Yesterday I managed to make a ridiculous post about the dangers of using humor in the classroom. I managed to leave out one of the dangers that daily annoys every teacher of middle schoolers who has ever been even remotely dedicated to the notion that you must at least try to follow the school rules if you wish to remain employed and outside of the prison system. That tiger trap is the important societal rule against certain magic words. You know the ones. Those words that, if you dare to say them out loud in the classroom as a student, make you instantly disappear… and learn hard words like the word “consequences”, and “eternal detention”, and “Would you like fries with that?” And if you are a teacher, those words lead to other hard words like “special school board meeting” and “disciplinary action”, and though they take longer to work their magic, eventually also “Would you like fries with that?”
These magic words are a serious danger and roadblock to teaching young minds because they so easily begin flowing out of young mouths. When you become a teacher infamous for using humor in the classroom, those young minds who don’t really have the big word of “inhibitions” wired into their circuitry yet will think license to laugh in the classroom is the same as license for dropping the magic F-word, or the magic S-word, or the combo-magic M-F-word. And those words invariably make somebody disappear completely… sometimes even permanently.
Being a Texas teacher, I have experience with the ridiculously harsh notion of Zero Tolerance Policies. Yes, in Texas we give the death penalty for swearing at the teacher. Well, maybe only a trip to court in front of an unfriendly judge who will levy a fifty dollar fine for the sin and then forbid the parents to pay it, making the child choose between paying it himself or spending a night in jail. So it is definitely in the students’ best interests if the teacher navigates around magic words in the laughing classroom environment.
You do this primarily through modeling. I never use even remotely offensive words in conversations with students. I sometimes even correct myself out loud for using interjections when I am mad like “Oofahdoo!” or “Fabulous French Frick-a-see-see!” because, as I point out to them, we all know what magic words they are filling in for. Context can often say for us the word we are not supposed to say. I have also been known to fake getting mad at them for saying “Criminnittly!” or “Hang-dang it!” in imitation of me because the teacher getting mad over the use of certain words is an absolute guarantee that the word will come out of the student the next time he or she needs to express inappropriate sentiment in the classroom. A teacher’s job, then, becomes the putting of lipstick on the pig. Because we are burdened with rules that absolutely prevent the use of George Carlin words in the classroom, and when the powers that be see the lipstick on the pig, they will think “Marilyn Monroe”, and their absolutes will be satisfied. Of course, I am begging you… please don’t tell them that it is really still a pig.
In point of fact, using humor in the classroom is one of the easiest ways I know to become a beloved and effective teacher. But it requires skill. It is like dancing barefoot in a mine field that is littered with pit traps for trapping tigers. See how I linked the title to my opening paragraph there? Kids in the classroom don’t… unless you make it funny. Sometimes they want you to fall in the tiger trap on purpose even though there are punji sticks at the bottom. They want to see what the consequences of the mistake really are so they are not surprised when they immediately make that same mistake.
So, let me tell you about a few of those tiger traps and how to navigate through them.
Poo-Poo Jokes
Yes, one of the unfortunate truths about humor in the classroom is that nothing is funnier to middle school and high school kids than references to sticky brown stuff. (If that last statement made you snicker, then you know that it even goes beyond school.) And it can be a devastating thing on fragile, fledgling egos in a school environment where boys will invariably stick a half-eaten chocolate bar in a back pocket on a hot day even though they are wearing khaki-colored jeans. Over-reacting to a sudden fragrance from one of a number of volatile digestive systems packed into the same small classroom can completely empty the room and imperil the teacher’s job. (Principals don’t appreciate unauthorized leaving of the classroom… so teachers need to quickly learn how to calm-and-continue in an unusually gassy environment.) Of course, the girl leading the lemming rush out of the classroom under gas attack is usually the one who dealt it. But you can’t point that out without crushing some young flower’s petals of self-image. It is necessary to lay down fences of regulation at the beginning of the school year to regulate exactly how brown and sticky a bathroom joke can actually be before it traps you in eternal detention.
