Naked Hearts II

Writing about girls who were my students and fell in love with me is not mere bragging.  Yes, I mean it.  I am not bragging.  I was a skinny, nerdish white guy surrounded by Hispanic people and white crackers who looked sideways at me for being from the north.  I was not a love god in any sense of the term.  Young girls fell in love with me because they lived in a world that did not pay attention to them and wasn’t particularly kind to them in any recognizable way.  And as a teacher, I was nice to them.  I listened to them and tried to understand them.  They were not afraid to talk to me.  I used humor a lot in the classroom, and I made them feel like I cared about them more than the other teachers they had.  I am still not bragging.  It was the methods and best practices that I worked hard on to create a safe and caring classroom with, not any natural charm that I possessed.  It was those things that made little girls love me even when I got older and fatter and less good looking.  Although maybe I had the advantage of “pretty eyes”.  At least that seemed to be what they said to me the most, that I had “pretty blue eyes”.

Part Two : “Dance with me, Mr. B”

The Cotulla Junior High (sandwiched into the high school campus in the 80’s and 90’s) tried a number of baby-sitting tactics  to make schedules work out and keep teachers teaching most of the time.  In the very early 90’s we called the 30-minute baby-sitting class “Advisory”.  It was used as a study hall by the few who actually studied.  It was used as a social half-hour by most, and as recess by the immature few.  In 1990 it gave me the unique opportunity to get to know one of Mrs. Soulwhipple’s very energetic little “Bluebirds”.

There were two girls who were the very best of friends in my noon-time advisory class.  Olivia Angeles was in my English 8 class because, although she was super-smart and hard-working, she had a touch of Dyslexia.  Reading was tough for her.  But her very best friend, Shannon Moreno, was one of Mrs. Soulwhipple’s star kiddos who got stuck with the “Buzzards” for advisory.  But she didn’t mind it because she got to be with her best friend Olivia… and she got to exercise her evil genius on me.  I didn’t know it from the start of the year, but Shannon would quiz Olivia every day about my class, what jokes I told, what activities we did, and she read every one of Olivia’s journal entries because I wrote back to students in their journals and sometimes drew things in their notebooks.  (Journals were as much about communicating with the teacher as they were about practicing writing skills.  And I learned from Olivia’s journal about how vigorously Shannon had been stalking me.  Olivia told me.  And Shannon had even added her own saucy comments to that journal entry.  Two laughing jack-o-lanterns and a smiling skull got drawn on that page… probably not the clearest response I ever gave a student.)

So, we began a tease-war, the three of us.  Shannon became known as “Bean-body” in advisory, while I was “Owl-eyes” and Olivia was “Miss Nevertalk”.  So much for decorum and respect.  Nasty things were said with a smile, and I truly loved that twinkle in Shannon’s big brown eyes when she told me I was the worst teacher she had ever seen.

Advisory was used for UIL practice.  University Interscholastic League is the Texas educational organization that administers not only all high school and junior high sports in Texas, but scholastic subject-based competitions as well.  I was a successful Ready Writing coach, a contest where student-contestants are given a topic that they haven’t seen before, and are asked to create a contest essay in a two-hour time limit.  Olivia entered that, not because she was better at writing than she was at other things (she actually placed in the Math contest), but because she liked me as a teacher and wanted to be in my event.  Shannon was a better talker than a writer, so she was in Mrs. Delgado’s Impromptu Speaking event where, given a topic and five minutes to gather your thoughts, the student had to deliver a fully supported position speech totally out of their head on a prompt they had never seen before the contest began.  Shannon practiced on me constantly.

“Here’s why teachers should never tell jokes in class,” was one practice speech she laid into me with.  “This is why teachers with pretty blue eyes are an unnecessary distraction for female students,” was another.  I laughed at all the right places and let her actually convince me.

“You are just too good at this,” I said to Shannon.  “You have convinced me to leave teaching.”

“Don’t you dare!” insisted Olivia, even though I’m pretty sure she knew we were joking.

And then came the Junior High Dance around the middle of November.  It was student council sponsored and both Mrs. Delgado and Mrs. Soulwhipple recruited me to be an adult chaperon at the dance.  Well, you know how junior high dances go.  They play the principal-and-parent-approved music way too loudly.  The girls bunch up on one side of the gym.  The boys bunch up on the opposite side.  Nobody dances.  They just shout over top of the music at each other in single-sex conversations.  But Shannon was on the student council and determined to have none of that nonsense.  A half hour into the single-sex shouting and loud music, Shannon walked up to me.

“Dance with me, Mr. B!” she shouted.

“I can’t dance.  I have arthritis in my knees,” I responded.  (It was basically true, but also convenient.)

“But no one is dancing!” she whined.  She was actually close to tears, though I suspect that was about 75% her incredible acting ability.  “They will start dancing if you and I show them how.”

I relented, silly goof that I am.  I wandered out onto the dance floor/ basketball court and started to do the best twisty-two-step-dancing wiggle I could manage.  She did her own very graceful watusi-sort of rock-and-roll dance opposite me with a grin that melted my heart.  Low and behold, everybody started dancing.  Mostly girls at first.  But when one of the more dangerous greasers tried to make fun of me for dancing, I called his own manhood into question and shamed him into getting out on the floor to bust his own moves with his sweetie-kins.  After that they were all more embarrassed NOT to be dancing.  My efforts that evening earned me a hug and a thank you from Shannon.  The real thing.  No jokes.

And not just one hug, either.  She hugged me again after winning a third place ribbon at the UIL Impromptu Speaking competition.  And the hug she gave me at the 8th grade graduation ceremony was complete with tears.  And Shannon cried too.  Teachers are only allowed to love a student with teacher-love.  But my teacher-love for Shannon ran about as deep as any river of emotion ever could.