Category Archives: teaching

November 16, 2015 · 2:35 pm

When Teachers Write About Students

Dion City JH

As a writer of fiction, my characters have to come from somewhere.   A writer always writes best when he writes what he knows.  So, I am in a unique position for writing the stories that my body and soul ache to push out into the wide, wide world.  Most of my characters have to be little people… students, kids, and other denizens of the monkey house where I spent the majority of my real life.  (It helps to be told that the monkey house I refer to is a composite of all the middle schools I ever taught in.)  Of course, the students I taught were, over time, dancing in front of me metaphorically naked most of their days in my classes.  They told me everything about themselves in both conversations and their writing.  I know even their most embarrassing secrets.  Their identities have to be protected (not because they were innocent, Joe Friday, they were certainly never that, but because they have a sacred right to privacy).  So I rename them in my writing with fake names.  I take some of the incidents and eccentricities of their lives and splice them together with those of other kids.  And I transport them to imaginary worlds.  Some of my former students, reading my novels and other writing, actually don’t recognize themselves.  The picture above from the planet Dionysus in the 36th Century contains three of my former students.  Do you suppose they will recognize themselves if the story ever gets told?  The sauroid boy, a native Dion from the jungle world in the story, is modeled after Sparky, a boy I taught in my fourth year of teaching.  His real name was not Clay Snarkley, but that’s how I refer to him in my writing (when I talk about the real boy, not the alien dinosaur-child).  Sparky was one of those kids who lives his entire life on center stage.  He was the class clown who was always making a wisecrack any time the lesson involved a question that I asked students to answer.  And his wisecracks were actually funny.  He didn’t read well, but he was highly intelligent and creative.  He’s the one who fed re-fried beans to his three best friends before school and organized the Great Fart-Gas Attack in the middle of Sustained Silent Reading Time.  (That terroristic attack failed, of course, because with my lifetime of clogged sinuses, I had no sense of smell to offend.  I was perfectly comfortable.  It was the girls in class that were so enraged that Sparky narrowly escaped having a serious behind-ectomy and being the subject of ritual sacrificial revenge after school…with knives and fingernails.)  Sparky was one of my favorite students… of course, you probably know by now they were all my favorites, and he not only makes a good sauroid-alien, but he is a character in my on-going series of home-town novels, where he has to be transformed into an Iowa boy rather than a Texan.  It all means then, that I am writing humorous fiction for middle-school kids that is full of real people, people who are mostly still walking around out there living their real lives.  And if I draw them and write about them and use the details of their lives in my stories, they don’t have to be embarrassed by any of it.  As an artist, I transform the world as I perceive it through my artifice.  Their monkey-house secrets are safe. 20150807_135157

 

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November 11, 2015 · 2:56 pm

Bad Teachers

witch of creek valley

There are definitely bad teachers in the world.  If you have spent any time reading some of my old teacher posts (posts written by me, an old teacher) you might have the idea that I think I was a great teacher.  You couldn’t be more wrong.  I was a teacher open to learning from hard experience how to do the job better.  I improved.  In fact, I improved quite a bit, especially at the end of my career, the last decade.  But there were times that I understood what a bad teacher is because I was one.

badbatman_nOf course, the place to start with understanding bad teachers is the whole notion of classroom discipline.  For many principals, parents, and even teachers who should know better, a well-disciplined classroom is a quiet place with all the students seated (correct and healthy posture only) with heads bent over books and worksheets and stuff to do that supposedly qualifies as “learning”.  I know how to do this, because (especially when I started as a teacher in a school that students nearly burned down the year before I got there) I had to spend some time ruling through fear.  I made them keep their heads down.  I made them be quiet.  And I forced them to stay seated with more worksheets than they could do per period and little in the way of stimulus to keep them from thinking up ways to misbehave.  And, of course, I had students who were creative and brilliant enough to make my life as a teacher a living Hell despite how well I wore the Marine Corps drill-sergeant costume.  That isn’t teaching.  That is merely controlling their external behavior.  It is a very good way to teach kids to hate learning and hate going to school (unless, of course, you can look forward to doing apple rolls or lighting off fire-crackers in Mr. B’s room so you get to see the principal yell at him).

There are teachers who go for entire careers spending their whole day battling behaviors and filling class periods with lessons whose only goal is to keep kids quiet and busy.  Most of them are miserable all the time.  They end up hating being a teacher and hating kids.  Some become extremely negative and make you dread being in the same teachers’ lounge with them.  They will often say terrible things about kids you actually love and often, the terrible things they claim that student did in the classroom are actually true.  I used to wonder why the kids acted so differently in their classes than they did in mine.  But I had to learn the lesson that negativity only makes more negativity.  Unlike in Math Class, a negative times a negative does not make a positive when it comes to teaching.