Hurt-y Humor
There is the kind of humor that numerous comedians use as their fall-back style, that Don Rickles-esque “Your mama’s so fat that satellites can see her from space”sort of humor. It is also a highly tiger-trappy sort of humor to use in the classroom. Students don’t perform well after being the butt of slappy-face-style put-downs. You don’t want to remind the kid in the back row of how he mixed up the words “pied” and “peed” in last week’s read-aloud right before taking the State science test that will determine his educational future and your next evaluation. So how do you resist the urge to tell the snooty little cheerleader that just told you her mom is going to get you fired that she’s got a tail of toilet paper hanging down from the back of her skirt… when she actually does… and the football player she most idolizes is watching every move she makes with that big, tart and trippy tongue of hers? You take pity on them, and remember that if you break them down into tears in front of their peers you are doing the same thing to them that Bully Bob Beegshout did to you back in high school. Self-deprecating humor is far more effective at defusing a confrontation. You get them to laugh at themselves by making them see themselves in the story you just told on yourself. You can often make them laugh themselves right out of the bad behavior that way. (Oh, and I didn’t point out the toilet paper, but you can wait until someone else inevitably does and karma can balance the universe in that way.)
So, now that I have rolled well past the 500-word goal and still haven’t used up the whole list of tiger traps, I suppose it is time to reveal there will be a follow-up to this post.
Yes, this writer I have chosen to talk about today, this wunderful wubble of werfinsky cartoons and sniggly sayer of savantish snapoons, is, perhaps, the most important literary influence on my life. Back in the early 1960’s my parents bought a subscription to Dr. Seuss books that were written in simple, easy words… but the secret was always in the pictures and the sounds. Yes, the sounds. It’s the sounds that you see which will bollox the ear, and sear into your memory for many a year. Oh, and the rhymes… the rhymes make a memory for many old times. See if you can get that out of your head. I bet you can’t. The rhythm will make you remember instead.
The secret is how with picture and word the old master teaches you painlessly how to read. I loved Dr. Seuss as a child. I loved him even more when I was a teacher who often had to teach middle school and high school students belatedly how to read. I can’t tell you how many times I read Dr. Seuss books out loud while students looked at the words. I can’t tell you because it is such a big number that my old teacher-brain swells with the effort to remember and count. And it is not merely the reading skill you learn from this, especially the reading a book like Fox in Socks. Some time in the future when I regain a bit of health, I’ll have to show you on YouTube the tantalizing tongue training I went through with Fox in Socks.
You learn life lessons from Dr. Seuss. He not only made me a reader, he helped shape the sort of man I am.
The Lorax taught us about conservation of resources. The Sneetches teach us not to have foolish prejudices based on surface differences. He inspires us to be better than we are.
“School’s out for summer
School’s out forever
School’s been blown to pieces
No more pencils
No more books
No more teacher’s dirty looks
Well we got no class
And we got no principles
And we got no innocence
We can’t even think of a word that rhymes”
-Alice Cooper
Once again it is that day that every kid prays for… The last day of school.
My daughter doesn’t really get it, though. She doesn’t really understand the sentiment of the poor misguided school girl named Alice Cooper. Kids are supposed to hate school. Their teachers are supposed to be witches and warlocks who live for creating misery in the lives of their students. My daughter should know that already, since her mother and I are both teachers. (I am retired now, actually… and I do miss making kids’ lives total misery.) She is actually going to miss her middle school and all her middle school teachers.
She was up late last night using air-dried clay to make dragon sculptures to give to each of her teachers. Her art teacher was recently telling me about how wonderful she is at art and how wonderful she is as a student during a recent scholastic awards dinner. In fact, most of her teachers only have good things to say about her work in middle school. And teachers are supposed to hate kids and hate teaching, right? They are supposed to only be in teaching for the paycheck, marking time until they retire, living lives full of bitterness and revengeful interactions with children.
O, I am guessing that I am actually the problem here. I never felt the way teachers are supposed to feel about kids. In fact, I… like kids. Oh, no! The secret is out. I miss being a teacher. I miss the kind of devotion you get from the kind of students who stay up late making clay dragons for you as a goodbye gift.
While I was a teacher, we were not allowed to be Facebook friends with students. Society frowns on teachers getting too close to students. But now that I will never teach again, or be in the same room with any of them again, I have been saying yes to students’ friend requests. So, I am now going to share with you pictures of former students that they have shared with me. Of course, I won’t tell you their names. I don’t want to embarrass them by revealing that they don’t hate all of their teachers the way they should.
So, there’s photographic proof that once I actually was a teacher. And I know that it probably also proves I didn’t do a very good job of making their lives miserable and making them hate me the way I should have done. But I miss it terribly. And I would work harder at being bitter and crabby if only I could go back and do it some more.
