Harry Wong is 63, but you would never know it by seeing him speak: He gesticulates, jumps and prowls around the stage like a teenager.
"After 38 years of teaching you too can look this healthy and happy," he told a gathering of Murray District teachers during a four-hour speech at Murray High School on Wednesday.San Francisco-based Wong will be a busy man in Utah for the next few days. He is the keynote speaker at the Utah Education Association's annual convention Thursday and is scheduled to address the National Rural Schools Association's annual convention held in Salt Lake this week.
"I kind of shoe-horned this in," he told his Murray audience.
Wong began teaching high school in 1956 and is a believer in strong classroom management to help students learn. Discipline plans and procedures for things as small as how to hand papers in, get a drink, ask a question and even enter the classroom need to be established early on in order to create an effective learning environment.
"What you and I do the very first day of school - the very first second - will determine what happens the rest of the school year," he said.
Wong wasn't content to just tell - he showed his audience how effective procedures and routines can be. Before the teachers took a break after 1 1/2 hours of listening, he told them he expected them back in 15 minutes, at which time he would raise his arm in the air. That would be the audience's signal to sit down and shut up for the second half of the lecture.
Sure enough, 15 minutes later, even while some teachers were still entering the auditorium, Wong raised his arm and within five seconds he had everyone's silence and attention - without saying a word.
"Procedures and routines - they will save your life," he said.
Wong has had his share of challenging situations. When after 17 years of teaching high school he switched to junior high, he found students that age aren't easy to handle.
"Hormones on feet," is how he described junior high students.
Putting the students to work immediately upon their entrance into the classroom was the key, he said. The worst classroom in the world is where the teacher is sitting at her desk grading papers and the students are doing nothing.
"You can't ask junior high students to do nothing," he said. "They'll start doing all sorts of nefarious malfeasances."
Wong outlined four stages of teaching: fantasy, survival, mastery and impact. A new teacher usually has a fantasy that he should, above all, be friends with his students, which notion usually crumbles quickly when the students start taking over the classroom.
"Be loving," Wong said. "Be kind. But don't be their friend."
The new teacher then enters the second stage, survival, and some never get past it.
"Just sit there and be quiet and fill out the work sheet and don't talk to anyone - I want some peace and quiet around here," was the way Wong described such a teacher. "And while you're filling out this work sheet I'll be looking for another."
But if a teacher can get past the survival stage, master his teaching and have an impact on his students, that is when it becomes a truly satisfying career.
So why does Wong remain so youthful after a lifetime engaged in a typically stressful career?
"You want to know the secret? I don't work," he said. "My students work their buns off, but I don't."