Once in a while negative pressure from the teacher teaches a kid something.  I remember one time when one of my favorite gifted students, a girl who was head seventh grade cheerleader, student council vice president, and extremely pretty, failed to read the assignments in To Kill a Mockingbird.  I made the poor girl cry by calling out her behavior in front of her class full of over-achievers and suggesting that she had too many irons in the fire and too little commitment to reading a very great piece of literature.  I embarrassed her in front of her friends.  And because she was a self-starter, she vowed to herself to read the entire book before the rest of the class was scheduled to finish it.  She later thanked me for making her read the book.  She said it was a wonderful reading experience that changed her life, and she never would’ve finished it if I hadn’t forced her to take it on.  The appreciation felt very good for a while.  But I realized that it really had nothing to do with my skills as a teacher.  I merely used  extortion and humiliation as a weapon to force someone to do what they would probably have eventually done anyway on their own.  You can’t prevent kids like her from learning.

pink n blue212

And another problem for bad teachers is the whole idea of “playing favorites”.  I have heard other teachers say things like, “Thank God for Sasha and Abby in my third hour class.  I couldn’t stand it if they weren’t there to answer the questions and make lessons work.”  Too often I have heard students tell me to my face, “You are a hypocrite for getting mad at me.  Larry the Loudmouth gets away with doing the exact thing all the time.  You even laugh at his jokes sometimes even though they are about you!”  And I realize I have always had a problem with having “favorite students”.  I love teaching because I love kids.  The only solution I have ever found for liking some of the kids too much is to try to make them all feel like they are my favorite student.  Even the bad ones who I make voodoo dolls of at home to stick needles in when I am in a vengeful mood…  Yes, even some of those have been my favorite kids.

pink n blue22

So I have been a bad teacher at times.  I have learned to recognize what is bad about certain very common teacher behaviors.  I have observed enough other teachers in action to realize that the bad ones outnumber the good ones by two to one… more in some schools that are going steadily down hill.   And being a good teacher doesn’t get that teacher any monetary value as compensation for their efforts.  Even the best ones will have to endure being under-valued, under-paid, dis-respected, and generally treated like a second-class citizen.  People who teach can be forgiven for being bad teachers at times.  The behavior is understandable.  But there is gold-and-platinum value in those rare few who are honestly good teachers.   We need to recognize it more and reward it more.  Not all teachers are bad teachers.  And some deserve to be called great.

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November 5, 2015 · 3:22 pm

Naked Hearts III

20151105_sofie

I have presented in the last two posts some of the perils of being a teacher and having students that have not yet fully formed their mature human brains.  There is a distinct danger that they are going to be a little confused about how they actually feel about you.  There is that possibility that they will confuse liking you for the kind of teacher you are, and loving you because they think you are attractive as a member of the opposite sex.  Their front-brains that help them make mature decisions and weigh the consequences of those decisions don’t reach fully-formed maturity until the age of twenty-two.  So, these children are capable of of falling in love with you for the wrong reasons even though you have become a middle-aged man with a pot belly and scruffy author’s beard.  Poor little birds with the half-formed brains, I weep for you.  I warned you at the outset that these particular stories would make me regret and make me cry.  But maybe I overlooked the fact that they also make me laugh and make me feel all warm inside.  Puppy love does not have to plague an old dog’s heart.

Part Three; “You could marry me, Mr. B!”

The War on Ignorance, 1994  campaign, saw me trying hard to cope with burgeoning class sizes.  Technically the Chapter Two entitlements law limited a teacher like me to classes of no more than 15 students.  My sixth hour afternoon class was almost twice the legal limit.  I would probably have died of exhaustion on the battlefield if they had given me the usual three or more hyperactive boys with attention deficit during that period.  Thankfully, they gave me mostly girls.  Extra-talkative, loud, and somewhat foul-mouthed girls certainly, but still girls.  Oh, and only two ADHD boys.

I would’ve been doomed to die alone and depressed that year if not for the good girls of sixth hour.  Abigail Littleton liked me before the 7th grade year ever started because her older brother Luke was one of my RPG players, and infected her with a serious love for my teaching style and charm.  Sasha Garcia, who was even more critical to my success in that classroom, was a fatherless girl who knew me through her older cousin Lionel, a previous year’s star pupil.  Both of those girls showed serious leadership capability that year.  They showed the others how to take teacher directions and turn them into fun and learning.  When Claudia the mouth-girl smarted off, or Lisa the nail-polisher wasted class time, one of the two classroom leaders would admonish them and bring them under control even before I could react to their misdeeds.  Sasha apparently had fists of fury off campus, and they did not cross her.  Whenever we did group activities, which tends to be the most effective way to teach a bunch of female socializers reading and writing skills, I could always count on Abby and Sasha to be effective group leaders.  They also organized their own secret group activity from which I was destined to benefit, but knew absolutely nothing about.

