Tag Archives: teaching

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.

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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 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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August 20, 2015 · 2:15 pm

Terry Pratchett, the Grand Wizard of Discworld

image borrowed from TVtropes.com

image borrowed from TVtropes.com

I firmly believe that I would never have succeeded as a teacher and never gotten my resolve wrapped around the whole nonsense package of being a published author if I hadn’t picked up a copy of Mort, the first Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett that I ever encountered.  I started reading the book as a veteran dungeon-master at D&D role-playing games and also as a novice teacher having a world of difficulty trying to swim up the waterfalls of Texas education fast enough to avoid the jagged rocks of failure at the bottom.  I was drinking ice tea when I started reading it.  More of that iced tea shot out my nose while reading and laughing than went down my gullet.  I almost put myself in the hospital with goofy guffaws over Death’s apprentice and his comic adventures on a flat world riding through space and time on the backs of four gigantic elephants standing on the back of a gigantic-er turtle swimming through the stars.  Now, I know you have no earthly idea what this paragraph even means, unless you read Terry Pratchett.  And believe me, if you don’t, you have to start.  If you don’t die laughing, you will have discovered what may well be the best humorist to ever put quill pen to scroll and write.  And if you do die laughing, well, there are worse ways to go, believe me.

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Discworld novels are fantasy-satire that make fun of Tolkien and Conan the Barbarian (written by Robert E. Howard, not the barbarian himself) and the whole world of elves and dwarves and heroes and dragons and such.  You don’t even have to love fantasy to like this stuff.  It skewers fantasy with spears of ridiculousness (a fourth level spell from the Dungeons of Comedic Magic for those fellow dungeon masters out there who obsessively keep track of such things).  The humor bleeds over into the realms of high finance, education, theater, English and American politics, and the world as we know it (but failed to see from this angle before… a stand-on-your-head-and-balance-over-a-pit-of-man-eating-goldfish sort of angle).

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Terry Pratchett’s many wonderful books helped me to love what is ugly, because ugly is funny, and if you love something funny for long enough, you understand that there is a place in the world even for goblins and trolls and ogres.  Believe me, that was a critical lesson for a teacher of seventh graders to learn.  I became quite fond of a number of twelve and thirteen year old goblins and trolls because I was able see through the funny parts of their inherent ugliness to the hidden beauty that lies within (yes, I know that sounds like I am still talking about yesterday’s post, but that’s because I am… I never stop blithering about that sort of blather when it comes to the value hidden inside kids).

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I have made it a personal goal to read every book ever written by Terry Pratchett.  And that goal is now within reach because even though he is an incredibly prolific writer, he has passed on withing the last year.  He now only has one novel left that hasn’t reached bookstores.  Soon I will only need to read a dozen more of his books to finish his entire catalog of published works.  And I am confident I will learn more lessons about life and love and laughter by reading what is left, and re-reading some of the books in my treasured Terry Pratchett paperback collection.  Talk about your dog-eared tomes of magical mirth-making lore!  I know I will never be the writer he was.  But I can imitate and praise him and maybe extend the wonderful work that he did in life.  This word-wizard is definitely worth any amount of work to acquire and internalize.  Don’t take my convoluted word for it.  Try it yourself.

borrowed from artistsUK.com

borrowed from artistsUK.com

map

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August 19, 2015 · 3:29 pm

Mickey Mouse Club Music

Today’s essay was inspired by Annette Funicello’s Facebook page.  I was marveling at how a teen idol and Disney child star could have such a large following and leave such large footprints on social media when she is not only all grown out of her child-stardom, but is actually quite dead.   I, however, who am technically still alive, work very very hard at this author-self-promotion-thingy, and I hardly make any headway at all in the ocean of the internet.  So, I did what I always do when faced with the imponderables of this writing life.  I drew a picture.  I drew Annette naked.  Well, that’s not entirely accurate either.  I put clothes on her because, well, young-adult-genre authors don’t always have to think like a teenager.

annette

You see, I am not mad at Annette.  And my hormones no longer control the other things that once made me deeply regret the fact that Disney never let Annette appear in movies in a bikini, even the movies that were not Disney movies.  When you’re twelve, there are different priorities than when you are 58.  Hormones don’t do all of my thinking any more… at least, that’s what I tell my wife.

