Tall Cotton
August 2nd, 2010
August 2nd, 2010
It is not very often when I muse on the Civil War that I do it from a Northern perspective.
But this must be the way the Yankees felt after Chancellorsville when the other guys lost Stonewall Jackson.
For the first time in a long time, the Gator Nation will be going to battle without THE field general of all field generals, Tim Tebow. It’s not the end of the world in Gainesville, not by a long shot. You still have the coaching equivalent of Robert E. Lee, pending chest pains or some offer that can’t be refused.
The troops are still excellent, the cause still seems as sacred and the spirits are still high…but it is not the same as it was. Lee was calling the shots, the troops were excellent and spirits were high at Gettysburg, too, but Jackson had left the scene and all of a sudden the Army of Northern Virginia was beatable.
When Stonewall Jackson took the field it wasn’t. Tebow was the same kind of “get er done when the guns start firing, always finds a way” guy. And now he’s gone.
They mourned Jackson in Richmond, while the people of Boston celebrated.
For possibly the first time in my life, I can relate to Boston.
While taking a break from the Florida heat, hitting some golf balls in the high country and hanging out where the bears live, I took part in a Relay for Life walk. It was at a Steamboat Springs high school, walking the track around the football field in a chilly breeze — on a football field in what we used to call football weather.
You can’t help but start to think about the Great Game under circumstances like that. And for the first August in three or four years, I was actually able to smile about one part of it — no Tebow. I’m as glad to see him gone as the Gator faithful were to see him on the field.
This might not change my personal fortunes a great deal. From all indications, my Volunteers of Tennessee are going to have their hands full with Vanderbilt and whomever they schedule for homecoming — some folks are saying breaking .500 might be dreaming.
But even if we are out of it, without HIM on the field, you can be beaten by SOMEBODY. That is reason enough to celebrate for me.
It was in this frame of mind that I walked out to pick up a local paper here in Breckenridge, just to see if there was any college football news or predictions. They had the Denver Post and the Summit Daily News and I grabbed both, pulled on a sweatshirt for the football weather outside, poured a hot cup of coffee and went out onto the balcony.
And guess who I met….
Tim Tebow grinning out from both front pages. He had just arrived at Broncos camp and it was only slightly less jubilant than MacArthur wading ashore in the Philippines. A feature story about his contract to advertise underwear got more space than any of several Armageddon-like world news stories. Thousands showed up at the field to watch him show up. Radio talk shows have callers asking about the possibility of attending photo shoots for the underwear ads.
The callers are men.
Tim Tebow arriving is bigger news than the Taliban, the oil spill and the Little Beaver Bike Trail being washed out by rain. Guys who watch football want to see him in tighty whiteys. Worse yet, all my friends at Aspen, Snowmass, Steamboat, Beaver Creek, Telluride, Crested Butte, Winter Park and the other ski resorts I frequent in Colorado are ALL Broncos fans.
It kind of took a little of the enthusiasm for football season out of me, so I moved my mind off to the other great sport that is coming soon. Snow skiing.
I think this year I will go to Montana…or some place even further from Denver.
And I dang sure won’t be wearing any Jockey underwear.
June 27th, 2010
Mr. Hoover, not his real name, could’ve been a power hitter.
I didn’t use his real name because somebody that mean and useless could not possibly have died yet. He must be sitting on a porch somewhere, shaking his fist at passing traffic, cussing the world and hoping against hope to find someway to make it a little worse before he leaves it. In other words, he would be the kind of man to sue.
Mr. H. was a teacher who did not see the role of educator as being friend, helpmate and encourager. He saw it more as concentration camp guard or gang enforcer. The enforcing was done with a chunk of board euphemistically known as a paddle. Paddle is a sissy word. This was not a sissy piece of wood — it was a bludgeon.
When you did wrong, were perceived to have done wrong, were accused of doing wrong, or, in many cases, just weren’t doing right enough, this fat waste of DNA would take you to the front of the room and paddle you until you cried. He loved those of us who would hold back the tears so he could do multiple forehand smashes.
And that brings us to baseball, where I meant to start.
I would say that baseball was a big part of my life at that time, but it would be woeful understatement. My life was made up of baseball and ballast, trivial stuff that filled in the time between baseball games. Every child who had any sort of claim to normality packed his glove before he packed his lunch, that being the priority. We would skip a meal in a heartbeat if it gave us a chance to play.
One game went for three years, with essentially the same players. We’d play ten minutes at a time at recess, charging onto the field in exactly the place we had been when the last session had been called off. Baseball meant more to the average boy than education (naturally), food, watching “Sky King” and Gene Autrey on Saturday mornings or even a “yeller dope and a Moon Pie.”