There was a new Math teacher that year in the 7th grade, a single Filipino teacher who came to Texas as part of a special overseas recruitment program.  Abby and Sasha conspired to play “Match-maker, match-maker, make me a match!” in my name.  I don’t know what went on in the Math classroom, but I know they pressured her to get to know me almost as much as they worked on me about it.  When I first took the risk of giving that new teacher a Valentine’s gift (actually Sasha’s idea rather than mine), it turned out that the secret plan worked.  We began dating, and in a little over a year, we married.

Now, you would think that would be the happy ending to the fairy tale.  But, it turned out that, even though Sasha was very mature for her age, her frontal lobe was still not fully formed.  As the school year drew to a close, Sasha was busy getting all her friends to sign the faded old pair of blue jeans she wore on the last day of school.  They all did it.  What they didn’t all do was ask the teacher to sign it.  Especially not the way Sasha wanted me to sign it.

“I want you to sign it right here on the crotch,” she said, indicating the flap that covered the blue jean’s zipper.

“I can’t sign it there,” I said.

“Why not?  I want you to know that everything under there belongs to you.”

I am not sure what color my face was turning at that moment, because I was on the inside of it looking out.  But I imagine it was either a bright shade of reddish-purple, or possibly pea-soup green… or both.

“That would not look right, Sasha.  It might get both of us in trouble.”

“Okay, sign it on this space on the thigh then.”

“Um, no…”

She gave me that don’t-cross-me-old-man look that I had seen her control others with.  “Okay, here on the leg part.”  Thankfully she was pointing at a space down closer to her right shoe, so I dutifully signed it “Good luck, Mr. B”.  I was actually wishing myself good luck, but I didn’t dare tell Sasha that.

So, that was awkward.  And I had to have Sasha in my class again the next year.  She was taller and more intimidating… and more beautiful then.  And we got along well.  It was a good year.  My wife-to-be had not signed a contract for the second year in Cotulla, so I was making trips to Dallas to see her on many weekends.  And Sasha found out about it because my wife-to-be was a Jehovah’s Witness and Sasha had a number of relatives who were in the Cotulla Congregation.  You can’t keep secrets from people dedicated to the Truth of God’s Word the Bible.

“She’ a Jehovah’s Witness, you know… and you aren’t,” Sasha told me.  “They don’t approve.”

“I can learn, can’t I?”  I said.

“You don’t know what they are like,” she said.  “They disapprove of everything.”

“I believe in God, and I love Ms. M.”

“But you love me, too, don’t you?”

“Yes, Sasha.  You are like a daughter to me.  I love you like a teacher loves a student.”

“You could marry me, Mr. B.   You could forget about her and marry me.”

“I am old enough to be your father,” I said.

“That doesn’t matter if we’re in love.”

“It does, my girl.  It is illegal for someone my age to marry someone as young as you.”

“Wait for me.  Three more years and I will be eighteen.”

“In three more years you will find someone more your own age that you want to be with more than you want to be with some fat old guy.”

Sasha didn’t cry.  She didn’t hate me.  She continued in her quest to organize my life for me, and would later offer to babysit for my first-born son.  But I had told my wife all about Sasha, and she didn’t want to risk it.

At the end of the eighth grade year, after graduation was over, Sasha came into my classroom to say goodbye.  She walked up to me and laid her pretty head on my shoulder, draping an arm around my neck.  “I’m going to miss you more than any other teacher I have ever had,” she said.  I suspect there was at least one tear involved, but Sasha would never let me see that.

“I’m going to miss you too, girl.  But neither of us is going anywhere for a while, so I’ll see you around.”

And I did, too.  She visited me frequently in my classroom because high school classes were in a different building on the same campus.  I probably owe her more and love her more than any other student I ever had.  She was special.  They were all special, in their way, but she was the special-est of them all.  (That’s a word, isn’t it?  It has to be.)

Epilogue;

Now that I have finished this weird trilogy of impossible love stories, I have to confess.  These were not the only times I could’ve crossed a line into darkness.  Feelings like these can be dangerous to a teacher’s career.  You see in the newspapers frequently what happens when a teacher, male or female, doesn’t have enough self control to handle things like this.  I am grateful that I always found the strength to deal with things the right way.  And I am not sorry these little love stories came to pass.  But don’t worry about the girls I have talked about here.  I have changed the names and fudged the timelines enough that if any of them read these stories, only they have enough of the private knowledge of this to recognize themselves.  And they all eventually had their happy endings.  When you reveal a person’s naked heart to the world, you have a responsibility to hurt no one in the telling.  That’s as true of my naked heart as it is theirs.  They may even have forgotten me long ago, and are now incapable of seeing themselves in these stories.  But I will always remember.  And I will always love them.

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November 4, 2015 · 2:55 pm

Naked Hearts II

20151104_shawn

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.

