In order to understand this story, you have to have a little bit of background first… a solid sense of context, in order to avoid anyone feeling that I might be ridiculing someone in an unfair or unloving way. So here’s a bit of context. I was a teacher for 31 years. I was considered a good teacher, in fact, a master teacher by something like 28 different principals and assistant principals, while only 3 felt like I was an incompetent mess, and two of those were eventually fired themselves. I only got fired once. So it can be safely assumed I know what incompetence in teaching is and can reliably identify it in others. Further, incompetence in teaching does not make you a bad person. Far too many people who believe they could be a good teacher have traits that would torpedo their own boat if they actually set sail on the sea of education. So, even though Grandma Frozenfield was a horrible teacher, she was actually a very nice and caring person, and makes a wonderful character for stories that lovingly make fun of bad teaching. And I should remind you, I don’t use real names when talking about people from my past so that their privacy is not violated by whatever my artist’s eye might reveal about them. The portrait I added to this post does not even look like her.
Grandma Frozenfield was a mid-year emergency hire who filled the position of 8th grade math teacher during my first year of teaching. She was already sixty-eight years old when she came to Cotulla, Texas, and she had five years of previous teaching experience in schools up north. How she survived five years in schools more competently run than Texas schools in the 80’s, I will never be able to figure out. She was able to hang on in our school for several years only because we were desperately strapped for warm bodies to teach Math classes in Texas junior high schools. Only idiots and coaches ever took on the job willingly.
Grandma Frozenfield had seventeen dogs and ninety-nine cats at home. That right there tells you something about which stereotype she easily fits into. But she was also a woman of great mystery. Her father had been a famous college professor in Minnesota. She had inherited a number of very valuable books from him, and kept them in random boxes stacked in dusty corners of the old run-down house she bought in town. She was actually quite bright, and though she would have spells of foggy thinking and confusion, she could capably discuss mathematics and physics and other sciences with me. She had a daughter who showed up during her third year of teaching at our school, and the daughter had a cute little son of about seven years old. Neither she nor her daughter had ever been married. In fact, rumor had it the daughter was telling people she was adopted. And her daughter and grandson disappeared from her life about four years after they started living with Grandma.
But the old lady was a spectacularly bad teacher. As bright as she was, she could never talk to kids or relate to kids in ways that kids could understand. She seemed to sincerely hate kids, calling them bad names in the classroom and telling them in detail how they would one day die in prison (a prediction that unfortunately came true for a couple of them). She would come into the teacher’s workroom after class plastered with spitballs on her back and in her hair.
A couple of the sweeter and more pro-active girls in her classes tried to protect her a bit from vandals and explained lessons to others in class to mitigate the chaos a bit.
She did not engage with students. Other than a few of the sweeter girls, she did not talk to them about anything but math. They didn’t understand her, and so they didn’t like her. She did not know how to monitor a classroom, so the infidels were on a rampage all the time in her room. It would definitely have felt like being in Hell to be her, teaching in that classroom. Why she ever wanted to be a teacher, she never said. I know it was in her family history. I know she was a caring, lovely individual. But when she died of throat cancer at 77 it was a lonely and sad thing. She had been forced to teach until two years before the end because of medical bills. She was never happy as a teacher that I observed. But she never missed a day without good reason, either. Good people don’t necessarily make good teachers. But she taught me things far beyond the 8th grade math she tried and failed to teach to students. I don’t think of her often. But I do think of her. She and her 17 dogs and 99 cats are all gone now. But not forgotten.
Cranky Old Coots Complain and Don’t Care
Yes, I am a coot. I became a coot in 2014 when I retired. I have the hair in the ears to prove it. I sometimes forget to wear pants. The dog is learning to hide from me on days when my arthritis makes me cranky.
So I am a practicer of the ancient art of being a cranky old coot. I have opinions. I share them with others foolishly. And I am summarily told to, “Shut up, you danged old coot!” And, of course, I don’t shut up because that would be a violation of number five in the by-laws of cootism. Obnoxiousness is our only reason for still being alive.
Lately, my group of coots on Facebook (who call themselves a “pack” like wolves, but, in truth, a group of coots is called an “idiocy”) are talking about politics… very loudly salted with firmly held opinions, beliefs, and bad words in several languages. I mean, it’s texting each other on memes we disagree about, but we do it LOUDLY, like that, in all caps. We also do it in such an infuriating manner because, if no one ever bothers to tell us to “Shut the hell up!” we will begin to suspect we have actually died and gone to purgatory where we are still being obnoxious, but nobody knows we are doing it. That is rubbing coot fur in the wrong direction.
The radical right (otherwise known as coot paradise) have been cooting up a storm about school shootings and gun control of late. They have more or less turned their ire on me because, knowing I was a school teacher, they have seized on the Coot in Chief’s notion of arming teachers to protect schools. Obviously, a majority of old coots agree that requiring a few “volunteer” teachers to conceal carry and learn how to handle a school shooter crisis situation with a gun instead of the way teachers are actually trained and practiced on handling such a situation, is the only economical way to defend schools from crazed lunatics with assault weapons. Of course, it is definitely more economical than hiring full-time police officers to handle security because “volunteer” teachers does not mean that they are necessarily willing to do it, but rather that they are doing it without pay. And of course, they shout at me things like, “Why don’t you just admit that you are too scared and unpatriotic to carry a gun as a teacher, and cowardly allow some female teacher with a big pistol to step in and do the job for you?” That is a very coot thing to say, and is hard to adequately counter, because if you try to argue using logic other than coot-logic, like the notion that since a majority of teachers in this country are female, you are asking women who are fierce enough to do the job (and I have known more than a few who would take it on no matter how hopeless their prospects) to take a handgun that the principal bought at Walmart with money from the Coke machine in the hall and face down a suicidal maniac with an assault rifle, you will not even be heard over the cacophony of coot braying and chest-thumping, let alone be understood.
And, for some reason, coots love Trump. Maybe because they feel he is truly one of them. He is older than dirt. He has an epically bad comb-over to hide his bald spot. He says bad words very loudly in front of women, children, and everybody. He says, “Believe me,” especially when telling lies. And he’s not afraid to fart in public and blame it on the dog. I admit to insulting Trump in front of them only because I like to see coot faces fold up in extra wrinkles, and coot heads turn various shades of angry red and apoplectic purple.
So, yes. I am a coot. Not proud to be one… that I can remember, but a coot nonetheless.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, goofy thoughts, grumpiness, gun control, humor, Liberal ideas, oldies, Paffooney, teaching
Tagged as coots, gun control and coots, obnoxious coots, old coots