WriteOutLoud

SHOCKING REVELATION! BRACE SELF!

At a belated birthday dinner last night, kindly given by former colleagues at the public high school I seem to have retired from, or something, I asked the assembled working educators, "So did you see the thing on the local news last night, about 70 or more California teachers being fired or disciplined or somehow punished for helping their students cheat on standardized tests?"

Horrified expressions all around. All of them--every single one--shrieked or gasped, "Was my name on the list?"

Because, of course, all of them--of us--could very well be on it. Thanks to what the fabulous Anne Richards, former governor of Texas, calls "No Child's Behind Left," we have to teach to the test (which we never see until test day), then while they're taking the test, try to clean up the mess.

What's the mess, you ask? Invariably, the test itself. Out of 50 multiple-choice questions, at least 8 make no sense, so we have to help the kids decode them. Three questions (or more) offer no correct option among the five choices because whoever's making up the test doesn't know the correct answer. So when the kids start looking mystified and raise their hands for me to come over and explain, I find that it's something I have to explain to everyone. So they all put their pencils down, and we kill 10 or 15 minutes, trying to guess which wrong answer the testmaker thought was right. Much hilarity ensues. If that's cheating, then handcuff me--and all my friends--and haul us off to Teacher Jail. Convict us for choosing Bad over Worse. Then try to find somebody who can figure out a way to actually teach in these appalling circumstances. Go ahead. I dare ya.

Coming Back to Life: the Other Stuff

I was so ashamed to tell him, my alltime favorite Harvard student, now a teacher himself besides being a Hollywood screenwriter: "Michael, I'm not teaching any more. And I don't think I ever will."

He laughed. Laughed. The kind of laugh only a guy the size of Toyota can produce. "Oh for fucksake, [my name], whatever you do, you'll always be a teacher! And I will always love you."

I thought I would surely die if I weren't going to a classroom every day. If I didn't have to dig deep into the pillows every morning at 5:30 when the alarm went off, asking God to help me get out of bed, begging Her for a good day.

Now I just perk right up whenever there's too much light to sleep through, usually about 6AM. I have so much to look forward to every day: setting up my website, making myself a silk nightie that is no less than a masterpiece of fingerwork, planning my birthday, seeing what my mother needs. It's a whole new life, my real life, and I've come back to it.

I'm ready for my birthday.

Get Your Scum of the Earth, Right Here!

"You look surprised!
You shouldn't be.
The world is full of creeps like me."
--Lyle Lovett, "Creeps Like Me"

I think I'm pretty tough, pretty realistic about what depravities people are capable of. I survived the OJ verdict, for instance. I watched Watergate on TV. I know there are creeps--and worse--out there, I've met a few, and they're at all levels, so I can watch the news or read the gory parts of Paris MATCH without losing my lunch.

But we have a case out here right now that has me so steamed, all I can do is splutter. Seems a 44-year-old guy picked up a couple of girls, 15 and 16, at the bus stop by the mall, by giving them the "I can get you into showbiz" line. Told them he was from MTV's "Jackass" program--excellent choice!--and would pay them $50 to do--well, here, you can read about it if you want to.

Fortunately for the girls, he stopped on the way to the motel, to get batteries for his camcorder. One of the girls got her head on straight, and called a friend--the hero of this story--who drove right over and blocked the creep's car so he couldn't get out, then called the police who came and arrested the creep.

All bad enough, of course, but the creep is--no, WAS--a teacher at a ritsy K-8 private school not a mile from where he picked up the girls.

A teacher.

The week after he was arrested, a local news station ran a "series" called "Who [sic] Can You Trust?" #1 on their inventory of possibly untrustworthy public servants were "Your Children's Teachers," followed closely by cops and I forget who else. Thanks to creeps like this guy, a crying child on a playground cannot be hugged by a teacher--of either sex. Any time we're working alone in our classrooms, we have to leave the doors open. And I was fired from a similar school for, among other gross offenses, taking a troubled student to lunch at his parents' request.

I despair. That's all I'm able to say about this. I just completely despair.