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November 3, 2015 · 3:24 pm

Naked Hearts

sweet thing

Being a teacher leads to things you never expect.  I need to write the stories of some of those things.  And some of those things will make me blush, and make me regret, and maybe even make me cry.  You see, when a teacher sees a student naked, there is usually jail time involved.  The self-righteous child protectors will read this sentence and start heating up the tar and ripping apart feather pillows.  But I should say at this point that I have never actually seen a student naked.  Not actually naked.  Only metaphorically naked.  Realistically, they are still children even though they are suddenly stuck in weirdly morphing bodies that are becoming an adult.  They are all metaphorically naked all the time.

Part One ; “I hate you and I love you, Mr. B!”

Her name was not really Rihanna Baumgartner because I don’t use student’s real names, but she was a Hispanic girl with a German-American father.  She had a cute little face like a cartoon animal.  I had her brother in my class the year before teaching him English as a seventh grader.  He had the same chipmunk cheeks and deer eyes that she did when she came in and sat down in my classroom on the first day of school.  I could’ve sworn it was just Joe again wearing a skirt and earrings… and breasts (I am happy you can’t see me blushing at the moment).  When he came into my eighth grade class later in the day, I almost asked him what he had done with his skirt.  He would’ve laughed at that.  He was a goofy, skinny kid who laughed at all my jokes, and I fell in love with him the year before (teacher love, child protectors!  Put those torches out!)  She was painfully shy.  It took two months just to get her to talk to me in class.  She didn’t have many friends, so she didn’t talk to others either.  But she had a five-thousand megawatt cartoon grin.  And she laughed at my jokes without opening her mouth.  She was sweet and quiet and the perfect student.

I learned most of what I knew about her by talking to two of the Science teachers and the Reading teacher (who was my second girlfriend, the stalker, during the time when I had two girlfriends at once).  They told me Rihanna’s older sister Melody had run away from home as a teenager and was later found dead in Las Vegas.  It wasn’t clear at the time whether the death had been a murder or a suicide.  Rihanna lived in a family of five in the trailer park/junkyard that was Fowlerton, Texas at the time.  They were desperately poor and apparently the father was well known as a drunkard and suspected of being a wife-beater.  Rural towns in South Texas have so many lovely family stories to tell.  I could only ache for the poor girl and wonder what her home life was like.  If I was guilty of staring at her during class time, it was because I wanted to make sure I saw no bruises on her.  But I fell hopelessly in love with a girl who chose to sit up front and always laughed at my jokes and funny stories.  (Teacher love again!  Come on, people!)

At that time, in the 1980’s, I was earning a reputation as the teacher who could reach and teach the “bad” kids.  I was given the title Chapter Two At-Risk teacher and given all the toughest discipline-case-type kids in my English class because… well, in Texas Education no good deed ever goes un-punished.  So, that meant that I had the Baumgartner kids for two years apiece.  It was an honor I wore well.  I was fool enough to like kids that most other teachers dreaded.

During the eighth grade campaign in the War on Ignorance, 1988 version, Rihanna transformed into something else entirely.  She started wearing her older sister’s leather jacket.  She became snippy and snappy about giving answers in class.  And one day she said something that caught me off guard and changed everything between us.

It was after class had ended and only her new best friend, Maria the non-reader, was still there in the classroom.   “Mr. B,” she said, “I love you.”

“Oh, girl,” I smirked, “you don’t have to butter me up.  You are making an “A” already.”

Rihanna glared at me and Maria stared at her.  Things grew suddenly uncomfortable.

“I love you, Mr. B.”  Her voice was flat and unemotional.

“Well, that’s nice.  You are one of my best students,” I said, squirming on the inside like earthworms on a hot sidewalk.

And that was the end of the conversation.

That was also the end of the sweet little girl I had fallen in love with.  After that point, she was surly Rihanna.  She was Rihanna the snarling one.  She was make-a-comment-and-slip-in-a-bad-word Rihanna.  One unfortunate exchange led to, “I think you need to go see the principal, Rihanna.”

“Fine!  I hate you, Mr. B!”

It was totally out of the blue.  And very upsetting.

Joe had become a Freshman by then, but he still came by to see me once in a while.  He was the one who told me Rihanna was heartbroken over me.  Maria the non-reader would later tell me Rihanna wanted to spend romantic weekends on the beach with me.  (That was a daydream, I’m sure, because we were about 300 miles from a beach… unless she meant the bank of the Nueces River which sometimes had no water at all in it.)

The principal came to my classroom during my conference period to talk to me.

“Mr. Beyer, Rihanna Baumgartner was in my office for the last two hours.  She is insisting she needs to be changed from your English class into Mrs. Soulwhipple’s class.”  (Mrs. Soulwhipple was the district superintendent’s wife, so she had all the A+ Bluebird-type students while the rest of got the Robins and Meadowlarks… also known as the Buzzards.)

“I hate to lose Rihanna as a student,” I said, “but she is definitely smart and hard-working enough to handle Mrs. Soulwhipple’s work.”

“Well, that’s good.  I am going to have to make that change.”

