Tag Archives: teaching

June 2, 2016 · 3:56 pm

School’s Out…

20160602_080054

“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.

20160602_073946

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.

1 Comment

Filed under autobiography, education, high school, humor, kids, teaching

Tagged as , , , , ,

April 14, 2016 · 5:35 pm

Like Pulling Teeth from a Chicken

superchick2

Life is hard here in the Kingdom of Paffoon where you labor hard at a labor of love and try to give birth to something eternal that ends up going nowhere… stacks of old writing litter my closets, and the prospects of being published grow dimmer and dimmer.  My book Snow Babies has a contract with a publisher, but, apparently they are not going to be able to publish it after all.  I am at the very least going to have to find another publisher for the rest of my books, both finished manuscripts and works in progress.

Blue and Mike in color (435x640)

I do intend to follow through and get published, though.  I can no longer teach, but I feel a powerful force pushing me towards the sheer precipice of authordom.  One way or another I am going to make it over the edge and plummet to the bottom of that cliff.  I am compelled by the need to tell stories, and I have a captive audience every school day no longer.

I used to tell my classes that doing impossible things was like trying to pull chicken teeth with pliers.  You know, impossible things like getting a book published or teaching a mostly Spanish-speaking student how to read in English…  every-day-sort-of impossible things.

“But, Mr. B, chickens don’t have teeth,” some bright-eyed student would say after realizing that “chicken” was the English word for “pollo”.

“Exactly!” I would say.  “That’s what makes it so challenging!”

And now I must put on my chicken-catching socks, find my tooth-pulling pliers, and get ready to make more novels happen.  After a brief bout of consternation and depression, I actually feel a bit better about the whole fiasco.  There are other publishers, and publishers seem to like my writing, even if they can’t publish it.  And I have waited two years to get Snow Babies published, all apparently for nothing.  It is time to stop wasting time.  And maybe to stop repeating repetitions too.

Leave a comment

Filed under humor, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, publishing, self pity, writing, writing humor

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

March 26, 2016 · 3:14 pm

Boo Boo Testing

Blue and Mike in color

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.

in the wild

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.

Teacher

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.

sweet thing

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.

3 Comments

Filed under humor, Paffooney, pessimism, teaching, Texas, Uncategorized

Tagged as , ,

February 26, 2016 · 4:45 pm

The Oubliette

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.

Eli Tragedy

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.

20150807_135157

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.

5 Comments

Filed under forgiveness, humor, Paffooney, teaching

Tagged as , , , , , ,

February 13, 2016 · 5:46 pm

Mother Mendocino

20160211_210513

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.  20160213_110859

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.

3 Comments

Filed under autobiography, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, teaching

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

February 10, 2016 · 7:50 pm

Stupid Is Lovable

Stupid Boy

One does not have to be smart in order to be lovable.   In fact, I think, based on my years as a teacher and reputed smart person, being smart is actually a handicap to being loved by others.  Some of the sweetest, most lovable students I ever met were the the special-education students who were mentally handicapped.   I worked with them at times as a substitute teacher in 2006 and 2007.  I also encountered them routinely doing hallway duty at Naaman Forest High School.  They always said hello.  They always smiled.  Though they rarely knew my name.  Some of them went out of their way to shake hands with me and ask me how my day was.  I discovered along the way that teachers who worked with them on a daily basis tended to be nicer, more welcoming and friendly than other teachers.  That simple enthusiasm and likability is obviously contagious.

I promise, doing the things that happy but somewhat stupid people do works when you have to deal with others on a daily basis.  I know because I tried it.  It took me several years to work past the foolish teacher-notion that you have be the boss and you have to be mean to get students to learn.  You start trying to iron out bad behaviors by calling them out and shouting them down, which only leads to threats that have to be carried out, students sitting in misery in the principal’s office, parents calling with concerns or trying to boss and bully you, and more trips to the store for antacids and headache pills.

sweet thing

What actually works better is meeting the students at the door with a stupid grin on my face before class ever starts.  “Good morning,” I say.  “You are looking smarter than usual today.  You must be ready to learn the most important lessons anyone ever learned.”