And that brings us back to the man we are calling Mr. Hoover today. I was under his supervision when the World Series was being played, back in a year when all the games were still played in the afternoon. My team had made the final two and there was no way I could miss a moment of it.
Those of you who are old enough to matter will recall the 6-transistor radio that came with an ear plug for secret listening. The radio itself was as big as the paperback Spanish-English dictionaries most teachers have in class these days and for some reason, there never seemed to be a position from which you could reliably count on receiving a signal. You had to hold it all sorts of different ways and turn it here and there to hear anything. The wire to the earplug was clumsy and too long and always twisted up.
This was not an instrument designed for surreptitious reception of a baseball game.
But still we tried. Kids are either dumb as heck, or hopeful — which can amount to the same thing. I would sit there in a small room, thinking the teacher would not notice that I was covering my ear with one hand that had a wire extruding from it while manipulating the other hand below the desktop and occasionally whispering “wait for yoru pitch, wait for your pitch.” I could just as easily have donned a clown suit and rode a tiny bicycle around the room without being noticed.
I did this in Mr. Hoover’s classroom, knowing I would be caught and would be beaten. Knowing further than if I figured out a way to steal my radio back I would do it again.
This is not meant to illustrate how stupid I was, but to give you an idea of how much baseball meant at that time.
Yesterday I was at a dance competition for one of the kids in my class and there was a long break between solos. I ran out to grab something to eat and there were several televisions out where the food was. There were also about 16,000,000 kids loafing around out there looking for something to do…a lot of them were boy siblings of the dancers, kids about the age I used to be in summer.
A bunch of them were watching World Cup. Another bunch was outside throwing a Frisbee around. Not a single ball glove in the crowd. In my day, the only place that would have happened would have been church and then somebody would have had a ball we could toss around barehanded, or we would have found a stick and hit some rocks with it.
Even stranger to me…way back in the corner was a TV tuned in to the Los Angeles Dodgers playing the New York Yankees in one of those inter-league competition games we once would have died to get a glimpse at. In a crowded hotel full of bored little brothers with hands jammed into their pockets and occasionally whining “I don’t have nothing to dooooo”, not a single person was watching the game.
No point to make here…no big finish. It was just odd and sad. Something we used to have isn’t around anymore and it seems to me that some of the general enjoyment of life went with it.
Mr. Hoover, if he is still around, would be pleased.
June 13th, 2010
First off, let me begin by apologizing for it being so long since I have begun anything at this site.
If it makes anyone reading this feel any better, the yard is a mess, the Yaris is overdue for servicing, I have been putting off getting a tooth filled and occasionally I will turn the dirty clothes pile over and rewear a few items because there has been no time for anything.
A school year doesn’t go quietly. It has been at least a month of catching up on grades, paperwork, personal development assignments, parental communications, conferences and such, not to mention all the awards ceremonies, certificates and skits that mark the end of the year. Add the normal rowdiness of children that comes with spring, and, this year, some exceptionally mean-spirited behavior from a couple of kids and concurrent difficulties with parents who can’t bring themselves to believe that their children would ever do anything mean-spirited and you have a double handful of more than you can handle.
That might sound like the kind of complaining that would lead someone to say, “if it’s that hard, quit…Publix is almost always hiring people your age.”
Well, it IS complaining, but don’t get me wrong. I do love this job…all except this part of it right now, the part that doesn’t include having kids in the classroom.
There is nothing sadder that I am aware of than a school full of empty. There ought to be kids here. That’s what “here” is all about.
As we stroll these echoing corridors for the final few days, scurrying about to get our training sessions in and to get our checklist items checked off, there is almost a mantra…”only five more days” ….”only four more days”…etc. I can go for that and I can clearly see where they are coming from.
The teachers are ready for a break. Me too. But, I just had one. No kids in class on Friday and that was plenty for me. I do not relish the idea of a Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of hallways so silent that you can hear footsteps walking. They should be running. This place needs some pitterpatter of unauthorized skipping and running, some laughter, some screeching and such.
The noise and the chaos might drive us crazy, but the silence is worse.
So, I’ve got my own mantra for the summer….”only 72 more days”….”only 71 more days”…
April 7th, 2010
I recently did a cartoon for Lake Magazine that included a poem, which I mercifully will not repeat here… except for the last couple of lines, which I am only approximating.
“I don’t want to give you the wrong idea and I don’t want to create a fuss….
But if you won’t allow kids to pray in school, could you please let the teachers cuss?!”
Of course I wouldn’t want that permission and wouldn’t use it if I had it. This was a joke. But sometimes you really do feel like cutting loose with some colorful language. So, in our class we borrow some of the style of Roald Dahl’s giants and use words like “fumbletoofed garsnaggle” instead of *&^%ing pile of *&%$*&!