And part of what I still love most about Annette is the music.  The Mickey Mouse Club was always about talented kids.  They could sing and dance and play the drums, and they were as easily professional quality as many of the adults… and cuter to boot.  Talented children have been a significant portion of my life.  As an English teacher in middle school, I taught kids that were Annette’s MMC age.  I taught them how to write and how to read, and occasionally I had to find other talents to promote and help those kids become winners in the great game of life.  And, it may be cruel to say it bluntly, but some kids are downright ugly.  Not merely ugly in terms of what they looked like, but how they acted and how they thought and how they felt about things.  Racism runs deeply through children who’ve been taught thoroughly by parents before the teacher even meets them.  Sometimes you have to dig around really deeply in the black pits of their personalities to find something bright and shiny enough to put the spotlight on.   But it is always worth it.  ALL CHILDREN HAVE TREASURE BURIED INSIDE THEM.  And it deeply hurts that too many adults in every community can’t be bothered to dig for it.

Annette in DLandnI grafted a background on my picture of Annette to stress the fact that she is not naked in my picture.  She was a very public figure and a good portion of her personal treasure was that screen personality that showed through and sparkled in every role.  My favorite Annette piece is the movie Babes in Toyland which I saw for the first time at Grandma Beyer’s house in Mason City on her color TV.  The songs from that movie still play in my dreams.

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August 7, 2015 · 2:36 pm

Humor Without Insults

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I am not one who can stand to watch Republican debates.  I know the clown car is full to busting, but I can’s stand the idea that one of those narrow-minded, fact-free, duplicitous Bozos could end up being the next president.  (Or fascist dictator, when you consider what “fascist” actually means, and what former President Carter has said about the U.S. not being a democracy any more.)  If one of those clowns wins it, the true power will once again reside with the unseen ring master, like it was with the rodeo-clown George W. Bush and his secret puppet-master, Dick Cheney.  And I pay enough attention to know that Donald Trump was so insulting to women during the debate, that Democrats can pick Beelzebub to run as their candidate and women still won’t vote Republican.

I watched the final Jon Stewart Daily Show instead.  Stewart is more liberal than I am and uses a lot more bad words than I ever could, but his humor and politics are far gentler and kinder than anything coming out of the mouths of name-calling conservatives.  They uniformly say terrible and untrue things about President Obama and Hilary Clinton.  They don’t hold back from calling even their own Senate leader a liar (a la Senator “Slappy Happy” Ted Cruz.and Senator Mitch McConnell).  The Donald is a master of the crude and inappropriate slam.  Look at the unfounded claims he made against Mexicans and the cowardly way he impugned the honor of Senator John McCain.  Jon Stewart mocks them by taking their own actual statements and putting them beside the verifiable facts to show the absurdity of their political beliefs and goals without casting insults.  Yes, I love his turtle voice for aping Mitch McConnell, but there is a gentleness to his wit that shows affection for his subjects rather than laying waste to their psyches with crude insults and unfounded accusations.

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I had to learn the kind of humor I’m extolling here as a classroom teacher.  You cannot believe how fragile the little animals can be when you resort to calling them names.  A growing, developing, vulnerable psyche cannot take the random bash and cruel cut the way an adult can (though even an adult shouldn’t have to).  You have to learn to be funny by the surprising imagery you use, the comparisons with funny things, and the flat out absurd.  And self-deprecating humor is the only kind of insult you can actually get away with.  (I even learned that when a student grows to love and respect you too much, even insulting yourself to make a point is out the window.)

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Humor definitely has its uses in the classroom.  This classroom poster was used both to teach students how to write a quatrain of twin couplets, and also to teach them that classroom discipline was a matter of teaching them how not to be like cockroaches.  I am not directly calling them cockroaches.  Instead I am telling them that if they choose to use the thoughtless and rather dumb behaviors that are against classroom procedure, they are choosing to be like roaches.  Of course, there is always the classroom clown like Steve-O Whoopsadoodle (not his real name, but a name he called himself) who glories in being like cockroaches.  You also have to learn to laugh at them politely and give them their few minutes of fools’ fame.