“She told you that she hates me now, did she?”

“Well, yes, but I think we both know that’s not what she really means.”

“Yes.  I have been through this before.  Sometimes they just love you so much it turns into hate.”

“Yes, something like that.   She is angry because she wants something more than you can give her.  And as a single teacher, I need to relieve you of that problem.”  (To this day I still believe he said problem, but I knew he meant temptation.)

So she actually became a star pupil among the Bluebirds.  And when she stopped by in later years with her brother Joe, she smiled again and laughed at my jokes again.  The old Rihanna with the cartoon animal grin was still alive and happy in the world.  A decade later, when I was trying to do the Jehovah’s Witness thing and knocking on doors to spread the Good News, I saw her again at her trailer in Fowlerton.  She was happy to show me her beautiful smile again, and she showed me her two smiling little ones.  They had her husband’s dark brown skin, but they had her cartoon animal smile.  The world was a better place to live in again.  And I think it was because I saw her naked heart… and I did not hurt it.  I let the butterfly land upon my hand, and I did not try to capture it.  I did not crush the butterfly.

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October 16, 2015 · 2:07 pm

Gilligan’s Island

Gilligans IslandI mentioned the other day the G-word from when I started teaching.  I mean, Fernando was guilty of starting it with his comment, but it caught on fast.  Before I knew what had hit me, every kid in Frank Newman Junior High School was calling me Gilligan.  I was, in fact, thin and somewhat gangling as a twenty-five-year-old teacher, and I suppose I did have a goofy sort of smile, and a rather childish innocence (compared to the vato locos I was teaching at the time).  You can see for yourself.  ABCmemeThis is a high school graduation picture of me, but I didn’t change much in the seven years of schooling that passed before they dubbed me Gilligan.  Alright, the horn-rim glasses were mega-nerdy, I admit.  I only wore that style until they didn’t make them any more.

The reason the name bothered me was because they were trying to use it to gain power over me.  The more they irritated with it, the more they could make me mad, the more they could get away with calling me that and only making the principal laugh about it when I tried to report the misbehavior, then the more they could control whether we actually learned anything or not during class.  (The principal, at only four foot eight in height was dubbed “Papa Smurf”, and the History teacher, Mr. Stackwell was known as “El Pato” (Spanish for the duck) because of the way he walked and the fact that his face reminded even me of Donald Duck.)  But I did eventually observe that other teachers would ignore and even smile about it when they were called their own nicknames.  (Thank you, Mr. Stackwell, for giving me that example.)  I learned that I could accomplish more by owning it.  My classroom became “the Island” or “Gilligan’s Island”.   And we began feasting on cooked coconuts of learning.  I regularly pointed out that on his show, Gilligan often got the attention of the movie star, Ginger, and the farm girl Mary Ann.  There were benefits to being a single guy with two available girlfriends on a tropical island.  (I even tried the two-girlfriends-at-once thing in real life, but that’s a horror story for another day.)Hilda

El Loco Gongie often accused me of speaking Martian to the class because I used a lot of words that were, to his small mind, too big to be real words.  So I owned that too.  I would put groups of five big words on the chalkboard (or, at least, words they thought were big) and spent time each week expanding their vocabulary with “Martian words”.  I learned to fill dangerous down time when the class wasn’t doing anything else with “puzzlers”, trick questions or thinking games.  I asked them to answer difficult questions like; “You are in a room with four southern exposures.  Each wall has a window in the center of it.  A bear walks by one of the windows.  What color is the bear?”  (I promise not to tell you the bear was white… oh, uh, well, anyway, you can still figure out for yourself why that is.)   We began to have a lot of fun on Gilligan’s Island (Room 2 in the south hallway of Frank Newman Junior High in Cotulla, Texas).  Diamantina even told Papa Smurf that I was “funny”.  Of course, Papa Smurf had a long talk with me later about why teachers shouldn’t be funny, at least before May of their first year.  But I learned that when she had told him that I was funny, she meant my class was enjoyable and she was happy to be there.  Funny equals learning.  That was the most important lesson Gilligan’s Island taught me.

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October 13, 2015 · 2:52 pm

Fernando

newwkidI believe that I have mentioned before the fact that I was sexually assaulted as a ten-year-old child.  It is not a fact I was able to talk about publicly until the perpetrator died.  I have since forgiven him, and hopefully his family will always remain uninformed about the incident, for their sake more than mine.  And it is not a fact that did not have consequences.  I may have mentioned before that I did not get married until I was thirty-eight because of the discomfort the fact gave me in my acceptance of myself as a sexual being.  I was resigned to the idea that I would never be married or have children because of that fact.  The Paffooney I am using to illustrate this post is entitled “Long Ago It Might Have Been”.  I drew it after saying goodbye to girlfriend number two, a blond teacher-lady with a broad smile and sparkling eyes… A girlfriend I broke things off with when she began talking about marriage and having children.  The boy in the picture is my dream-child, blonde because of her, and modeled off an old black-and-white photograph of me at the age of about ten.  He has a Bart Simpson skateboard for a reason, and that reason was named Fernando.