“Are we doing something in class today?” they always say.

“Of course we are,” I answer with my stupid grin, “wonderful things!”

When the lessons start and the class clown puts wasted sticky-notes on his eyelids and ears and tongue, I don’t get mad and tell him to straighten up or else.  I tell him, “Something is different about the way you look today.  Did you try a new hair gel or something?”  When the others break up in giggles, I tell him, “Whatever it is, it makes you look good.  You should wear it that way for every lesson you do.”

Sometimes you have to stop a serious consideration of themes in the Kurt Vonnegut short story from the Literature Book to take a serious wiggle-break.  Students need to stand up and shake apart whatever stiff dead-parts they may have grown from sitting too long in one spot.  Most of them shake their behinds.  You know, the part they use for thinking most of the time.

You do these stupid things, and the students begin to love your class.  They begin to love what they are reading.  It is a simple, stupid thing… but so very necessary.

Of course you can’t cure all the dead-brains, jerks, and snarks this way.  Some will never buy in.  But it works with most.  Kids will behave well for you if you love the stupid parts they all have in them.  They will love you because you let them be stupid without serious consequences.

Now, I know there are many… some of them principals and teacher-evaluators who will be offended by me talking about kids being stupid.  Some will mistakenly think I am insulting them.  But I am not.  I often need to make a distinction between the kind of stupid I am talking about here and the angry, hurtful kind that I prefer to call ignorance.  That kind of stupid is the kind that makes Donald Trump, a person who actually knows better, call Mexican immigrants rapists.  It is a different thing to do something stupid because you are unintentionally wrong about something, or impaired somehow (like me when my blood sugar is low), or valuing silly over accurate.  Stupidity often can’t be helped.  but when you demonize Muslims because you want to make political points with people who are angry and fearful and honestly don’t know anything about Muslims they haven’t heard from ignorant people, then ignorance means ignoring what you probably know is true anyway to do something that intentionally chooses not to make use of whatever useful intelligence you have.

So forgive me for writing a stupid essay about stupid being lovable.  I can’t help it.  I am just stupid sometimes.

2 Comments

Filed under humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, teaching

Tagged as , , , , , ,

January 27, 2016 · 4:30 pm

Time For Wasting

wonderful teaching

When I was still alive and still teaching, maximizing and managing time was an incredibly important part of the day.    You had to activate learners with an attention step, a lesson focus that grabbed them.  Usually that had to follow a warm-up, something you got them to do as soon as you had smiled at them at the doorway, offered to shake their hand, and then pulled them into the classroom to do some work for you.  fifteen minutes at the start of the class to rev up mental engines and get the gears turning… shake out the rust and the cobwebs that accumulate the instant the final bell rang in the previous class. I timed that part of class down to the second with my pocket watch… or phone in later years.  Then, once the engines started, the focus is in place, you introduce the learning objective.  Never more than ten minutes… timed to the second… you give the explanation, the road map of the day ahead, the instruction.  Then for the next ten to fifteen minutes you let them discover stuff.  In groups, with a partner, teacher to class, student to class, or (rarely) individually, they must apply what you pointed out and figure something out.  It could be complicated, but probably it was simple.  All answers are welcome and accepted… because all answers will be evaluated and you learn more from wrong answers than you do from correct guesses.  Evaluation comes in the five to ten minutes at the end when you evaluate.  “What have I learned today?”  You try your hardest to pin something new to the mental note-board hanging on the brain walls of each and every student.  Depending on how much or how few minutes you are given before the final bell kills the lesson for the day, you have to put the big pink ribbon on it.  That tightly-wound lesson cycle goes on all day, repeated as many times as you have classes.  In that time you have to be teacher, policeman, friend, devil’s advocate, entertainer, counselor, psychotherapist, chief explainer, and sometimes God.  And you time it to the second by your pocket watch.