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So, to sum it all up, humor is a very useful thing in running the world and teaching things to others.  It is why I always go for the joke in my writing.  The place I am at doesn’t always have to be the happiest place on Earth, but it is a lot funnier and happier without the cruel and biting insult.  (Sorry about earlier, George, you old rodeo clown).  And if we can just be a little nicer to each other when we make fun, it might turn out to actually be fun.  (You are welcome to find all the gaffs and mistakes I made in the old drawing above.  I was still learning my craft in 1980.  But please don’t call me names over it.  I have had all the blue I can handle for one week.  I used up the last of it in this last Paffooney.)

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August 6, 2015 · 1:52 pm

Making Mickey Happy

lil mickeyI have to admit to being a little blue yesterday.  Not “literally blue” because most days I look nothing like my Paffooney portrait here to the left.  I said a little blue, as in slightly depressed.  Not weeping and roaring with sorrow depressed… more like needing to softly sing to myself sort of depressed.  I wasn’t depressed for valid reasons.  I was mistaken about the writing contest results.  The dental insurance also covers more of what we are going to owe for the privilege of having teeth than I was at first led to believe.  So my deep blue hole yesterday was imaginary and all see-through-y if I had been sane enough to look properly.  But, Mickeys are like that sometimes, getting all bothered about things they really shouldn’t get bothered about.

So, today, determined to still be sad for a reason, I began to list other things that I could conveniently be sad about.  There was school news about an 8-year-old boy in Kentucky being handcuffed by an officer in school and crying because it was hurting him.  That social media outrage led me to an article about school discipline.  “Schools as Punishing Factories”  Reading that made me bitterly depressed.  I have witnessed the truth of that article in Texas where teachers can get in trouble so easily when they try to advocate for kids, especially black and Hispanic kids.  I have seen talking back to the teacher, throwing spitwads, and disrupting lessons become reasons for students to be escorted away in handcuffs.  I like to pretend it is because principals and policemen and community businessmen can be rather stupid sometimes, and not because there is a concerted effort to use the school experience as training for black and Hispanic, as well as poor kids to prepare for the second part of their life, the life they will lead inside prisons for profit.  As a teacher who loved kids, even the bad ones, I am truly depressed about this trend in America.  I have white friends in both Texas and Iowa that want to tell me that I am the one who is wrong, not the system.  Their conservatives beliefs are stronger than any eye-witness evidence I can give them.  So… even darker blues and more depression.  My contest novel is about a teacher like me trying to fight the way things are and teach the way teaching should be done.  I must comfort myself by telling myself that my book will change peoples’ minds and make the problem get solved.  If I just lie to myself hard enough, like those friends who tell me “throwing money at the problem of failing schools will not fix the problem” lie to themselves… a lie I know is false but want desperately to believe anyway, then I can make it true.

So, how do I make Mickey happy?  Well, luckily Mickey is goofy.  I went to Walmart and finally found the doll on sale that I had been searching for.  I bought Operetta. the daughter of the Phantom of the Opera to add to my Monster High collection for only $9.95.  And Mickey is seriously addicted to doll collecting.  It makes him happy and turns him away from despair when other things probably can’t.  I am not forgetting about the education fight.  Oh, no!  Mickey’s dander is up on that.  And he will bombard you with his writer wrath about that another day.  But forgive me.  I need to be happy a little right now.  And Mickey needs to play with dolls.