As an almost sixty-year-old heterosexual man with a wife and three kids, I am really not in a very good position to pontificate on the North Carolina transgender bathroom controversy. I play with dolls and stuffed animals (though in my defense, it is more of a collector and wannabe toy-maker style of thing). A couple of my children may actually decide to consider themselves bisexuals (though in their defense, almost all teenagers go through this sexual-identity angst and it is fluid, not carved in stone). The religion I professed for most of last twenty years says that we should hate gender problems and treat them as a wicked lifestyle choice, not a genetically determined spot on the flexible continuum between male and female.
But I have known transgender people as a school teacher who was always approachable and who students often trusted with their deepest, darkest secrets. And teachers, by the very definition of the profession, care about students. The insensitivity of this stupid controversy breaks my old teacher-heart.
The truth is, transgender people in this country inhabit a bear pit full of angry bears that wish to rend them with claw-like condemnations and bullying treatment all because their preachers and opinion leaders tell them that they should be angry about this. But whose business is it really? And all the transgender people I have ever known, all two of them, were incredibly damaged people. Suicide is the most likely result of the depression and self-loathing that most transgender teens experience. I pray that such a thing doesn’t happen to children whom I have taught and tried to love for who they are. But it happens.
(I need to warn you… the next part is not funny at all… nor is it intended to be.)
My example story does not have any names attached. I will not tell you what happened in the end because transgender people are entitled to privacy. But I am using a concrete example because I want to share with you things I know to be true. The boy I am telling you about was really born a girl. He was a boy on his birth certificate because an accident caused by hormonal imbalances during gestation gave him a penis on the outside even though he had internal girl parts, including ovaries. He was not a hermaphrodite, though he was closer to being that than he was to being normal. His culture forced him to be raised as a boy, even though his thoughts and actions revealed him to be a girl. The people around him had decided he was gay by the time he was old enough to be in my classes. He was bullied, insulted, and abused in very Catholic and homophobic community. Things got even worse as he began to develop breasts. It was no wonder he acted out in school. The image burned into my memory was the day he threw a fit in the school hallway and had to be restrained so he would not continue to smash his forehead against the doorpost. He was screaming and crying and ended up having to be hospitalized on a protracted suicide watch. I never found out what set off the meltdown, but I can imagine based on the things I saw people do and say to him. I believe he eventually had a sex-change operation in his twenties. I pray that was a true rumor and not just wishful thinking on the part of some of his former friends. That would’ve solved much of his problem, if only it had been an option before so much damage was done. It might’ve been better if he had been allowed to dress and act like a girl from early childhood on… like the other one I know about but can’t say any more about. They deserve to keep whatever dignity and respect they still have. We don’t have the right to take it from them.
This has been a very difficult thing to write about. I hope, if you read this far, that I haven’t made you cry as much I as I did myself. But crying is good, because it means there is caring in a place where more caring and understanding are desperately needed. There are places to gain more knowledge about this issue, and I hope that you can see that more knowledge is what is most critical to resolving it. Let me offer a link from a right-hearted clergyman to help you know a little bit more.
Sometimes ideas for essays find me instead of making me find them. It happened to me again tonight. I have been posting a lot of liberal political gook on Facebook lately to see how many of my conservative friends will shoot me a mad-faced “like” or write a comment about how stupid and blind and ignorant I am (with the word ignorant misspelled). One angry face came from Ronald Broccoli (not his real name because I don’t do that to students). I thought I knew who that was. But I just couldn’t place the name. Then he messaged me on Facebook chat asking if I didn’t remember him from Creek Valley Middle School. He was an eighth grader in my English class during the worst year I ever endured as a teacher. That was the year I had all the worst kids available in the whole school so that the other English teacher on our team could have only good ones. I had all the emotionally disturbed kids, the low socio-economic-level kids, the kids with discipline files thicker than Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. It was the year that my diabetes kept depleting my blood sugar to the point that I couldn’t remember my own name by the afternoon. I even got lost one afternoon and found myself in Lewisville, the next city over, by mistake, completely lost, but in a restaurant and needing to eat, with absolutely no money on me anywhere. But Ronny was not one of the bad kids. (In fact, there were truly no bad kids in my classes, just kids with expectations totally stacked against them. I was just in very poor shape to deal with them.) He told me on Facebook that though I was only his teacher for a very short time, I had a big impact on him and his confidence in himself, and that he would never forget me. If you want to know the truth, he made me cry. Not tears of unhappiness… tears of joy. Even if you are lying, if you say something like that to one of your former teachers, you are going to make him or her cry.