From what I have seen, heard, read, been told, heard rumored and experienced through osmosis, the current educational reform effort is something of a fumbletoofed garsnaggle.
Because it is put together by people who don’t actually believe in their own jobs, it assumes that money will be the answer. That is reasonable. That is what they work for. That is the only thing that keeps them going. Why wouldn’t it work for us teachers?
It is not just the Legislature, either. I sat in a meeting recently with some wonk from some office that has the term “education” misapplied to it. She who doesn’t teach was evaluating my efforts, using charts and acronyms. She never smiled. She expected, essentially, that we all jump equal, research-based distances off our seats every time she uttered the word frog.
And she sneered a lot.
The woman was a rubber hole. (I don’t know what that means but I heard it one time and it seems to apply here almost as well as the word I would like to use.)
At one point during the meeting, this specimen says, in front of two hard-working teachers: “There aren’t any good math teachers. All the good ones get into administration so they can earn more money.” Then she looked right at me and did something that appeared to be an attempt at a smile.
It was a scary concept…her thinking that there might be some amount of money on this planet that would make me want to be like her. But beyond that, it was the idea that money is the prime mover of those who work in the classroom.
I quit a job making a lot more than I ever will make under any kind of merit pay system so I could teach fourth-graders. My kids learn the heck out of math. We go beyond the Grade Level Expectations, we compete with each other, we have competitions and we have fun. We are capable of smiling without sneering.
During Christmas break, I spent several hours of each day creating a Holiday Challenge and several hours grading the answers. Fourteen of my 21 kids went online on their own time and answered math questions. During this current Spring Break, I am working on evaluating science projects and setting type for display boards. When I finish this blog, I am going shopping at Goodwill for some figurines to complete our model city….we built apartment buildings to represent Safety, Trustworthiness, Accountability, Respectfulness and Success. While there, I will look for baseball gloves.
None of this counts toward my compensation. There may be some way they can figure out that it will count toward my future compensation, but I doubt it. My guess is that it will hinge on some research-based set of acronyms that were created by consultants who really are in it for the money and that can be charted and administered by a woman who thinks I work for money and who thinks a sneer is the equivalent of a smile.
That won’t matter. If they double my pay, I will still do things like this. If they cut my pay in half, I will still do things like this. If I don’t get fired, I intend to do the same thing next year that I did this year and last year and the year before. That would be everything I can. I will do that regardless of whether or not it is compensated for the merits that can be perceived through charts and research-based acronyms.
I do what I do for the kids, for myself, for the feeling I get out of accomplishing something…and, in a lot of cases, for the fun of it.
What I think will happen is that we will get another gigantic system that will create a tremendous amount of paper to replace a tremendous amount of paper of another gigantic system. And the teachers who are trying their best will continue to try their best and will be largely overlooked for their best efforts. I think that regardless of the good intentions, the merit money will fall into the hands of people who work harder on their paperwork than they work on their kids.
The same kids who are succeeding now, will succeed under the new system. The same ones who struggle, will struggle for the same reasons. Frogs will continue to jump and bees will continue to sting and the Legislature will continue to award itself regular increases in compensation.
And money won’t fix it, either.
And neither will sneering.
And since neither praying nor cussing is allowed, I will close by saying that I know a fumbletoofed garsnaggle when I see one.
March 21st, 2010
When the Legislature tries to reform education it is a lot like the guy across the street trying to do his own electrical work. Looks simple enough. Heck, read the instructions. Nothing to it….until you start to do it and then you can get shocked.
The whole mess is such wrongheaded badthink that newspaper columnists are supporting it. Anything simpleminded enough to be subscribed to by that tribe is bound to need rewiring at some point.
But let’s just look at a couple of the factors, primarily the idea of merit pay. It is a good one…on paper. To equitably be able to determine who should get it, you would need a parallel system that is the size of the school system itself. That won’t happen.
What will happen is some set of fairly arbitrary standards that purport to take into account what ought to be happening in the average classroom. That average classroom idea, by the way, is arrived at by Legislators who sent their kids to private schools where everybody speaks English and you rarely have to take knives away from 9-year-olds. This knowledge is backed up by scenes from Disney movies and research done by people who study the system for a living but who couldn’t last a week inside it.
Once these standards are in place, replacing the amazing set of standards already in place, it will be administered by pretty much the same wonks already administering. The upshot is that after tremendous trouble, expense and confusion, in three or four years we will end up with pretty much what we already have, except with new paperwork and a lot of old forms that will need to be recycled.