Teacher

I miss being the rabbit holding the BIG PENCIL.  Now that I am retired, I am no longer on the clock… no longer subject to careful time management.  My pocket watch is broken and lying in a box somewhere in my library.  I live now in non-consecutive time periods of sleep and illness and writing and playing with dolls.  I have entered a second childhood now.  Not really a simple one because of diabetes and arthritis and COPD and psoriasis and all the other wonderful things that old age makes possible.  But a childhood free of school politics and mandates from the school board and from the State.  A childhood where I can once again dream and imagine and create and play.  That’s what this post is if you haven’t already figured it out.  I am playing with words and ideas.  They are my toys.  Toys like this one;

turtleboy

This, of course, is Tim, the turtleboy of irony, holding his magic flatiron that he uses for ironing out irony.  He is flattening it out now with a cartoony Paffooney and wickedly waggled words.  Ironically, I have often taught students to write just like this, making connections between words and pictures and ideas through free association and fast-writing.  Have you learned anything from today’s retired-teacher post?  If you did, it is ironic, because you were never meant to from the start.

2 Comments

Filed under humor, irony, Paffooney, teaching, Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

December 23, 2015 · 9:04 pm

Humbuggery

Technically I am not supposed to be celebrating Christmas.  Jehovah’s Witnesses have institutionalized “Bah, Humbug” and made it a religious offense to celebrate Christmas or any other birthdays.  And I have not yet been disfellowshipped from the JW religion.  That is, however, a mere oversight on their part.  They have not read this blog enough to be offended with my worldly views.  I have suggested here that I am a Christian existentialist… something that any JW who understands what that philosophical term means would call an atheist.

20151223_134449

Fozzie tells really bad jokes, which isn’t necessarily irredeemable, but Alf not only tells bad jokes, he also eats cats. How can they be saved by religion?

I definitely understand why atheists avoid proactive religions like the Witnesses.  For one thing, JW’s believe in the redeem-ability of the human race.  Open the door, listen to the proselytizer’s mini-sermon, read the infallible Bible verse, and paradise in an everlasting life on Earth is yours for the taking.  So, get out there and knock on some doors with a Bible in your book bag!  These redeemable Texans whose doors they knock upon being the same ones that have the police arrest Muslim clock-making teens for showing their project to a teacher, and throw hungry school children’s lunches in the trash in front of their friends if they owe $1.70 over the limit for their reduced lunches.  These redeemable Texans are also the ones who sent Ted Cruz to the US Senate and may help elect him president.  Despicable is too good a word for that type of human being… unless Sylvester the cat is the one saying it with extra sloppy spray coming out of the sides of his mouth.

20151223_141426

I confess that I have been working on a comedic science-fiction novel about a planet-wide civilization destroying itself for greed and despicableness.   I even put Ted Cruz in that story as lizard-man alien (which I am not sure if it is an insult or a complement to Cruz).  I also idolize Mark Twain, and often wonder if he isn’t right about the “damned human race”, and how Noah should’ve let them drown.  So I should be embracing humbuggery for so many reasons…

Senator Tedhkruzh

Senator Tedhkruzh, the lizard-man from the doomed planet Galtorr Prime.

But today I re-connected on Facebook with a former student from not so long ago.  Ronan Pablomia was an ESL student from the streets of Manila in the Philippines.  As a teacher, I normally love students, even the stinky ones, and I tried for three years to get through to this kid.   He was repeatedly in fights in school with other students.  He was disruptive in the classroom, saying intentionally horrible and insane things during class.  He was probably an un-diagnosed bipolar person, but he was definitely diagnosed as having a learning disability and a rage disorder.  He was hostile and made life so miserable for his classmates that they begged both the principal and me to expel his sorry behind from our high school.

Today he had the remarkable good sense to tell me on Facebook that I was the best teacher ever.  He said he finally acknowledged his fighting problem and got help (after getting out of jail).  He has a job now and is helping to support his parents.  He apologized for how stupid he acted in class, and I ended up reminding him that the best students are the ones that learned the most.  He was not the smartest kid ever, but he was bright, and if he has learned to control his bipolar temper, he definitely qualifies as one of kids who came the farthest down the learning path, and probably learned the most after all.