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June 20, 2015 · 2:22 pm

Red State Hate

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It has taken me some time to put ideas together to tackle this terrible thing.  Jon Stewart did a segment at the beginning of his show that was not funny.  It was somber, thoughtful, and full of real outrage that cast lightning bolts at the heart of the dragon.  And I admire Stewart for what he is… someone who truly cares about things, and fights the good fight using the best weapon he has.  Humor.  Mark Twain said that against it, nothing could stand.  But some things are so terrible that not even a joke can put it right.  Why?  Because there are places in this human world where ideas are like a festering sore, spreading at an alarming rate, and daily becoming more and more poisonous.  Texas is like that.  It is a Red State.  That means it is a hotbed of conservative ideas and nurtures Republican values… like being distrustful and fearful of them…  And who are they?  They are not us.  They have a different religion.  They have a different skin color.  They are not opposed to raising taxes on the rich, even if they are rich themselves.  They are not capitalists… Or not freedom-loving…  They think it can be left up to women to decide what to do with their own bodies.  They don’t see abortion as murder.  They don’t think teaching evolution in schools is evil.  We must fear them… and, yes, even hate them.

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As a school teacher, I learned early on that if you only look for the bad in other people, then that is what you will be left with, a world in which there are only bad people.  I don’t know about you, but I can’t live in a world like that.  I learned to look at the world as being full of imperfect people who all have good in them, lots of good.  I grew up in Iowa where the people were so white in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s that when the winter snow fell heavy enough, we all had the super power of invisibility.   I remember only one black face from my childhood that wasn’t on television.  There was a little girl from Chicago who came to stay with a volunteer family so she could get out of the inner city for a while.  The adults warned us that she might be prone to stealing things, so don’t do anything to tempt her.  And we didn’t.  And she didn’t.  And damn it, I don’t know whether we did a good job of not tempting her, or that warning was just an empty prejudice.  She was just like us.  She laughed at things.  She loved kittens.  She played our games.  She was just like us… but she had a better tan.

I started teaching in South Texas.  I quickly learned how to deal with Hispanic kids who were mostly poor and mostly Spanish-speaking.  I learned that they didn’t laugh at the same things as I did.  When they called me Batman for a while, it wasn’t a compliment.  I learned to laugh at the things they found funny and learned to joke the way they joked.  I played their games.  I learned to love pit-bulls and other dogs the way they loved dogs.  I was just like them… but they couldn’t hide in the snow as easily as me.

I learned to teach black kids like they complain about on Fox News, the ones they throw to the ground and sit on at pool parties in McKinney, Texas, when I moved to the Dallas area and the town of Carrollton.  I quickly learned why some teachers are so stressed out by them.  They are louder than the white kids.  Their nerves can be more raw and their tempers hotter than the other kids.  Not all of them… just about 51 %.   But you have to look close enough to see that… they laugh at most of the same things as us.  Some of the brightest, widest smiles I have ever seen are on the faces of black kids when you laugh at their jokes.  They play the same games as I do.  They love puppies just like I do.  They sometimes even have more faith in God than I do.  Some of my favorite students of all time had very dark faces.  I still think of them often… and i will never stop loving them… all of them.  And when something happens like it happened in South Carolina…  Forgive me, I have to cry again for a bit.

And how do we solve the problem of places where love is so badly needed, but is not present in large doses?  How do we overcome this passion some people have to exclude illegal immigrants, and the need some people feel to move their children out of schools where there are too many of the wrong colored faces?  I do not know the answer.
But you do not create love by passing laws and building walls.  You have to spend time with them.  You have to laugh at the same jokes.  You have to play the same games.  You have to love puppies and kittens.  Don’t you?

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June 15, 2015 · 2:43 pm

The Haunting 2 ; The Wicked Witch of Creek Valley

If a horror movie is going to succeed as a movie franchise, the most serious challenge is to make a good #2,  So, for the sequel to The Haunting, I will tell you about the Wicked Witch of Creek Valley.  I hope to haunt her when I become a ghost, I really do.  And I should explain to you why.

witch of creek valley

My first job in the Dallas Fort-Worth area was at Creek Valley Middle School.  I was hired there by Dr. Witchiepoo (most likely not her real name… though not to protect the innocent).  She was a very prim and proper sort who had a reputation as a really good principal for earning high test scores on the State tests.  When she hired me, it was because I could demonstrate from school-district records that I, as the only 7th grade English teacher in the South Texas school district, was responsible for improving writing scores, above the State targets for the increasingly difficult and high stakes writing tests.  She was good at recruiting talented people for her school.  She was not, however, very good at treating talented teachers as human beans… er, I mean human beings.