The goal here is to educate EVERY child, using what you already have. This is to be done regardless of that child’s resistance to education, lack of family support, total indifference to any sanctions that can be taken to encourage learning, gypsy lifestyles, noncompliance with everything, disruptive behavior, truancy, tardiness, malnutrition (often by choice…they buy ice cream and throw away the free vegetables)…and that doesn’t take into account the biggest and baddest obstacle of all.
What really makes it hard to educate those “kids on the back row” as some call them is that you have to spend some time and effort on “the kids on the front row.” The ones who show up everyday and try their best have something coming too. Don’t they?
The columnists and legislators have an easy answer to that. Do it all. Work harder. Work smarter. Use your resources more effectively.
Yeah, right — just like the Legislature and newspapers, do.
Remediation is the answer, according to those who are supposed to know. Small groups, individualized programs, personal attention and lots and lots of forms to fill out to prove that you are doing it. So, for example, if the cards happen to deal you nine children who need extra attention twice a day each day of the week, find the time for 18 individualized extra lessons with corresponding assessments, accommodated to needs. The other kids — the ones who have already learned how to read and add and subtract, can work in their workbooks, or do “literacy groups” which you can monitor by occasionally standing up at the back table and yelling loudly enough to wake them up. The ones who aren’t drawing.
In my experience, it would seem that we are beating this horse as hard as we can beat it, but the powers that be still don’t think it is running fast enough. So, they are going to give us an extra saddle.
What if we turned this sort of “get ‘r done with what you have” attitude around, and applied it to, say, the newspaper. Well, actually, that sort of is what is happening. Look how much that particular institution has improved and look up the circulation numbers to see how well that policy is working. But you could take it even further…suppose that columnist who doesn’t see any reason why teachers can’t snatch those kids off the back row and make mathematicians out of them were asked to modify his column-writing a bit? It will now have to be fully accessible to those who can’t read English, and will have to be modified to make it understandable to everyone who subscribes, and you will have to sit down and explain it to anyone who doesn’t get it and another version will have to be produced that is in simplified language, along with a version that is more complicated to enrich the advanced readers.
AND you will have to spend as much time filling out forms to show that you are reaching readers as you spend writing the column.
Better yet, apply the standard to the Legislature. You will need to keep the government spending just as much as it has ever spent on a regularly increasing scale, you will need to improve the effectiveness of everything you do at your end WITHOUT any new taxes or increased revenue of other sorts. AND you will need to prove to an independent agency regularly that you are making an effort to get this done using research-based methods that don’t seem to work in all cases and you will be called in occasionally for close examination by someone who doesn’t have a good handle on what ought to be done but who is obsessed with crossed t’s and dotted i’s.
Everybody wants the school system to work. But here is the kick in the pants. It seems that nobody believes teachers care whether or not it works. The root of all legislative or grassroots reform in the last 30 years has been the assumption that teachers are lazy and indifferent, that they are not giving this the sort of 100 percent effort that we are getting out of our hard-charging legislators.
I worked for a newspaper. I know how hard that is. If the writers, columnists and editors worked as hard as teachers, for the same pay, those businesses would be solvent instead of dying like fruit flies at the end of their day in the sun.
I’ve never been a legislator, but I have known some. They all seemed to have plenty of time to play golf back when I had plenty of time to play golf. I don’t anymore. They still do. You make the call on who works harder there.
Having time for golf was especially true of those with seniority. Seniority means everything in government, because it is assumed that if you have been doing something a long time, you understand it better, are in a position to help others and are more capable of getting the job done. In the military, seniority is rank. If you have been a captain longer than the next guy has been a captain, you are in charge. It works on the police force, at hospitals, the fire department, the post office and just about every aspect of life overseen by government officials who do their business in committees chaired by the senior member.
It is assumed that seniority makes these people better and therefore of more worth, which is reflected in tenure and compensation.
But in teaching, it is assumed that people who have been around longer have just gotten lazier and more indifferent. They want to take that away and base it all on “merit.” I have a suggestion for all those exalted ones….don’t just tell us how to do that, SHOW US. Can your system. Pay yourselves based on what you get done, judged by experts who don’t understand your job.
Oh well. This will all either blow over or will be instituted and teachers and administers will try to turn the ship around and go 10 knots beyond full speed in yet another direction, until another legislator decides this, too, is the wrong course.
I’m not ready to mutiny or to abandon ship and most of the teachers will hang in there, too. However, I do have a few legislative names in mind when it comes time for somebody to walk the plank, also known as election day.
March 10th, 2010
I never trusted fraternities for the same reason W.C. Fields didn’t go for clubs…any organization that would have me as a member is not anything I would care to get involved with.
