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Published by Boson Books 3905 Meadow Field Lane Raleigh, NC 27606 ISBN 1-932482-41-5 An imprint of C&M Online Media Inc.
© Copyright 2006 Chris Dahl All rights reserved For information contact C&M Online Media Inc. 3905 Meadow Field Lane Raleigh, NC 27606 Tel: (919) 233-8164 Fax: (919) 233-8578 e-mail:
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EXCEPT EDUCATION The Spectrum of Secondary Education by
Chris Dahl _____________________________________________________
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TABLE OF CONTENTS How I Got into Teaching, a Sort of Prologue Chapter 1: Disorders That Run a Spectrum: 1 in 500 Chapter 2: A Disorder at the Other End of the Spectrum: The Debbie Harmon Affair Chapter 3: Winston Westrup: The Case of the Empowered Student, or Another Shade of the Spectrum Chapter 4: What if There Were No Spectrum?: The Violence Inherent in the System Chapter 5: Different Shades of the Spectrum: Timmy and Lyle Chapter 6: The Dark Side of the Spectrum: Janell Dixie and the American Dream Chapter 7: Under the Rainbow: Balloons, Beepers and Beatings in the High School Cafeteria Chapter 8: Every Shade in the Spectrum: An Average “Class” in a School Ranked in the Top 100 of the Country “
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HOW I GOT INTO TEACHING: A SORT OF PROLOGUE “Freedom of speech is not an absolute right.” A former superintendent in an e-mail on teachers discussing politics in the classroom. When I was four or five years old, my father subbed for a week as a history teacher at my Catholic school. He had always wanted to teach. After graduating from a very competitive high school and an equally competitive college, my father wanted to go back to his high school alma mater to teach history. His goals in life at the time were completely academic. He loved books on philosophy and history, with a minor taste for literature. That was going to be his pursuit: to impart wisdom of the classics and history to young people. So, he was informally promised a job as a history teacher at that school, but the priest who was going to retire never did. My father then took a part-time job as an editor for a massive publishing firm to pay the bills. Four decades later, he is still in publishing. I remember he always quit working for one publishing house or another, going “freelance” at times, working on manuscripts at home, always moving around, as if he thought this was still just a temporary exile from what he really wanted to do, teach. Before I was old enough to go to school, and when my brother was in Saint Anastasia’s Catholic School in New Jersey, a junior high history teacher took ill. My father was approached, somehow, to fill in for a week or two. He used all his vacation time to teach. I don’t know if he was ever happier, but I do know he seemed to be pretty good. I sat in the back of the classroom with my mother as he taught a lesson. There were questions in white chalk on an old slate board; he wore a flannel blazer. Students threw their hands up in the air and tried to satisfy his questions. “More specific,” I remember he kept saying and then he chose another student. “Specific,” I remembered him saying and thinking that The Specific was an ocean. Why was he talking about oceans? He wrote notes on the board and the students copied them down in marble composition books. That day might be why I became a teacher, or at least part of it. So, I ended up a teacher a couple of decades later. My first faculty meeting was in the band room of a small high school in the Catskill Mountain region in Upstate New York. I was 26 years old, but, at the time, my hair had not gone gray, as it did only 5 years later. My eyes didn’t have that sullen, beaten look that people who have just lost a lover, a relative, or a friend, or that a quarterback has in his eye after the opposing safety intercepts his pass. That look that says, “Yes, I teach high school.” The faculty was mostly older, very conservative; most of them still rehashing the knit ties they swore they were going to replace when that next raise the School Board promised them came through. The men wore short-sleeve checkered shirts they bought BOSON BOOKS
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for 30% off, just out of season. The women—again—mostly older—complimented each other on how well those Sears business suits and dresses fit them. No one had money for anything else. If everyone is wearing closeout-priced clothes, and leftovers from a season before, then the exception becomes the rule. Then, the man who wears J. Crew, Armani, or the woman who walks in with a Louis Vitton bag to teach in a public school is the one whose name is shot around in rumors. “Hmmm, looks like someone thinks this is a fashion show, not a job.” “Where does he get his money?” “What does she do on the side?” But, after eight years in this racket of teaching, I can tell you that the exception always becomes the rule, and I should have known that the day of that faculty meeting. The principal was a short Polish fellow from a small town “up North.” The factories, and his first two attempts at love and marriage, had failed, leaving empty houses, empty factories and classrooms full of kids who knew an education of Great Gatsbys, algebra and algorithms—none the less Spanish 1, 2 & 3—were not going to fill those factories with jobs. Nor would those classes take away the cold, gray winters. The best things that happened in those kinds of towns were snow days, and the first day of the month, which was when the relief checks came in. From what I could put together, the principal, whom I will all Horatio Alger here, pieced together a childhood while living in basement apartments with his mother, without his father. There was never any mention of support checks, SSI, alimony or any money coming in. Horatio always talked about a lady who fed him cake after school and how, for some time, he had to bathe before school in the gymnasium because he had no running water at home. Horatio’s favorite stories, though, were how he would get to play basketball on the practice squad against the high school varsity squad, simulating the moves of the rival high school. He admitted he was too short, too slow and had no “ups,” but he was there every afternoon, playing decoy, until the sun went down which was when that brokendown factory town got quiet and froze. That’s when he would shower in the locker room, put on his day-old sweats and head home in the cold. No wonder he became such a good heart, such a sucker for any sob story that came his way. Horatio had, I assumed, gotten into education after a tour in Vietnam because he wanted to save souls, change lives, and he believed that he could actually make a difference. There are actually “crusaders” in this racket. Moreover, if the exception becomes the rule in education, then Horatio was no exception. This time, however, the exception, the outcast, the little Polish kid who could not jump high enough for a rebound, couldn’t move his feet quickly enough to guard the starting point guard, became not just the rule, but the ruler. Horatio, unfortunately, wanted to rule by popular consent, but there is only one problem with that theory: he did not have popular consent. And Horatio was still the poor kid on the practice squad: the principal who made it in as a result of a studentadvocate approach, a winner who plucked at the heartstrings of the hiring committee. He would always be, no matter what he did it seemed, that assistant principal from that run-