I was assigned to be the #2 English teacher in Team #2 of the Eighth grade.  I soon discovered that I was #2 because #1 was one of Witchiepoo’s favorite teachers.  Now, I don’t blame #1 for that.  She was a nice teacher who loved students and didn’t understand why she got all the best students and the best treatment at faculty meetings.  I, and two other English teachers had to handle all the thugs and discipline cases.  In fact, the History teacher on our Team was also a basketball coach, and he shared with me the fact that all the worst kids in the 8th grade were in my English classes.  Classes of not less than 24 kids and not more than 30, for two consecutive class periods (double-dipping kids in reading and writing for two of the five major tests on the all-important State tests) can be a nightmare when they are packed with discipline problems.  I had five special education students who were all emotionally disturbed.  I had a bipolar teenage girl in one class who refused to take her medications and was not even identified by the special education department.  I had to find out about that one from the mother when discussing incidents in the class room.  Juggling that many wackos is possible, but you have to be properly informed and prepared.  And I was handling them as well as it is possible to do.

But, Dr. Witchiepoo did not like the way I taught.  She believed good classroom discipline is a quiet classroom, and bad kids controlled completely through fear.  I normally engaged with kids, joked with kids, listened to kids, and other things that made noise.  (Oh, my gawd!  The evil-eye looks I got from the boss.)  And I had at least one young gentleman of color that Dr. Witchiepoo wanted to see expelled for poor behavior.  The thing that ground my kippers the most about that situation was that he was actually a good-natured kid, quite likeable, and trying his hardest to meet behavioral expectations.  All of my favorite kids that ill-fated year were actually black kids.  I got the distinct impression that Dr. Witchiepoo didn’t feel the same.  Bipolar girl registered some kind of complaint about the young gentleman.  Dr. Witchiepoo was on my case to punish him daily, but without telling me what he had done wrong in my classroom.  I watch kids constantly and learn a lot about them just by looking.  Whatever this invisible behavior was, it gave Dr. Witchiepoo the fuel she needed to burn me with.  The fireball came during my evaluation.  Dr. Witchiepoo came in to evaluate my teaching methods in the class in which both bipolar girl and the young gentleman were in attendance.  She told me she didn’t have enough information for her evaluation after the first period-long evaluation (I still maintain it was because she didn’t see any bad things she could use against me).  So, she came back on another random day, un-announced, and she lucked out.  It was a day when bipolar girl was on a rampage.  I knew from the usual signals, late arrival, catty comments, and brooding silence, that bipolar girl was having a bad day.  (I have since learned that special education law specifies that my ignoring any attention-getting behaviors was the proper procedure for that kind of problem.)  While the bipolar girl was ignoring my wonderful teaching all period long because I didn’t rise to any of her bait, the principal spied the colored marker drawings that bipolar girl was occupying herself with instead of interrupting my lessons.  Principal Witchiepoo marched over to bipolar’s desk and took her markers away from her.  She didn’t shout at the girl, but she said things to her that guaranteed the retaliation that followed.  Witchiepoo put the markers on my desk, indicating that bipolar girl could not expect to get them back.  Well, then bipolar girl did interrupt my lesson and quietly got out of her seat without asking permission, walked to my desk, and took her markers back.  This is when the shouting started.  Not me, mind you.  Principal Witchiepoo and bipolar girl.  I was ordered to take my class to the library for the remaining ten minutes of the period while the Principal did whatever evil thing she intended to do to bipolar girl.

My evaluation nearly ended my teaching career.  As far as I know, bipolar girl got her markers back and maybe sat for two hours in detention.  I, on the other hand, was zeroed out in two domains on my evaluation, discipline because that was the obvious one, and promoting critical thinking in the classroom, because Witchiepoo couldn’t guarantee non-renewal with just one zero.  I was doomed from that day until the Garland school district gave me another chance to be a teacher three years later.  I felt ambushed.  The human resources officer for the district I was working for was rooting for me to get another chance, probably because he was getting other similar reports of abuses by Witchiepoo, but because I made the mistake of signing the bad evaluation, he had no recourse but recommend non-renewal of my contract.

So that is why I intend to haunt Witchiepoo.  But it will be hard to find anything scarier than she is to use against her.  The one thing a bully in a position of power like that fears most is loss of control.  To accomplish that, I will have to possess a number of her students and make them defy her.  Nothing scares a bully more than when the powerless stand up to them.

But there are drawbacks to this plan.  First of all, being inside a middle-school brain is bound to be super-yucky.  Boys often have the next closest thing to raw sewage going through their imaginations at any given time.  Girls can be full of saccharine-sickly pink clouds and butterfly-farting unicorns, or they can be darker and more super-Goth than any boy.  Possessing a boy would make me feel polluted, while to possess a girl is risking complete Silence of the Lambs levels of insanity.  So, there is that.

And worse, by now, karma has probably already caught up with Dr. Witchiepoo.  She had driven twelve teachers out of her school with her demanding micro-managing by the time the first semester had ended the year I was teaching for her.  The administration was already beginning to wonder.  The last time I talked to a colleague from Team #2 about Witchiepoo, a very talented math teacher who was also looking for a new job, I was told that she was on the verge of being fired for excessive abusive behavior against teachers and students.  And that was eight years ago now.  What are the chances that the tiger traded stripes for lamb’s wool?  So once again, my haunting plan will probably not work out.

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June 13, 2015 · 4:09 pm

The Haunting

I have been resting and recuperating, but also planning for the worst.  I mean, when I am ill I often get a little depressed because I know what has to eventually happen to me.  I am not immortal.  So I have been having some fun planning all the people I will haunt when I become a ghost.

Haunting

Ghosts are usually around for the sake of cosmic justice, seeking to wrong the rights done to them in life (did I say that backwards?  Maybe so).   So, my first task will be to choose the ones I will haunt because of how they helped shorten my life and contribute to the misery I’ve endured.

I really thought the best place to start grinding axes was in the political arena.  (The sound of grinding axes would be spooky, wouldn’t it?  Especially in a State capitol building like the big pink-marble mausoleum in Texas.)  I would very much like to haunt the people who helped kill me with stress by making it so difficult to be a Texas teacher.  This State is rather anti-education, at least since the conservative Republicans took over and made the State their sovereign province for perpetuity.  Rick Perry and the Republican agenda have slashed budgets for education, cut teacher jobs… especially in the arts and music areas, and set up a system of State tests to measure educational progress that are rigged to show that we are failing in Texas to provide a decent basic education.  (If you make the test harder and harder at the same time you make the stakes higher and higher every single year, you are bound to get results that show educators doing worse and worse.  And, of course, the tests are designed by lawyers consulting with test-makers… no teachers allowed in the process.)  So I can haunt Rick Perry to wrong that right.  (Okay, I am saying that backwards because “right” also means “conservative”, and it is apparent that they hate education, especially for people of color and people who are poor.  Can’t have those unfortunates reading up on basic human rights, now can we?)

So, I plan to haunt Rick Perry by spelling out threatening messages in his alphabet soup.  That’ll get him, right?  Scare him out of his cowboy boots, maybe?  Heck… I don’t know for certain that Rick can read, do I?  Not even with the glasses he wears now to look smarter.  And his successor, Greg Abbot, can he read?  He is advertising his latest education initiative to make education in Texas #1 by establishing higher standards in preschool and the lower grades.  That will make education better, right?  Make the little kids reach higher scores on harder tests?  And do it by passing a law that they have to reach those standards or the schools will be punished?  Not spending more money or anything.  Heck, he probably doesn’t even eat alphabet soup.  What scarier things can a teacher ghost do?  I will have to think harder on this subject.  And I am thinking I want to haunt more people too.  I just have to decide who.  So maybe I save some of my spookier insights into what I will do as a ghost until another post.  Let me end by giving you an idea of what I want old Rick to look like when I haunt his sorry old cowboy behind.

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May 16, 2015 · 1:58 pm

Teacher-Wise

So, does this title have more than one meaning?  Of course it does.  This post is about being a teacher and having wisdom.  And I know you will immediately think, “You dumb guy!  I know teachers who aren’t wise at all!  Some teachers are stupid!”

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You are especially saying that if you are a student.

You are not wrong, either.  Some teachers have no business being teachers.  It is especially difficult to find good science and math teachers.  After all, those who are good at math and science can make so much more money in the private sector, that they would have to be born to be a teacher… and realize it, to go into teaching.  There are very good science and math teachers out there, but many of them are wilting under the weight of a difficult job being made constantly harder by social pressures like truly dumb people who say things like, “You can’t solve our education problem by throwing money at it!”  I guarantee no one has ever thrown money at the problem.  If teachers were paid what they were worth so that we could retain good, competent teachers, you would see education make an amazing amount of progress in a very short time.  What Wall Street firm fails to pay their star players what they are worth?  Do bankers and lawyers get punished for doing a good job by asking them to produce more with fewer resources for less pay?  Those folks in finance and law always pay the price for the best because that always produces the best result.  If you want schools to routinely produce critical thinkers and problem-solvers, why would you complain that we are spending too much money per kid?  Of course, there are those with the money and the power (especially in Texas) who really don’t want more students coming out of schools with the ability to think and decide for themselves.   Smart people are harder to control and make a profit from. (Out of Control is a book they don’t want you to read.)

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So now I have totally proved the point that smart people who are looking out for their own interests should never go into teaching.  Still, among the unwashed, unloved, and incompetent that do make the mistake of going into teaching, there is still a great deal of learning and gaining of wisdom going on.  After all, if a fool like me can become a good teacher, anybody can do it.  You just have to learn a few bits of wisdom the hard way that have very little to do with what we call “common sense”.

As Dr. Tsabary points out in the book I plastered on the front of this post, discipline is not what you think.  We all remember that teacher we had that nobody listened to.  She was always yelling at us.  She made threats.  She punished us.  And even the good kids in class would shoot spitwads at the back of her head.  Why did we not respect and learn from this teacher?  Because she never learned these profound truths.

1.  Kids are people.  They want to be treated with respect and even love.  Their ideas matter as much, if not more than the teacher’s ideas.  Good teachers will;

a. Get to know every kid in their class as a human being, knowing what they believe in, what they care about, where they come from, and who they think they are.

b. Ask them questions.  They will never have an original idea if you do not make them think.  They have insights and creativity and strengths as well as weaknesses, bad behavior, and wrong ideas.  You have to emphasize the former and minimize the latter.

c.  Laughing and talking in the classroom is evidence of learning.  Quietly filling out worksheets is evidence of ignorance, and most likely the ignorance of the teacher.

2.  Tests don’t matter.  This is always true for these reasons;

a.  Tests are a comparison, and nothing is gained by comparing kids.  Comparing the scores of my bilingual kids in South Texas with upper class rich kids in Chicago and college-bound kids in Tokyo has no value.  Their lives are completely different and so are their needs.  If we don’t score as well on the tests as the kids in Tokyo, what difference will that make to what time the train arrives in the station in Paris?  (Especially if Pierre has chosen the bullet train that goes south at a rate of 200 miles per hour.  No trains in Texas go that fast without crashing and blowing up.)

b.  If I spend time in class teaching students how to read and making them practice reading critically, they will do just as well as the kids who drilled extensively from specially made State materials preparing for the test on the reading and vocabulary portions.  The only way that outcome changes is by cheating and giving them the actual test questions before the test.  (I should point out that teachers caught doing this last thing are shot in Texas and buried in a box full of rattlesnakes.  Dang old teachers, anyhow!)

I know I started this little post by convincing you that I am not wise, and very probably mentally unbalanced.  And now that I have made my arguments, you know for sure.  But over time, there is wisdom to be learned from being a teacher.  You don’t have to believe me, but it’s true.  (I don’t know how many times I used that phrase out loud in a classroom over 31 years, but I am guessing you couldn’t count them on fingers even if you used the hands of every kid I ever had as a student.)

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