The idea of a “we” is okay…for the Army or a football team. But it’s a little greasy to fully embrace when it comes to life in general. I went to a party at Sigma something or other back in the day and it did seem to have benefits, but it also seemed to be a vessel with more barnacles than sailors, if you know what I mean. If you don’t, you probably were one of those Sigma something or others.
Anyhow, their big selling point was contacts and networking throughout life. That is essentially what we know as “the good old boy network” except with latte and alligator shoes. It appeared to me then, as it appears to me now, pretty much nonsense.
I don’t think I would want to work for an organization that hired or promoted people based on which house they used to get drunk in 20 years ago. It might happen. It might even explain governments and Enron, but I want no part of it.
So, why did I join this current network?
I am now a member of something because Ed bullied me into it. We were sitting in my rented condo during a cocktail party at the Ritz-Carlton in Beaver Creek. It was the Orlando Ski Club, but I wouldn’t call it organized enough to be an organization.
Herb, for instance, was talking about how much money he was making and discussing the cost of the tires on his Porsche. (That could have been a fast-forward scene from the Sigma so and so house, by the way.) To escape this, I had maneuvered Ed between us to deflect conversation and he starts carrying on about why I never accept his invitations to join this network thing.
Short version is that I logged on to a computer and accepted it. I am now “IN.”
Trouble is that I am not at all sure what it is I am into or what its purpose is supposed to be. If it has changed my life in any noticeable way, I haven’t noticed it. All it seems to do is garner more invitations to join the networks of other people.
So, I have to wonder if I am doing my part.
To that regard, here is an open letter to all the people with whom I network.
Dear Symbiotic Connections:
How am I doing?
Has your life, fortune, sacred honor or esteem in the community been in any way altered by my presence in your network? Has it advanced you? Impeded you? Have I somehow thrown myself over the barbed wire of the business world so you can charge ahead?
If so, you are welcome.
Have I, on the other hand, somehow failed you all in some manner in which I am not aware, not actually being aware of what it is that I ought to be doing? Am I as useless to you as that previous sentence is to communication in general?
Is my network ashamed of me? Am I letting down the side? Am I sort of like the doofis with a Bluetooththing in the ear — the guy you wish hadn’t showed up for lunch?
If so, I apologize.
I just want every one of you to know that I have your back and will do whatever is necessary to ensure that you get whatever it was you expected to get out of me … as long as it doesn’t actually ever entail me doing anything or participating in anything or exerting the least effort on your part.
It is an easy promise to keep because I know you would do it for me.
February 17th, 2010
We came very near to breaking two lifetime habits and saving me a lot of work…but the Olympics messed us up.
Somehow our newspaper subscription managed to lapse without any fanfare, something I find amazing. We must have gotten a dozen advertisements per week asking us to subscribe when we already had a subscription, but nothing happened here. It is like they are all trying to pull people aboard but when one starts to slide back into the water, nobody reaches out to grab them.
Oh well. Neither my wife nor I cared that much except we wanted to keep up with the Olympics. Feel free to laugh. A Florida paper is NOT what I would call “astute” coverage and I should have known better. Back when the Winter Olympics were in Lillehammer, the sports department sent a guy from Cuba, not that there is anything particularly wrong with that — if baseball or boxing or Jai-alai were medal sports. This gomer came to see me the day before he left and wanted me to “tell him about skiing” so he would have some expertise.
I about swallowed my candy. He had never been on skis.
Then again, that gives him about as much to go on as the average sportswriter has with football.
So I told him all I know about winter sports: You ride up, you slide down and then you drink.
Still, we wanted the paper so we resubscribed and I will once again be hauling most of it out to recycle on Sunday night, still unrolled and unread. But not before at least one thing irritates me out of each issue.
This morning was the headline “Blood Bank Chief’s Pay Increased Right Before Layoffs.” A woman who runs a “non-profit” organization was increased to $605,000 per year right before she axed 42 people. At that salary, it is no wonder that her organization doesn’t make a profit.
This salary is, of course, absurd. It is a regular candy-gram sent to a person of privilege by other people of privilege who serve on a board and vote themselves too much money. We might as well be in England supporting official inbred royal fops as to have this, but there it is.
There is absolutely nothing that a person can do for $605,000 that could not be done for the previous $588,000. It is free money. And she earns it by canning people who might actually be doing something, and as a result of her highly paid efforts services will probably suffer and if you happen to need blood in Orange County you won’t get it unless you know somebody.