Houston Schools: the Truth

One of the ponies Dubya's ridden to power is the "success" of the Houston school system, which apparently was a prototype for No Child Left Behind/No School Left Standing. One of the Shrub's claims: drastically reduced dropout rate, like 1.5%. But Sixty Minutes II thought maybe that didn't lissen just right, so they went to Houston, talked to a guy who's been demoted from high school principal to second asst principal of a three-grade elementary school (nope, not making this up), who says the dropout rate is actually, um, closer to 50%. The schools are cooking the books. They make up "codes" for the records of kids who vanish--"transferred to another school," "family relocation"--so they can claim nobody much actually drops out . And the principals of schools who report in the target range are getting paid bonuses--some as much as $5,000 a year--while others end up like this guy who's running a kindergarten but refuses to be humiliated, refuses to shut up.

This is No Child Left Behind, in action. This is how it is. This is education, run as business. For the mirror view, we have Martha Stewart on Larry King a couple weeks ago, referring to herself as a "teacher" and to the working-class KMart shoppers she exploits as "the people I help." Business, tricked out in the trappings of education, is one of Martha's Good Things, apparently. No dignity, no honor, just profit for the few in collapsing the distinction between self-service and service to others.

"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?

Something Funny, and then there's the rest of it

"My first, and arguably seminal experience of music was at Hull’s Craven Primary School in the nascent ukulele orchestra."

This sentence, with which a friend opens his personal statement of application to study music at St. John's College, Cambridge, has had me in stitches for about a week now. To find this as funny as I do, you may need to know that he grew up to become a double-bass virtuoso. Or you may not. The mere idea of an entire orchestra comprised entirely of tiny children flailing away on ukeleles, the use of the word "nascent" to describe them, the name of the school being Craven (it's in Hull, England)--with all the unappetizing associations that word brings with it--and his use of "seminal" to describe the experience: all this might just be enough to crack you up, too. I hope so!

It certainly came in handy for me this week, when the Red Sox were pummelled into something the Yankees like to think was submission, in the 11th inning on Thursday night. Last night, as the Bronx Bullies were being mildly trounced by the Marlins, one of their fans held up a big sign saying "Bambino Bucky Boone" just to remind everyone who doesn't need reminding (nobody else cares) of that horrid 11th inning. This kind of behavior (egregious, unsportsmanlike gloating) demonstrates why we hate the Yankees, here at WriteOutLoud.

In other news, I've been silent, here, a long time because 1) I've gone back to work (sort of--a long-term substitute high school teaching gig, same school as last year, and 2) I'm so upset by the predicament our schools are in. EVERYBODY's wrong! Not just the administrators, not just the parents--the teachers, too. I've long tried to persuade myself--OK, clung to the illusion--that teachers are long-suffering, much-abused, undervalued and misunderstood. Many are. But I'm now forced to admit that many are incompetent, irresponsible, and dishonest. I've been trying to draw lines between the Good, the Bad, and the Just Plain Ugly, but the lines keep blurring.

Example: I'm writing on the board in front of 38 11th-graders. A surly but bright-seeming boy in the back yells, "HEY, I CAN'T READ THAT!" I step back, check my penmanship, the darkness of the marker, the size of my script, and they all look fine, so I ask him why not? "I CAN'T READ CURSIVE!" He didn't just get here last week from Mexico, like some of his classmates; he's been "educated" all his life in this country. He has no diagnosed learning disabilities. I asked how many others couldn't read cursive, and EIGHT KIDS raised their hands. They've all slipped through the cracks, somehow.

Here's one now: in the lunchroom, the computer literacy teacher and I discussed a student we have in common. I'd noticed he was using the hunt-and-peck method on the computer keyboard, and asked her whether she teaches touch-typing. "I do," she replied, "and one other computer teacher does, but the other two don't." Why not? "Because they figure kids have already been using computers for years before they get to high school, so they have their own 'systems' in place by then." I asked her if the teachers who don't teach touch-typing can touch-type, themselves; she just shrugged. She's been trying for years to make it a requirement, with no success. The administrators don't see her point. HOW COULD ANYBODY NOT SEE HER POINT? With everybody using computers for everything from now till Gabriel blows his horn, how are speed and efficiency not crucial? Teachers who can't teach what they should teach pretend that what they should teach isn't important. I see it all the time. They have credentials, these teachers, credentials developed by theorists whose primary concern seems to be that everybody in the classroom be comfortable in every way, every minute of the day.

The best professor I ever had, Stephen Booth, used to say (probably still does) that nobody ever learned anything when they were comfortable--intellectually comfortable, that is. Socially comfortable, yes, but intellectually comfortable, no. Now all that matters is social comfort; intellect seems not to have any role at all, either in the seats or up front. I feel uncomfortable teaching material I know to be flawed, inferior, unnecessary, useless--but that's the daily menu I'm expected to dish up. I suspect I'm the only one who knows what chaff it is.

So yeah, I'm uncomfortable, in all the wrong ways. The kids are comfortable, in all the wrong ways. Pretty Luciana whined, on Friday morning, "I'm bored! This is boring!" to which I replied, "If you're bored, it's because you're boring." To which she shot back, "It's your job to entertain us!"

No wonder she thinks so. That's all she's ever been, in school: entertained, or not. She certainly hasn't been educated.

Peeeyeuw!

So yesterday, Monday morning, we come to school and there's a kinda funny smell. Not as pungently atrocious as last year when somebody arranged garbage cans into a swastika shape and set them on fire in the senior quad, but still pretty nasty.

The source was, again, garbage cans: still full from last Friday. Budget cuts. Fewer janitors. Now they can take out the trash only every other day, which apparently means Tuesday and Thursday. It's still, at the end of September, over 100 degrees here every day. Kids don't have anywhere to eat lunch inside where it's cool, so they hang out in classrooms, filling the wastebaskets and garbage cans on their way out. How long before we're swarming with roaches?

It's only the third week of school, and already teachers are screaming their heads off about working conditions, the kids are on edge, everybody's on edge. The edge of what, I can only wonder.

My Druthers

Fabulous Fred of Floyd (www.fragmentsfromfloyd.com -- I can't make the link work) has a linguistic moment this morning, wonders who out here in Etherland grew up with druthers. I most emphatically did, which proves druthers are not entirely a Southern phenomenon, as I was raised by people from Canada, South Dakota, and Iowa, none of which are in the South as far as I know. But maybe I'm the one who has it on backwards because every time I read Faulkner, I think how Southern (in the Faulknerish sense) my family is--so many of the same twitches and compulsions that cause inward growth and general backed-upness.

So anyway, if I had my druthers today, I would not be sitting here in the dark (except for the screen) in my undies with a wet towel on my head at 6AM. I would not be on my way to my new substitute teaching gig. I would be on my way to part of it, but not all of it. The part I would not be on my way to:

Me, trying to make self heard by 40 11th-graders: . . . then turn to page . . . Jose, please don't talk while I'm talking.

Jose: I wasn't, Miss! It was HIM! I dident do nothing!

Me to Jose: Just pipe down, please, Jose.

Jose: You're a racist!

Me to class: Who's the racist here?

Class: HIM!

If anyone's wondered where I've been, the past few days, that's where.

If I had my druthers, I would have 20 kids in that class, not 40.

Actually, if I had my REAL druthers, it would be Saturday, so I could lie on the couch and read Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, by my hero Al Franken. Fortunately, here as in the South, tomorrow is another day: Saturday!

Helicopter Moms

Thank you, Mme. Lefarge, for expanding my vocabulary in a particularly helpful way. "Helicopter moms," she explains, are Mothers Who Hover, pathologically advocating for their children no matter whether los kiddos are in the wrong or in the right, hypervigilant against any slight or omission (always imaginary) or hint that their offspring is not an impeccably behaved genius and the Fairest (or Most Handsome) One of All. Mme. L's had a bellyful of these women, and so have I. An example:

Back at St. Midas Prep, I tutored a girl--not my student--after school one or two days a week, in my classroom. Once, I let her use my computer to begin an essay (which--need I mention?--she'd had two weeks to work on and was now due the next day). At the end of the session, we copied what she'd written onto a disk, and off she went.

First thing next morning, I was summoned into the august presence of the headmaster, who leaned across his desk and hissed at me, "DID YOU LET [child's name] USE YOUR COMPUTER?"

"Well, yes. It's the only one in the room."

Big Head went on to explain that, after some school function the evening before, he had seen lights in my classroom, so stopped in to see what was up. And had found the Helicopter Mom breaking into my computer. She had persuaded a janitor to let her in. Seems the disk her daughter brought home didn't have anything on it, so Mom was SURE the essay fragment must still be on my computer, and that she was entitled to retrieve it, whop-whop-whop[sound of blades, whirling]. BH shut down my computer, escorted her out of the room, and the next morning, instructed me "NEVER LET THAT HAPPEN AGAIN!"

See how the Helicopter Mom's pathology became my fault? But who could be expected to predict such heinous behavior? Have I mentioned that St. Midas Prep did not renew my contract, citing (but not specifying) "indiscretions," of which I can only assume this was one?