I had a rad 7th grade Social Studies teacher. I can’t remember her name, but she was a small lady who had a sense of humor and wore jeans. I daresay she was even kinda cool, and I’m not just saying that because Social Studies was one of my favorite classes (I love to read that much). Unfortunately, I don’t recall much except four things:

• The time we watched The Little Mermaid and the class clown– responding to Ariel’s “Why, Eric? Run away with me?”– yelled incredulously at the screen: “You don’t have legs! You can’t run!”
• I managed to have The Latest Crush sign my yearbook. We never spoke to each other before that. He was surprised that I wanted one; I surprised myself by feeling brave enough to even ask.
• That pretty sweet drawing I did poking fun at The Boston Tea Party for extra credit. (Alas, lost to time. Maybe. I’ll check my closet).

It was this Fourth Thing that cemented her as A Cool Teacher (but as is tradition, The Cool Teacher was the Art teacher).

The school year starts out as usual. Each class rarely began with lessons and homework on the first day. Instead, the period was spent going over rules, lesson timeline, grading scale, the boring but important stuff. So when we wandered into this corner classroom we expected more of the same.

And it was– except for a twist. When we got to the Rules section of our material, she instructed us to open our brand new spiral notebooks. I’m sure a lot of us thought “Dang, we’re taking notes already?!” But no.

On the top of the very first page, she had us write this, instead:

DO NOTHING TO INTERRUPT INSTRUCTION.

and tasked us with how we could (and would) follow that rule.

Simple, right?

Deceptively so.

While some of our suggestions took the piss out of it, they still had a glimmer of truth in them. The majority of what we scribbled down were serious: no loud noises, no gum in seats, don’t be rude, don’t be late, respect the teacher– someone even mentioned no sleeping! Some were obvious, some were creative, but all of us were using our developing brains for ten minutes trying to come up with a least ten subrules.

This is something I carry with me to this day. Hell, a version of this typically encompasses the spaces I moderate. When you really boil it down, a list of rules can arguably be summed up with a “do nothing to disrupt this space.”

It’s like the Golden Rule, but in social groups.

And I think that is pretty cool.