This video of Miss Watson is also something that I encountered on Facebook. I should warn you. If you watch it, she cries in the video, and you will probably cry too if you don’t remove your heart and hide it safely in your sock drawer first.
I had a wonderful teacher once too. Her name was Mrs. Houser (That is her real name, because I won’t embarrass her… but I need everybody to know she was a life-changing sort of teacher too.) When she accepted my friend request on Facebook, I wrote a note on her wall. I said, “I just wanted you to know that I recently retired after 31 years of being a teacher in middle school and high school. And a number of my former students have found me on Facebook and told me how much of a difference I made in their lives and how much I meant to them. I wanted you to know that you were that wonderful, inspiring teacher for me, and I couldn’t have done it without you.” That goopy little comment got more likes on Facebook than anything else I have ever written. People all over the United States were adding their thumbs-up to that post. They were her family and former students. And it wasn’t about me. It was about her. Teachers throw stones into the pools that are the lives of their students. And sometimes they can muddy the water, but more often than not, they make a splash that needed to be made, and the ripples of it can flow all the way to the ocean.
So, what is this really about? I have just revealed a secret to you. If you remember any of your teachers, and you need to get even with them, or you just need to pass it on, now you know how to make them cry… and feel good about it at the same time.
I miss being a teacher. But even if I was suddenly healthy enough again to return to the classroom, I would have to think twice… or three times… or twelve times about it. I know excellent teachers who are being driven out of the education field by the demands of the job in the current educational whirlpool of death and depression. My own children are very bright and capable, but they face State of Texas mandated tests this next couple of weeks because that’s what we do in Texas, test kids and test kids and test them some more. If we don’t stress them out and make them fail on the first round of testing, there will be at least two more to get the job done. And believe me, the real reason for all the testing is to make kids fail. It sounds harsh, and like one of my loony conspiracy theories, but the Republican legislature of this State has discussed in earnest how test results prove our schools are failing, and how we must certainly need to fund more private schools and schools for profit, and stop teaching kids on the taxpayer’s dime (although they don’t really care about my dimes, only the dimes of millionaires and billionaires which we have more of in Texas than we have ever had before). Of course, these private schools they speak of will be for the children of well-to-do families, particularly white Anglo-Saxon protestant families. Public schools will be okay for everyone else, preferably built next to for-profit prisons where the public-school kids will move after graduation.
Arts and humanities-type class offerings are becoming increasingly rare. We don’t teach them to be creative any more. We have to focus on core subjects, Reading, Writing, History, Science, and Math. And not the high-level stuff in any of those areas, either. We test them on the minimum competency stuff. But we make it harder every year. Back in the 80’s it started when Governor Mark White let H. Ross Perot spearhead a school-reform drive that began with idiot-tests for teachers. The Mad Dwarf of Dallas was convinced that the biggest problem with Texas Education was incompetent teachers. But we didn’t test them on classroom management skills, or skill at motivating young learners. We took basic English tests where the teachers weeded out were mostly black and Hispanic. I helped one very gifted Science teacher pass the test which she nearly failed three times (the limit before contract non-renewal) since she was taking her teacher test in her second language, not her first. When they finally got it through their heads they were only weeding out the good teachers with test anxiety, they changed the tests to make them harder. They stopped giving life-time teaching certificates and made you prove that you were not an idiot every five years.
It was Governor George W. Bush (a Forest Gump clone with DNA mixed in from Bullwinkle the Moose and Elmer Fudd) who decided that teachers needed to be weeded by demanding that their students perform to a certain level on standardized State tests. If you watched the John Oliver video, you have a clear idea already of the value of that. We worked hard for a number of years to do better on the alphabet tests. The TAAS test became passable by most of the State, including the poorer districts, and so they replaced it with the TAKS test, a criterion-referenced test that they could provide all new and harder questions for every single year. I sat on a test review board for two years as the representative of the Cotulla District in South Texas. I got to see some of the horrendously difficult question before they were asked. There were very real cultural discriminations among those questions. Why should a Hispanic child in South Texas be required to know what “galoshes” are? And when teachers began teaching to the tests well enough to get a majority of students passing, Emperor Rick Perry, the permanent Governor of Texas after Bush, decreed we needed STAAR Tests that students had to pass in order to graduate to the next grade level. And, of course, we had to make them harder.