I had the same problem when the mayor down there hired an arts guru for a ridiculous salary or when a consultant who happens to be a friend of a crony gets a big check around here. Lake County is as silly and insulting to taxpayers as any other place where money can be given for “services” that might not be exactly called “earned.” There’s not a city in the United States that is getting $30,000 a year worth of city manager “service” but those gomers routinely pull down athlete money. And what about that lineup of welfare suits knocking down blood center executive salaries for standing on the sidelines at Magic games…soon to be in an arena paid for by people who don’t know people.
While we are at it, how about a non-skier getting sent to the Olympics because he is chummy with the brass? Is there anybody at your place making too much for too little? It happens everywhere, so I shouldn’t be THAT irritated by this…except for one thing.
The layoffs in a time of crisis. The attitude is “I got mine and I’m keeping it and I don’t care if the ship goes down.” It is shameful.
My fourth-graders know better than that. They may not be able to do fractions with numbers, but if we have 16 Oreos and 21 mouths, they will figure out a way for everybody to get a bite. I wish we had people like that running things.
The only decent way to do it would be to figure out how much money you have, figure out how many people are on your team, and then slice up the cookies. What is happening at the blood bank down in Orlando is an instance of the teacher taking 9 servings, splitting the rest among teacher’s pets and sending the kids who don’t get any to study hall.
Are those people who were laid off necessary? If so, figure out a way to keep them. If not, having them on board in the first place was a misuse of funds and they should have been let go back when there were jobs to find.
Possibly I would not be so offended except for one of the girls in my class yesterday. She had some kind of strange skirt on over blue jeans, which is sort of a thing they do at 10. I said it was pretty. She beamed and said it was her sister’s and is too big but she wears it sometimes.
Then she added this: “When Momma gets her first paycheck from her job, she’s going to take me to the mall and I can pick out any clothes I want.”
She knows this won’t happen. It is just something you tell kids when you don’t have a job and kids pretend to believe it and bring it up to let you know they will be dressing better soon. We all know that the money will go for electric bills, food, medicine, gasoline and rent. It’ll take a lot of catching up after being laid off for so long.
The little girl did mention that when she goes shopping she will get something for her sister, too, because she loans her things. She might have to do without, but that’s okay. It would only be right to share.
That’s character. It’s a shame we can’t elect 10-year-olds.
February 11th, 2010
First off, let me remind you that there is no such thing as a secret among 10-year-olds. When they are trying to pull something, it is written all over them.
I knew something was up when, casually, during math practice, one little girl asked “by the way, speaking of perimeter and area, what is your shirt size?” Another brought up the same subject during social studies….the textile industry, I believe.
During reading, we were looking at an illustration. “That’s a nice shirt that woman is wearing,” one student said. “If you were going to get a shirt like that, what size would you get?”
Of course there were other oh-so subtle hints. Like when the three students came up to the door where I was standing and said “don’t ask us what is going to happen on Friday because we can’t tell you…IT’S A SECRET!” And then ran giggling off.
Girls began to ask permission to “go visit a teacher” or “go to the nurse” and also began to go to the restroom in groups of four. Then the boys began to go in groups.
When the boys start doing that together, SOMETHING is up.
Still, with all that warning, what happened on Wednesday still caught me a little bit by surprise. When the ringleaders came charging out of the restroom yelling “SURPRISE!” my first words were “you’ve all been saying the surprise was Friday!”
“Yeah, but we couldn’t wait.”
It was a Minneola Mustang T-Shirt that had been signed by all the kids in class. They were giving it to me as a Valentine’s Day gift and had declared Tuesday to be “Mr. Vest Day.” The shirt was purchased with “good behavior” tickets, a currency the kids can use to purchase toys and gifts for themselves as part of a Positive Behavior System. They had taken up a collection of their tickets and passed up their trinkets to get this shirt.
It is too late for me to get Rookie Teacher of the Year. There is about as much chance of me ever being Teacher of the Year as there is of me becoming Secretary of Agriculture. I won’t be around this profession long enough to ever be a principal or vice-principal and I may not be around this world long enough to see what is to become of the kids I try to teach.
I may not be going anywhere…but on Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2010, I arrived.
By the way, the shirt didn’t fit.
But that doesn’t matter. This one won’t be worn for yard work or running…it’s going to be hanging on the wall.
February 7th, 2010
When I was showing the Lake Magazine site to some friends of mine in Colorado, someone pointed out that I appeared to be dressed as Mark Twain and wanted an explanation.
And all of a sudden, it hit me. I haven’t sent a new picture in since Halloween! Yikes. When was the last time I blogged? Uhhh…Halloween?
I can’t justify this….I mean, if you say you are going to do something, you ought to do it and be done with it. Or quit doing it and be done with it. Those are the only two honorable options. Anything else is moral cowardice, laziness, sloth, immaturity, dishonesty, lack of self respect and, just possibly, Senatorial.