So Ronan gave me an excellent and unexpected Christmas gift.  He added one more hint that my career as a teacher was not in vain, and three years worth of patience and suffering did not go for nothing, even though he never graduated high school.  Maybe the aggressive and carnivorous primates that populate this planet are not all that irredeemable after all.  So have a happy Christmas.  Frohe Weinachten.  Feliz Navidad.  And God bless us, every one.

4 Comments

Filed under humor, philosophy, photo paffoonies, Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

December 19, 2015 · 8:51 pm

A Miss Morgan Sampler

Miss Morgan one

 

I told you yesterday the wonderful news about my novel, Magical Miss Morgan.  Since I am still celebrating that, I thought I would share a little peek into that competition novel.  This is chapter two, called a canto in Mickey-speak.  And though it is not the first chapter, it is the place where the largest pile of main characters are introduced.  Chapter one is full of fairies mucking about and searching for a human to help save their kind.

Cool School Blue

Canto 2 – Miss Morgan’s Class

“All right, kiddie-winkies,” said Miss Morgan, “now that we have the space for our talking circle created, we must take off our shoes and socks.  Bare feet only!”

“Why must we do that, Miss M?” asked Blueberry Bates, a cute little brown-eyed girl with a very concerned scowl.

Miss Morgan loved the Six-Twos better than any of her other classes… and that was saying something because she really loved them all.  Six-Two, however, had the most Norwall kids in it of all her classes, and Norwall kids were a little more imaginative and empathetic than the Belle City kids, or the Goodwell kids, or the Klemmens kids.  Those other little towns were charming, but not nearly so wondrous.  Besides, she had once been a Norwall kid herself.  It was a very special little Iowa farm town to Miss Morgan, and it meant more to her than all the other three towns in the rural school district combined.

“Who can tell Blueberry why we have to have bare feet for this discussion?” Miss M asked the whole group.

“Well,” said Mike Murphy, a Norwall rapscallion and a Pirate, “we’re studying the Hobbit by Tolkien.   Hobbits all go barefoot all the time.”

“Very good, Michael.  He’s right.  But why does it help for us all to be barefoot?”

“Maybe it helps us feel like the main character Bilbo,” said Billy Klatthammer, the plump son of the Klemmens, Iowa farm implement king.

“Right.  But why is it important to feel like Bilbo?”

“He’s an every-man character,” said Frosty Anderson, a Norwall farm kid.  “We have to identify with him as we travel through the world of Middle Earth.  He’s supposed to be just like us.”

“My, my… Someone was listening when I was talking about the book yesterday.  Thank you very much, Forrest.”

“And I think,” said Barbie Andersen from Belle City, “that people are more sensitive when they are barefooted.   You want us to feel what Bilbo feels and think like Bilbo thinks.”

“That’s very good, Barbie.  I hadn’t thought of that.”

“The real reason,” said Tim Kellogg, Norwall boy and most difficult child in the class, “is that you like the smell of stinky feet.”

Everyone burst out in a belly laugh, including Miss Morgan.

“Okay,” said Miss Morgan, “Now that I can smell all of your stinky feet, I need you to gather around in a circle.  As we take on each question from the study guide, we will go around the circle and get an answer or a comment from each of you.  We will talk about each question until everyone has said at least one thing and we have made an agreement on what the best answer is.”

At that moment, the first-year teacher from next door appeared in the doorway.  “Miss Morgan,” said Miss Krapplemacher, “the noise from this classroom is eroding my standards of discipline again.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Abby,” said Miss Morgan, smiling and speaking through gritted teeth.  She resisted the urge to call her Miss Krabby, the way all Krabby’s science students did.  Miss Krabby insisted on a silent classroom and made students fill out worksheets all period.  “We will try to be quieter.  We are doing a discussion assignment, though.”