When I started teaching exclusively ESL kids in high school (English as a Second Language) that special population was mostly exempt from taking the alphabet tests. After all, it takes at least five years to gain proficiency in a second language even for the brightest among us, and all of those students had less than five years of practice speaking English or they weren’t qualified for the program. But scores on the TAKS and then STAAR tests were generally too high. So ESL and Special Education Students were required to take them too. And, although the passing standards were lower for ESL students than they were for regular students, the passing standards were ratcheted up every single year. And we eventually did worse than the expectation. Our ESL Department got a lot of the blame for Naaman Forest High School in Garland, Texas losing its perennial recognized school status. (We got the blame even though our scores were high enough to be rated exemplary on the sliding scale… it was actually the low socio-economic students in Math that lost us our yearly recognition… just so you know.) The paperwork nightmares I had to fill out for our ESL Department were one of the reasons my health got so bad I had to retire. Healthy teachers can’t take it any more either. We are looking at a crisis in Education in Texas. Teacher shortages in Math and Science are already apocalyptic. We are intentionally doing away with Art, Band, Chorus, and other artsy-craftsy things… things that are good for the brain and the self-esteem and the creative problem-solving abilities of students. Teaching has become a nightmare.
I hope you will take me seriously over my conspiracy-theories and lunatic teacher complaints. I have been told too often that you can’t solve education’s problems by throwing money at it (though I do not remember the time they speak of when money was actually flying through the air). I have been told too often that teaching isn’t a real job. You just sit around all day and talk to kids and you have the summers off. How hard can that be? And I have been told too many times that Johnny can’t read, and it is apparently my fault as a Reading teacher… it can’t be anything politicians have done, right? It certainly isn’t anything that politicians have done right!
God help me, in spite of all that, I really miss being a teacher.
Today may very well be the last day on Earth. I laugh when I write that, but it could literally be true. There is an asteroid approaching the earth and it is supposed to pass within 11,000 miles of Earth. That is close enough for a minor math oops to fool us into not panicking about an extinction event. The Dallas Fort-Worth area is being soaked in thunderstorms and potential high winds as I write this in a house that has foundation cracks made worse by a high number of fracking-induced earthquakes the last couple of years. I woke up with chest pains this morning, and I have a family history of heart trouble. (Although the last time I panicked and had the chest pains checked it was apparently arthritis in my rib cage… and the weather does make my arthritis worse.) So, in very many ways, this really could be the last day. And as I reminded everybody yesterday, I am a pessimist in all things.
So, I am girding up in armor as a pessimist always does, preparing for the worst. If I am not going to be here tomorrow, then I need to prepare by counting my blessings today. Number one, I have completed a successful 31-year career as a teacher. I touched over 2,000 lives, made a difference in a lot of them, and screwed up only a handful of them. I taught some kids to read, and I taught a lot of kids to write. I was a good writing teacher. I know how to build a theme and I can teach others to do the same. I have lived a life of service, and though I have not been made money-rich by my efforts, I have wealth greater than Croesus (I know you don’t really know who that is, but I didn’t want that sentiment spoiled by using a name like Trump or the Walmart heirs.)
Senator Tedhkruzh, the lizard-man from the doomed planet Galtorr Prime.
Number two, I am a survivor who has seen an amazing amount of history roll past without ever being crushed under its wheels. I was alive for John Kennedy’s Presidency and assassination. I watched Neil Armstrong step foot on the moon. I taught the day the Challenger exploded with the first teacher in space on board. I also taught the day the twin towers fell on 9-11. I have seen how the world was changed, and I, like most people, experienced the changes necessary to adapting to a new world. As a pessimist, I am already planning for life under President Ted Cruz. It will be the worst possible outcome for our nation of the election of 2016. We really should not elect a Reptilian as our leader. But I survived the Ronny Ray-Gun revolution, and eight long years under the Cowboy of Very Little Brain, so if I live to see it, I will adapt. And so will you. We have only rarely ever been truly free and prosperous, but in our minds, no one, no matter how tyrannical, can ever truly deprive us of our freedom.
So, if these are the last words I ever write, then know that I am at peace with the world. If the big space rock does us all in today, then at least we have to consolation that humankind has had its chance to live and love and laugh, and we didn’t do everything wrong.
Every Dungeons and Dragons player, especially game masters, know about the oubliette. In the foundations of towers in the castles of the French you often find a windowless room with the only entrance in the ceiling. It is a dark hole where you throw captives you want to simply forget. In fact, the name comes from the word in Middle French, “oublier” which translates to “forget”. Now, of course, as a former school teacher, I know about oubliettes. I have been in one more than once. I have tossed bad kids in there more than once. But the thing I had to learn about “forget holes” is that there is always a way out.
