When I was a beginning teacher, part of my mentorship required visits to the classrooms of older, career teachers in order to pick up tips, and also (presumably) to hone my own teaching persona by applying my own critical faculties to the teaching practices of others.
One formidable teacher managed her classes by developing a particularly fearsome persona. First, she would turn up at least a quarter hour late to each class, which would impress upon everybody how important her own time was in relation to that of everyone else. She would make sure to arrive puffing. I never saw her enter a room without puffing and panting.
Second, she would routinely plonk her backside upon the desks of various students, even if it meant sitting upon their books and stationery. (I would have been tempted to come to class armed with thumb tacks if it were me, but no, actually I would not have dared.)
Most of all, this teacher was manic-vigilant, pouncing upon any student who dared to express anything other than the required emotion*. One day when I was in attendance, a student made the grave mistake of yawning unself-consciously. It wasn’t a loud yawn, and the hapless girl wasn’t even making a statement. But the teacher decided to take this as a grave personal insult, interpreting a yawn as only one emotion: boredom, and boredom not just with the subject matter but with the teacher herself. The girl got into a lot of strife for daring to yawn.
*Except boredom is hardly an emotion, but rather lack thereof.
I think of this particular incident whenever our Border collie yawns, because the funny thing about many dogs is that dogs yawn not out of boredom but due to excitement. “Walk!” I’ll say enthusiastically, and this will have him trotting to the door, stretching his front legs and yawning uncontrollably. He shakes his head afterwards. You may have seen dogs do it. This sort of yawn is not due to someone sitting at the front of a classroom droning on about spelling rules.
Humans are not dogs, but I’m sure this mammalian reflex indicates something slightly more complicated than one hundred percent boredom. In fact, we should never assume to know too much from a person’s body language, even if the likes of Alan Pease would like to consider everything in binaries and absolutes.
- What A Yawn Says About Your Relationship from Scientific American
- Really? Yawning Is Contagious Between Dogs and Their Owners from NYT
- Here’s Steve Jones talking on Radio New Zealand about the science of yawning: AKA chasmology.