(This particular aside, or parenthetic expression, is here to note that not all humor blogs are funny.  This one is meant to begin with a lump of wet sadness and mold it with the artist’s hand into something of the joy and sunshine that follows in the process of creating humor out of the suffering of an artist.)

I started my teaching career intending only to ever deal with high school students.  I was certified in Secondary English Education.  But the teacher job market was tight when I was starting.  I had a Master’s Degree with no experience, so I was one of those beginner teachers who was both unproven and expensive to hire.  Only Texas and Florida had job openings for teachers in the early 80’s.  And my Dad’s company had transferred him to Texas while I was still in college.  So, after applying about fifty times, I finally got a job offer.  But it was in deep South Texas.  And it was at a… oh, horrors! …junior high school.

My first problem student on my first day of my first teaching job acted out for the very first time in my… you guessed it… fourth period class.  You didn’t guess it?  Well, I had three periods of the first-day-quiet-sort-of-looking-and-listening-and-evaluating-of-weaknesses that new teachers normally get before the dam on the River of Middle School Chaos bursts and my illusions of competence were all drowned.  And Fernando was the boy who pulled the cork out of the hole in the middle of the crack in the dam.  Damn!  He was a skinny little hairball with long, uncut black hair and dark smiley eyes.  He was dressed that day in one of his two shirts and wore the only pair of blue jeans he owned.  He announced to the class, without permission to talk, that I looked like Gilligan from Gilligan’s Island.  He made them laugh at me, and what followed was a long string of struggles to keep kids seated, to make them listen to anything I had to say.  He was a little ball of furious energy that could bounce around the room and hit you “splat!” on the neck in the back of your head with an over-sized spitball and not even give a hint that he had thrown it when you whirled on him to catch him in the act.  Of course, I knew it was him.  He was the only one behind me when it happened.  And besides, he later confessed to doing it.  It was the beginning of a truly awful first year as a teacher.  But the one bright spot was, believe it or not, Fernando.

This is actually a picture of Manuel, not Fernando... but it gives you the right impression.

This is actually a picture of Manuel, not Fernando… but it gives you the right impression.

You see, Fernando needed me more than any other student I had that year.  He came from a poor family.  He was exposed to a lot of drugs and alcohol and sex from his drug-dealer cousin, the one that went to prison for selling cocaine five years later.  His drug-dealer cousin was seventeen years old at the time and sitting in the back of that fourth period class.  The cousin turned out to be the reason Fernando acted out in class.  He was compelled to entertain his cousin and do his bidding.  I even believe from talking to Fernando that the cousin was sexually abusing him.  There are signs you pick up on when you’ve been through the experience yourself.  And he would never rat on his cousin, but he had a deep need to tell me things about himself.

He was the first student to discover where I lived.  He was also the first student to come knocking at my door on a day off in late September.  He wanted to talk and be around me.  I apparently made the mistake of making him feel comfortable talking to me in class, and just like when you feed a stray cat, you begin to be considered the property of that cat.

Now, I know you are probably thinking that it is not a good idea for a young single man to be spending time alone in the company of a young boy.  I was definitely thinking it, even if you weren’t.  I was aware of the literature suggesting that pederasts and child molesters were molested themselves when they were young.  (Never mind the fact that young boys like that are pretty repulsive in their habits and thinking, and not really what I would ever consider attractive… I would’ve died from the shock of being accused of anything like that.)  I made Fernando get permission from his parents to visit me.  I made sure the window curtains were open so anyone passing by could see nothing evil was going on.  I even got him to bring friends along when he visited, so that he was not coming alone.  And we started playing Dungeons and Dragons at my little apartment because it was fun to tell stories that way, and because it served as reason for them being there and for Fernando to be with me on weekdays after school and on Saturdays.  He turned out to be the first of many boys I befriended.  And although neither he nor I was really what you would call hug-able at that time in our lives, he was someone that I actually held in my arms, because he needed me to.  He was the first student I ever served as a second father to, but he was the first of many.  He was the first student I ever got to really know on a personal basis, but he was the first of many more.  And it was through the mentoring of young boys, talking to them and helping them to solve their problems, that I eventually reached a place of competence in my life where I could actually begin talking to and spending time with eligible young women.  Spending time with Fernando probably had something to do with my eventually being able to get married and have children of my own.  (Okay, maybe not.  Life is not that neatly tied up in a bow in the long run.  But it’s a pretty theory to work into this essay.)

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October 2, 2015 · 2:01 pm

I Can’t Believe I Did That

I was a teacher, once upon a time.  I learned to do the job correctly.  I think I earned the pay they gave me.  I think I choose to believe at least a few of those kids who told me, “Mr. B, you were the best teacher I ever had.”  I’m not full of myself and conceited or anything.  But the world needs good teachers.  And I think I answered the call.

But I had to give it up.  I am not well enough to even be a substitute teacher.  I can’t breathe very well.  My body is wracked with arthritis pain.  I am subject to bouts of depression brought on by chronic pain.  And I am worried that it is a job which has become so very much harder to do.  Politics and people’s opinions of teachers and the sacrifices you have to make in pay for your work are all making teaching an impossibly hard job.  I fear that more and more it is being populated not by the best and brightest, the ones who love teaching kids, rather it is a place for losers.  A job held by people that were trapped by mistakes they made or lack of real choices.  A job that they don’t take up as “holy mission from God”, but as a way to get by.  Too many people are taking up teaching so they can fake it and pick up a paycheck.  They hate the job.  They hate the kids.  And there is no joy in Mudville.

20150807_135323

So here is the best thing that I can say or do to try to help this problem.  Read this plea and seriously think about doing it.  Become a teacher!  It is the most important thing you could ever do.  And who, exactly am I talking to?  Well, you made the mistake of reading this far, didn’t you?  If you are young and have your life ahead of you, especially if you are brilliant enough to be reading my obscure little posts on my obscure little blog, you have to realize that becoming a teacher is about more than building your own personal career castle.  It is about guiding future generations in the pouring of concrete, the shoring up with strong wooden and stone pillars, and the laying of strong foundations for their own castles.  The castle you build will never be as grand as the castles you will help others to build.

Neuschwanstein castle will look like a sandcastle next to those.  I can testify that there is no more satisfying experience than seeing a child you taught grow and thrive and become a worthy citizen of the world.

And I know some of you are smugly thinking that, “He’s not talking to me.  He’s just talking to those young goobers headed to college or not sure what they want to do with their lives.”  Not at all.  I am talking to you too.  No adult is immune to the needs of the young.  Every act of every day can be used to show the way.  Read to a kid.  Tell them that story about that time your Uncle Everett learned the hard way that raising chinchillas was not the road to riches and easy money, that it came with numerous foul-tempered rodent bites. Spend time with them.  Get to know them.  And if you are like me and have lost your good health and your access to kids other than your own, then write it all down in your blog, all the stuff that you know.  It will help them and heal them and give them wisdom to grow.  If that sounds like Dr. Seuss stuff… well, that’s because it is.  Dr. Seuss was one of the best teachers I ever had.

I can’t believe I did that.  I can’t believe I just told you all to be teachers.  I am alone during the school day, feeling ill and feeling depressed.  I strut and fret my hour upon the stage (of the front of the classroom) no more.  But what can I do about it?  I just did it.  And I feel better!

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September 12, 2015 · 2:58 pm

The Unquiet Teacher Brain

Miss Morgan oneYesterday, as I was reviewing a movie that is almost as old as I am (in December, 1961 I was 5), I couldn’t help but think like a teacher.  If I were going to teach this movie as a piece of literature (and movies ARE literature!  Don’t argue with me!!!), I would start with an anticipation guide… or I could call it a lesson focus.  I would tell the students a little bit about why this movie is important to me.  I would give the background information about how Walt Disney wanted to make a musical picture like The Wizard of Oz, and even bought the rights to Oz books by Frank L. Baum to make it happen.  It was supposed to be a starring vehicle for his popular Mickey Mouse Club Mouseketeers, and ended up starring Annette Funicello (and I would never mention anything about my childhood desire to see Annette naked because information like that mixed with giggle-happy teens and hormones is an explosive mix and would get me fired).  I would also start a discussion of heroes and villains and what sort of patterns we might anticipate as the story went down that well-traveled path of the hero (I might mention some of Joseph Campbell’s work on myths because it is almost relevant enough to fit in the lesson… and it would not get me fired).  But, suddenly, I realize as the teacher-brain machinery is churning on this idea… I am no longer a teacher.  I am retired.  I am not even well enough to go be a substitute teacher for a day or two.  And besides, Texas principals all frown on showing movies in class when you could be doing worksheets to prepare for State STAAR Tests.  And Disney sues teachers for using their copyrighted materials in the classroom because, well… evil fascist corporate empire ruled by a mouse, right?  So I am bummed.

Cool School Blue

When do you stop thinking like a teacher so much that it hurts?  Probably never.  I got even with Fate just a little bit by writing the novel Magical Miss Morgan, in which I gave some of my old lesson plans to the fictional version of me as a teacher (the version of me that is not a cartoon rabbit as a teacher).  I had Miss Morgan teach a class of sixth graders about J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and tried to incorporate some of my goofier teaching ideas into the story as evidence that Miss M is, in fact, a very good teacher (hard to fake if you are not a good enough teacher to at least recognize what good classroom practices look like).  And I had enough fun pretending to be a female teacher with goofy imaginary students like Mike and Blueberry in the Paffooney above, enough fun to create what I think is my best work of fiction so far.  I submitted it to the Chanticleer Book Reviews YA novel-writing contest.  I have to wait like 30 years to find out if I failed to win anything… but that’s okay.  Doing it quelled the unbridled teacher spirit in me that keeps threatening to kick down the stall gate and run away from the safety of the brain barn in the middle of a tornado… or something equally horsey but dangerous.  So, I guess I am okay for the moment.  But what do I do next when the teacher brain in me fires up and goes into overdrive yet again?