But while I can’t justify the lapse, I can explain it. In fact, I have 20 explanations, starting with R.B. and going through to B.T. That would be my fourth-graders and all the fourth grade things they do, which is to say all the children things, which is to further say, all the work they create for adults just by sharing our air.
I love every minute of it, but when you get right down to it, it pretty much adds up to every minute of my day that is not spent sleeping, eating or filling out forms related to education. I’ll give you just one example…this weekend.
I could title this “My So-Called Time Off.” I was supposed to play golf, I had been invited to go to the races, my yard desperately needs work and there are a number of Super Bowl parties tonight. It could have been a full weekend without adding anything.
Instead, yesterday morning I arose at 6, read, graded and made comments on 67 essays…some but by no means all of which included punctuation, capital letters, paragraph indentations and things that are recognizable as words.
I am supposed to be teaching metaphors, similes, anecdotal support and robust vocabulary to people who write the following:
paint art and color is my favotire thing. paint get messy I like to paint picures on flat I injoy finter paint with a brush to draw pupys. I hope to be a fmous drawling when i grow up.
Sift through a pile of that before breakfast some Saturday. Then move on to grade 20 science tests. You find out that a star is made up of galaxies and asteroids, the third planet from the sun is a neutron and a form of energy that can travel through space is a centimeter. If you wrap a coil of wire around a nail and attach the ends of the wire to the positive and negative poles of a battery, you will create an abolitionist.
That last one might be true.
That was another hour or so. Then I graded the Theme Three Test, again a batch of 20, 25 pages each, including yet another essay and extended response written questions. You can actually have a teaching assistant go through and grade a lot of this stuff, but then what have you learned about what the kids have learned…or haven’t learned? You need to see who is missing what and go back and try to bandage the scrapes and prop up the loose boards.
I could continue with the weekly test, the quiz on area and perimeter, the vocabulary sentences (8 per day, times 20), the FCAT worksheets, the solar system projects and reports on favorite planets, the letters to the pen pal in England, the five letters home I am writing this afternoon dealing with personal issues. The 57 letters I have to answer from the kids in class….my mistake there…I established a post office and declared that all mail would be answered.
The one on top of the pile says “Dere Mr. Vest: How am I doing? Do you like my picher? Will you draw me one? Why don’t I ever get to be line leader?’
Times 57. This is a slow week. Sometimes it is 20 a day.
What it reminds me of is the scene in Fantasia when Mickey Mouse is the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the buckets of water keep coming and keep coming.
The fact that what I now do is more fun than I have ever had in my life and is the most fulfilling part of it doesn’t change the fact that if you don’t keep up you will drown in the paper.
That is my explanation for the lack of blogging.
But let’s grade this on a curve….the old school way of accommodating student needs. If we create a formula that figures the amount of time spent blogging relative to the amount of spare time available, my percentage has to be way up there.
I’ll try to do better.
December 19th, 2009
Friday was very nearly a perfect day at school, so it is only appropriate that it end so very nearly disastrously.
The day started, oddly enough, almost a month ago — just after Thanksgiving. That’s when I started dressing up the room. Among the decorations were a few of those ridiculous, boorish, low-IQ, childish talking and singing things….
A few, in this case, includes a moose that rocks in a chair while singing “Grandma got run over by a reindeer” and another big moose that dances to “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and a Jack in the Box, a Muppett, a donkey, two different dogs, an Aztec sun, a hopping chicken, a Garfield, a hopping penguin, a chihuahua doing “Feliz Navidad” a mouse that has to be hot-wired (science lesson) to do “We Wish You a Merry Christmas, three different sets of singing, swaying and dancing snowpeople, a thing on a sled that apparently sings carols while having a grand mal seizure and, of course, the dancing Santa Claus.
There must be others….
Oh yeah, the jack-in-the-box that sings “All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth” and the dog on a leash that used to yip Jingle Bells, but now hiccups in a rhythmless smoker’s hack, and the plush toy dog given to me last year by a student…it sings “I’m a Love Machine.” And the purring cat. And poor Jake the Jackalope, who has passed on this year, the victim of being placed foolishly within the reach of fourth-graders standing on chairs to see if his antlers were real and if it would be possible to pull his flesh off. They weren’t, it was, he’s gone.
Anyhow, that was about a fifth of the decor when we started off the day on Friday. We had a sing-along to Bingle Jells, a classroom original, to the tune of Jingle Bells. “Snashing gloo the mow, in a corncob full of clay….” etc. We had a spelling bee Cage Match followed by Multiplication Smackdown and a talent show. The kids were allowed to order what they wanted from Chick Fil A, McDonald’s and Burger King and parents fetched food and served as waiters. We lined the desks up like banquet tables and covered them with tablecloths and played Christmas music during the meal.
