WriteOutLoud

Where I'm From

In response to Fred of Floyd's invitation to write a "Where I'm From" poem:

I am from:

Cool dust under Gramma's orange trees, heat around them, "Spider House" garden shed and whirly lawn sprinkler, drool on my bedspread, Bobbsey Twins, Little Women, Gone With the Wind open under my sleeping hand.

Prickly grey Packard upholstery. Gramma's white '57 Ford.

Dodo's treadle sewing machine, sugar cookies, long pink corset strings, As the World Turns.

Dad's tobacco-leather-smelling top drawer, gold-ruby pinky ring, clank of silver Zippo. Swat of hard hand. Dark scowl.

Mom's sewing machine, humming, her mouth full of pins: "Stand still!" Oops--fainted.

Sidewinders curling hieroglyphs across desert floor, scorpions in carport,
flipflops, halter tops, bobby pins, pedalpushers, swimming pools, Sea 'N' Ski, waterslides, trampolines,
Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, Mickey Mouse Club, Clark Gable in a grocery store.

Piney summer mountain streams, smoking barbecues, rain hammering trailer roof.

Grubby hands stained by walnut husks, aroma of eucalyptus leaves/acorns crunching underfoot on chilly, fogshrouded mornings, San Francisco in the mist.

"Surfing" on air mattresses, waves pounding rocks, Si's nightly trombone wail.

A tidal wave that never came--but we evacuated!. Fires at the ranch: "Get the horses out!" Earthquakes: goldfish sloshing in their bowls; Mom hysterical. Floods: palm trees sailing by; Gramma in waders, shoveling. Sandstorms: a new windshield every year.

"It's California, after all!"

"Tinagores," and Why They Are

Answering a question about Huck and Tom, she wrote that they want to have adventures "because their tinagores."

I stared at the scrawled phrase for a full 15 seconds yesterday, struggling to decode it. Did she mean "because OF their . . . [something]?" or, as usual, was she fouling up there/they're/their? in which case, what on earth are "tinagores"? Who is Tina Gore? Not one of Al's daughters.

I squint. Aha. "They're TEENAGERS"--!

I surveyed the room, in which 37 tinagores were reading Huckleberry Finn and scratching away on their sheets of study questions at various levels of concentration. The 38th member of the class, Frank Gutierrez--the one who recently announced that, at 16 and despite having been educated in this country all his life, he cannot read cursive writing ("I tuned out that week in third grade," he explained)--was drooling contentedly onto his backpack, sound asleep on the floor under the counter in the back of the room.

As I understand it, there was no such thing as a tinagore until about 1950. Prior to their advent, people had been children until they were adults; as soon as they were old enough to wear clothes, they were dressed as adults. If they were rich (and male), they were educated; if poor and/or female, they were left to their own devices, in spite of which neglect, some few who wanted education managed to find it. They weren't herded into prisons, forced to sit still in straight lines arranged alphabetically, and babysat.

So what I'm wondering is whether people between the ages of 12 and 20 were surly, seething masses of angsty resentment before 1950--before they were tinagores. Yes, I'm still smarting from having been heartily cursed in class a couple days ago, by a girl who, last year, handed one of her teachers a battery-loaded ballpoint pen, ostensibly as a gift. When the teacher clicked the button on the end, she got an electric shock strong enough to burn her thumb severely. When the girl returned from the few days' detention that was her only punishment, she asked the teacher sweetly, "How is your hand, Mrs. K?" Earlier this year, she informed another of her teachers (also a woman) that she was "a dumbass fucking bitch."

Neither this brat with the "anger-management issues" nor Drooling Frank nor hundreds--thousands--millions of other tinagores are being served by compulsory education. Their parents are getting free babysitting, and their kids aren't out on the street, committing actual crimes (at least, not between 7:30AM and 2:20AM, M-F, they're not), but that's all we're accomplishing.

It's not enough. It's not worth it. The few who want to learn (and there are a few) have to watch their teachers' energy being drained off by the demands of crowd control. That's all we're doing. And the crowd isn't going away; when they're old enough not to be tinagores any more, they will be--what? Who will they be? The prospect is frightening.

The World's Other Oldest Profession

No, not politics.

We teachers turned in grades today. We have a computer program whereby we can enter the student's scores on quizzes, tests, essays, homework, exercises and misc, rated on all-over points or scaled according to task. Then we're supposed to be able to hit "Enter" and they go into the system.

But it doesn't work, so we spend hours and get bubble-elbow, filling in forms with our #2 pencils, a minimum of two bubbles per student (academic grade, citizenship grade) (I have 150 students); then, there's the plus or minus; then, there's an array of 24 "comments" we can bubble in three of, like "poor attitude" or "fails to dress for gym." If we had real comments like, say, "Unaccountably seethes with hatred for teacher," "Reads at 3rd grade level in 9th grade," "Cannot read cursive in 11th grade," "Sleeps in class," or "Does not know is alive," I might be a little happier.

But only a little. The teacher I admire most stopped me today and said, "It's amazing how hard we work to keep these kids from failing, and then they go ahead and do it anyway." We fall all over ourselves, doing what the Big Head at that fancy private school called "creating opportunities for students to succeed." Bring your book to class? 25 points! Here's an open-book quiz, and here's the book, ten questions, you have all period, 100 free points--go!--so hey, Jorge, how did you manage to score only 23 points? OK, lemme see how I can turn this into a passing grade. I know: I'll curve it! I'll set the top at, um, 50 points--that means you had 45 minutes to do 5 questions with the book open in front of you, and . . . oops, you still flunked it. My bad! Start over. Everybody wearing clothes gets 50 points. [writing in gradebook] OK, Celia, Jose, Marisol, good, that's 50 points each for you. But good lord, Mario, where are your pants? All I can see is boxers! No, don't beg; underwear doesn't count, underwear is none of my business, I'm giving points for clothes.

On it goes. I never feel more like a puta than I do on grade day. And today was extra-special because I also got told off by the mother of one of those unaccountably seething teens AND cussed out with the f-word twice, in class and at full (extra-full, even) voice, by the other ST. I have tried everything I can think of--kind concern, active encouragement, polite inquiry--to get both/either of these children to exude something other than pus. "Emily, what's bothering you? You look upset!" "I fucking HATE YOU, Miss!"

Which, I guess, makes it my fault she's failing the class. Right?