“Well, okay.  But stifle the laughing.  It’s hard to achieve serious learning with all the laughing going on next door.”

“We promise we will only talk about depressing things this period,” piped up Tim Kellogg.  “No more laughter this period.”

Bless the little black-hearted teacher’s kid.  Yes, Tim’s father was a teacher, one of the main reasons that Tim was difficult to handle.  Miss Morgan silently appreciated the imp with his special insight into teacher-buttons as Miss Krapplemacher made vibrating fists with both hands and stormed out.  Tim was Miss Krabby’s least favorite science student of all time.

*****

Donner n Silkie

I do promise you too that this book is a fairy tale as well as a story about being a school teacher in the United States.  I have included a Paffooney of Donner and Silkie in this post to show you what some of the main fairy characters look like.  You have to imagine them as less than three inches tall, however, because fairies are no longer big in the modern world.

Leave a comment

Filed under fairies, humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

December 10, 2015 · 5:05 pm

Mickey is Magical

I have decided that since I have a tendency to write science fiction and fantasy, with a special emphasis on the fantasy part, I should actually be able to do magic.  It doesn’t take a lot of self-examination to see that it is so.

Teacher Magic

wonderful teaching

As a teacher I know several powerful magic spells.  I have the power to put teenagers into a deep and restful sleep.  All I have to do is start a lesson focus and heads drop to desks and snore-music fills the part of the room that my blah-blah doesn’t.  I also have a powerful ability to make teenagers hate things.  All I have to do is testify with my best honest-to-goodness face that something is good for them, and they will thoroughly hate it.  Protein at breakfast is good for you?  Gotta hate that.  Independent reading of books is good for you?  I have just made the entire school library radioactive by saying it.  Think what good a teacher could do if the principal would only let them say, “Illegal drugs are good for you!” or, “You should join a street gang, it would be good for you!” or even, “Racial prejudice is a good thing for our white society!”  (I know I would never actually feel good about saying those things, and I could never make the proper honest-to-goodness face, but that last thing was actually tried by a teacher I once worked with… he said it because he believed it… and even the white kids were instantly up in arms and got that teacher fired.  Come to think of it, that was the only lesson he ever taught that I actually approved of.)  An even more powerful teacher magic is to forbid things.  Anything forbidden by a teacher or a teacher’s rules is the only thing they want to do.  I was able to get kids to read more by forbidding them to read library books during lessons.  I found it strengthened the urge to occasionally catch them doing it and lecture them about how they will end up unable to flip burgers at McDonald’s because they will let interesting and complicated stuff get in the way of mindlessly doing repetitive tasks.

cudgels car

Traffic Magic

I have an amazing magical power over stoplights.  I can unfailingly turn them bright red just by approaching them, no matter what color they were five and a half seconds before.  If I am in a hurry, I have the power to make that red light last for more than the three minutes that is supposed to be the maximum for the cycle.

I can also make old people (of course I mean other old people) drive slower in the fast lane by driving behind them.  I can make young guys in Bubba trucks zoom in front of me and nearly kill me simply by having a few inches of space between my front bumper and the rear end of the car I’m following.  I don’t know how they fit those big old Chevys and Ford Broncos and Dodge Rams in those little spaces which are less than half as long as their vehicles, and do it while using one hand to give me the finger out their window.  I suppose they have fold-able bones like a rat so they can squeeze through tight places.

Laughing Magic

20150105_161714 I suppose the magical power I am proudest of is my ability to magically make people laugh at me.  (Yes, they always say they are laughing with me, not at me… but we all know how humor really works.  We laugh because we are really happy that it didn’t happen to us!)  I am able to put on the clown nose and people automatically laugh almost as hard as they laugh at me without the clown nose.  I am able to say things in weird words that stimulate your brain to shout silently in your head, “That jest ain’t right!”, and you automatically think, “Funny!”  So, with all this magical power, I have concluded… I am a wizard!

space cowboy23

Leave a comment

Filed under humor, magic, photo paffoonies, Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , ,