Tag Archives: teaching

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 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.

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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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