I had a principal who decided I had betrayed him because he overheard me talking sympathetically to a teacher he had been berating for asking that he discipline students she sent to him for disruptive behavior. He overheard me saying that he would be more understanding if he tried to manage a class himself once in a while. For my indiscretion he took away my gifted class and gave me in its place a class composed entirely of students who had been repeatedly sent to him by teachers for being disruptive and unmanageable. It was a class from hell. Really… from hell… Satan’s stepson was the first student he put in that class. I was told I would have to discipline them entirely without help from him. But as tough as it is teaching twenty dysfunctional learners at once with no outside help, it was do-able. In fact, I liked some of the kids in that class. (Hated some too, though, because you can’t always like every kid no matter how crappy they act.) I didn’t manage to teach them much English. They all spoke Skuggboy fluently the whole time. But I did endure. In fact, when that principal was suddenly jobless two-thirds of the way through the year and replaced by a new principal, I got a chance to get some back. She overhead Satan’s stepson doing his comic stand-up routine in response to my specific directions and came in to remind him who was in charge in the classroom and who deserved respect. That reminder lasted for a good fifteen minutes and was a prelude to a parent-principal conference that same afternoon. I saw his evil smile turned upside down for the first time that school year.
Whenever I put a student in the oubliette (asked them to stand outside the classroom door until I could talk to them about their bad behavior) I never left them there more than five minutes. I would quickly give the class the directions they needed to continue on their own, and then I would go out to execute the prisoner. It usually was an explanation of how I wanted them to behave, and then giving them a choice, whether they wanted to go back in and do the right thing, or they wanted to visit the office with a written explanation by me of exactly what they did wrong. Even though nothing would probably happen to them in the office, they rarely chose that option.
So, there is always a way out… but there are many forms of the oubliette, and no one is immune to being sent there.
I am about to lay on you a story full of humor, lies, and distortion… but I wanted to warn you first. This is real-life story about someone near and dear to my heart. You can laugh all you want… but please don’t think ill of Mother Mendocino.
She was a Science Teacher. Appropriately enough she taught seventh grade Life Science. And she taught students about life and love in ways that no other teacher was ever able to do.
I met Endira Mendocino the very first year I taught in the little South Texas town of Cotulla. They hired me to teach eighth grade English. And from the first time I saw her until the very last time twenty years later, she always looked exactly the same, like a plump little Wish-nik Troll Doll with frizzy hair. The picture I drew from memory clearly looks more like Al Franken, the Senator from Minnesota than it really looks like her To draw her accurately from a photo would be more like an insult than a portrait.
Her great beauty was entirely on the inside. And I, of course, am not the only person who was ever made privy to this wonderful secret. She was a teacher who cared passionately about kids. She had been a Catholic nun before she became a teacher. And she brought the Bible teaching of the rod of discipline to her students. But not the rod of whacking. She was not one of those Catholic school nuns who whacked your knuckles with a wooden ruler for every perceived sin. Rather, she used the rod of discipline as it was meant to be used by the Bible writers who wrote about it. The rod was used to sight along straight lines for laying brick building foundations. It was used as a line of sight for making paths straight, not for whacking feet at every misstep. And this is how she taught students. She modeled good behaviors for them, how to speak respectfully to your elders, how to meet anger with calm and reason, how to think through a problem and sort out solutions to find the best one. She did as a matter of course on a daily basis things it took me years of trial and error to figure out how to do in a classroom.
Kids would do anything she ever asked of them. And they didn’t do it out of fear. Oh, she did embarrass them frequently. If a boy in her class became extra-wiggly and acted out at all, she would make him hold her hand for a few a minutes, and she would refer to him as her “boyfriend” when she reminded the class how you properly go about listening and learning. But those few minutes of red-faced humiliation imprinted on the wiggler’s young psyche that problems are best confronted not with anger and punishment, but with love.
She never married. She never had a romantic relationship that any of us ever knew about. But she definitely had family. We were all her family. Her students and fellow teachers all loved her and treated her like a loving mother, hence the nickname “Mother Mendocino”. And when her diabetes and kidney problems proved too much for the miracles of modern medicine and dialysis, she took an early retirement and quietly passed away. The whole town mourned her. But she is not gone. She lives in all of us. The lessons she taught were paid forward by all of us who knew her. And so I offer that little bit of her here and now to you.
Catch a Falling Star 