow teacher and I were grumbling about the fact that by the end of a day, we often feel as though we’ve been repeating ourselves for seven hours straight; and by the end of the week, well, you get the picture.
Sit down.
Whatever you’re doing, stop.
No running.
Please stop talking/Quiet/Shhh! (whatever flavor you fancy).
And so on.
So my fellow teacher and I posed this question: which one phrase do we say the most often throughout the day? If we feel so very repetitive, what is it that we are repeating so much?
The winning phrase: What are you doing?
It’s a truly magical phrase.
At first, I had a hard time believing that the most used phrase would be a question. I expected the winner to be a command. And it didn’t particularly strike me as something I had to say over and over and over. But, therein lies the magic.
Because you see, that question, what are you doing?, can be said for every situation or mood. It can be pleasant, simple curiosity. It can be indignant disbelief. It can be panic, spouting out of your mouth like fire. It could be all you say for an hour and you wouldn’t even have to say it the same way twice.
It’s a gift to all teacher-kind everywhere.
This topic was particularly fun to discuss. We even brought a couple of students into the mix, who found it funny in its accuracy. I’m not sure what it says about us teachers, but we are all excited to present a skit, performed by 8th graders Raulin and Diego.