The dessert table was piled so high that even the kids were turning down cookies late in the day. It was excess at its most marvelous stage and it all culminated in the gift exchange. We drew names and kids could take an unknown, wrapped present, or could “steal” a previously unwrapped present from another child, who then got to choose again. It was mayhem.
Then I got to open my loot, with kids explaining the meaning behind each gift. Against all odds in a room full of 10-year-olds, it went perfectly. Not a single complaint on my part. Parents were great, kids were fabulous, administration just said “please don’t do any damage and don’t let them miss their buses.”
I was in a dreamy state at 2:30. I was in a dumpster, literally, at 3:45.
We have other kids coming to our house and I needed to get as much of the Christmas stuff as possible packed up to transport home. Try to picture this. Twenty sugared-up kids with brand new toys, footballs flying through the air, a keyboard playing Mary Had a Little Lamb, a train chugging around piles of wrapping paper, “New Orleans Jazz Christmas” tunes blaring, parents fluttering about trying to help, me trying to find boxes and bags for transporting stuff, announcements resounding from the intercom, children of all shapes and sizes showing up at the door to offer cookies, candies and homemade cards, 30 various animals and noisemakers making noise, nine students arrive from the class of another teacher who had to leave early to catch a plane….
And then it was more or less over. Most of the kids were gone, the buses were pulling out, it was quieting down and I started thinking about loading the car. Job One…determine which of the half dozen black trash bags contained the priceless collection of talking and jumping and singing toys…but wait….there are only four bags left and they all have trash in them…I can see Chick-Fil-A bags, paper towels and toy containers in the tops of all of them.
At that point, one of the remaining kids began to drag one of the remaining bags to the hall. They had been HELPING. I would rather have a regiment of Al Queda against me than half a dozen kids helping…it would be much less trouble.
I rushed out to find the janitor to determine what had happened to the bag. The principal saw me, paged the janitor who brought another janitor and we determined that all the bags on that floor had been put in the dumpster.
It had to be near the top, I thought. How hard could this be.
Let me tell you something about black trash bags on the last day of school before Christmas. They pile up in substantial numbers and once they are put in the dumpster, they tend to mingle. There is no top, recent layer, clearly defined. It is all Mount Hefty, a volcanic, writing mix of innocent tissue and volatile lunchroom milk and mashed potatoes.
Into this mess I climbed, at first hopefully telling myself that one on the top rear looked like it might be a bag of electronic toys. And there another fact of the plastic bag matter made itself apparent….nothing looks any more or any less like anything else once it has been bagged and piled.
A half hour into this, Miss Bebe (the janitor) and I had a bigger pile outside the dumper than inside and my shoes were soaked in something that makes me gag a little to even think about it at this time. She was more frantic than I was, speaking in fragments of several unfamiliar languages and imploring me to get out of the dumpster, that she would find Glenn (another janitor) and make him go in there and do that.
Glenn was having none of it. He had, apparently been in dumpsters before. Now that I have spent some time in one, I understand his position completely. The other custodial staff members were nowhere to be seen or had, so the three of us were opening bags, retching, mumbling, beseeching, and, a little under our shallow breaths, cursing the foul luck.
That is when Glenn, who had a better understanding of the geology of rubbish than I did, made an observation. “If you’re standing in milk, it ain’t gonna be under that. That lunchroom stuff is heavy and this stuff wouldn’t work its way below it.”
And then he said something that chilled my sweaty, stinking self to the bone: “Did you check all the bags in your room carefully to make sure the toys and trash didn’t get mixed?”
To this, I replied in a sort of whimper that echoed from the walls of the now-nearly empty dumpster….”no.”
Sure enough, up there in the sanitary confines of what seemed a very neat and clean classroom, over next to the white board, was a bag that seemed too fat and rounded to be wrapping paper and cookie parts. Beneath a thin layer of paper towels and a Transformers toy package, I saw the nose of a chihuahua peeking out. I removed him and pressed the button and he began to sing “Feliz Navidad.”
Now, here is why school is so much better than other workplaces and why Christmas is so much better than other times. I had just taken an hour of time on the busiest day for the hardest working people in the school and got them involved in the nastiest thing possible, all due to panic and stupidity and these two showed nothing but absolute relief and delight.
I reached into the bag and pulled out a couple of more and we had a little concert. And then I reached into my wallet and pulled out a couple of bills. They both insisted that I didn’t have to do that, but they took ‘em. And they smiled even bigger and went off to reload the dumpster.
At the end of the hall they turned and said “Merry Christmas.”
And the best part of the best day ever was that they really meant it.
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