Self Portrait vxv

Ah well, I will think of something.

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September 8, 2015 · 2:36 pm

New Teachers in September

I am going to tell you a story.  It’s a true story.  It’s a horror story.  And it is replaying itself somewhere even now.  It is the story of how human sacrifice is made repeatedly every September, with lots of blood and screams and tears… in the classrooms of rookie teachers all across the United States.

Cool School Blue

You see, the longer this whole misery factory of teaching and learning goes on while under the control of evil, blood-sucking politicians who have never been in a classroom and have no idea what they are asking young, enthusiastic people of twenty-two to twenty-five years of age to do, the more innocent, normal humans are going to be eaten alive by the maniacal, monstrous monkey house.

I started teaching a lifetime ago in 1981.  I was thin.  I was twenty-five.  I had a Master of the Art of Teaching Degree from the University of Iowa, so I knew everything I would ever need to know about teaching.  And I had a class of eighth graders in deep South Texas.   Mostly Hispanic, mostly poor, and I knew they were going to be the greatest kids in the world, especially after I had revealed all the necessary secrets of learning and life to them through my wonderful teaching.

Blue and Mike in color (435x640)

And then, at the end of August, I was standing in front of them, six groups of between fifteen and thirty-two kids.  And they were all looking at me.  And they expected me to know what to do.  And they smelled funny.  And my classroom was the same little windowless classroom where the year before these eighth graders had, as seventh graders, driven the unfortunately named Miss Hilda Fokkwulf out of Texas screaming for the crime of trying to teach English. I tried to learn their names, but they laughed at me every time I said a Hispanic name.  I honestly don’t believe I was pronouncing every syllable incorrectly, but they weren’t going to let me know that.  Not even the white gringo kids who had the same problem and were grateful for someone else to be the focus of linguistic ridicule.  And the names…  The scary looking eighteen-or-nineteen-year-olds in the back of every row were named El Loco Gongie, El Mouse, El Loco Talan, and El Loco Martin.  And a shy girl in the front row whispered to me that those were not their real names and “El Loco” meant “the crazy”.

And these kids had unusual talents.  El Goofy was able to tense the muscles in his face and head to turn his entire head purple.  Wow!  I had never seen that talent before, and, honestly, I haven’t seen it since.  El Boy was cute and charming and had fifteen girlfriends at the same time.  I honestly liked him too.  But he could get away with murder even with the toughest teachers on campus.  And little Emmett Moolazonger, a scrawny little gringo kid, was known for destroying the school’s water fountains by ramming them with his head.  There were girls with talent, too… but that part of the story makes me blush and is best left for another day.  (But don’t get the idea that I’m covering up anything here… I would never… and some of them never covered up anything either.)

By September I was throwing up every morning before going to school.  I had had my life threatened and made the mistake of mentioning that to my mother, who almost came to school to drag me home and make me live there the rest of my life.  I had learned that it is practically impossible to get kids to stop talking.  And even harder to get them to stay seated.  Chalk, spitwads, and boogers flew through the air.  Parents complained to the principal about kids freely using bad words in my class, but the words were in Spanish, so how was I going to prevent that?  And of course, Mr. Wizoll, the History teacher who had sixteen years of experience tried to show me how you made them sit down and shut up, but he could do it just by walking in the classroom door and being present.  Well, what are the steps necessary to get from where I was to where he was in that matter?

“You can’t,” Mr. Wizoll said.

And it is true.  Teachers when they start out are tossed into a classroom without a single “this is how you do it” demonstration.  They are expected to learn it entirely on their own.  Principals say, “I will support you when you have trouble.”  But that really means, “I am going to yell at you for not doing this thing that no one ever actually taught you how to do correctly.”  And you either learn to do it entirely on your own, or the kids are going to peg you down to the floor, cut you up into little strips, and eat you.  Or you could use the Miss Fokkwulf method and scream at the top of your lungs all the way to the San Antonio Airport.  This happens every year.  Every year there are new teachers being eaten in unobserved classrooms.  I saw it with my own eyes when I was still teaching high school in 2014.  My wife was telling me about a young teacher in her school being eaten alive in her classroom this year.  Oh, the humanity!  When will we ever offer a little bit of help and sympathy to a young, enthusiastic, idealistic new teacher, who has no freaking idea what is going to happen to them before this month ends?

Teacher

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