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down high school in that factory town up north there. As always, Horatio had hung around until it was his time. The teachers would not shut up at any of these meetings. They were like that class every teacher hates, the class where there is that undercurrent of murmuring and the occasional outburst of laughter. No one pays attention; everyone looks at the clock. Horatio managed to stand there and smile and wave his hand. That day he was wearing a white short-sleeved cotton shirt (tight around the mid section) and a knit tie, which was two shades darker on the knot from his fingers fumbling to tie it for the prior ten years. “Folks,” Horatio said, but the din did not cease. “Folks, please, we need to get going today because we have a very important guest to give us some information on a new student classification, the 504 classification. She is here from the American Civil Liberties Union and what she has to say is very important.” A fairly attractive woman in her thirties, either Hispanic or light-skinned AfricanAmerican stepped up from behind Horatio. She started talking about how there are students in our classes, in our schools, in our country, who are not being serviced properly, and, in order to give them the accommodations they require, in order to be serviced properly, the federal government has passed legislation in order to ensure the rights—not just of the student who “has no issue” —and not just the student on the other end of the spectrum, “special ed.,” she said, making quotes in the air, but also those exceptional cases of students who fall into that gray area, somewhere in between the two ends of that spectrum. This was, she said, the 504 Classification. That is why we had them. It was the law. Horatio had his head bowed almost solemnly as the youngish, fairly attractive lawyer spoke about all those kids who were not smart enough to be normal and left to their own devices and not disabled enough to be considered “special.” These were all the various exceptions, she said, and it went on a case-by-case basis. There were, she went on to add, accommodations students are allowed, not modifications to the content of the curriculum. “And what,” the senior Social Studies teacher (whom I will call the Senator from Rome; he was a local alderman who at 45 still had married himself only to politics and teaching young Americans how to be “civic leaders” and “good citizens”), “if we don’t adhere to these accommodations, as you put it? I mean, we can hardly breathe as it is. Where is the freedom to teach?” She said she couldn’t address this question about freedom. That wasn’t her purpose, her concern here, but she could say that it was illegal not to comply with the Federal Legislation and that she or another ACLU lawyer would legally represent—pro bono—any student who felt that he or she was not being accommodated and/or “serviced” properly. There was a great deal of money on the line as well. The Senator from Rome hung his head in some rhetorical defeat. This is not what I thought I was getting into, he always seemed to be thinking, and this is not the way it’s supposed to be going. This is not education. Legislation is not supposed to drive education, he seemed to be thinking. BOSON BOOKS
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I looked at the clock. It was only a couple of minutes before 3. At worst, I thought, this could go on for thirty more minutes. Then, they had to let us go or the union “reps” would have something to say; after all, we had lawyers, too. Then, Horatio introduced the senior teacher of the Special Education Department who wanted to speak on behalf of the entire Special Education Department. She shuffled to the front of the room. She was a horribly ugly woman, one who had given up on any hopes of reforming anything in her world: her looks, her hair, the students whom she taught, anything. Moreover, she did not really care. But then, if all the rumors were true, keeping a stock of gin in the lower drawer of one’s desk would always help even the most burned-out teacher through a school year of 187 days. The only thing that really annoyed me about this senior member was that it always seemed as though she was sniffing her upper lip. “Like she had a turd on her lip,” a male member of the SED always said, “and she’s trying to see if it’s still there.” It is hard to take a person seriously when her nostrils are flared and her upper lip is always rigid and all you can picture is a log of dog turd balanced beneath her nose. Unfortunately, I still heard her say that this year there was a dramatic decrease in the number of students who were being classified as Special Education, and that if this trend continued, they would not be able to apply for the same amount of money from Federal and State resources as they had in the past and that would mean a reduction in services and even more sadly, in staff. So, she said, she wanted all of us to go back over our class rosters and to try to identify potential candidates to be classified as Special Ed., even if he/she is only borderline candidates, or something like that. Then, she said, that she would be putting a list of characteristics to look for in our students for the typical Special Education student. If we thought our students exemplified any or all of these characteristics, we should go through the classification process. A lot of money was on the line. This was very important. I looked over at the Senator from Rome and his head was still shaking. Money is not supposed to drive education. This is not education Wondering how I had gotten myself into this mess, I thought about the time, almost two years earlier, when I had decided to become a teacher. I had graduated a few months before from Fordham University, a school run by Jesuit priests in the middle of the Bronx. While tending bar one night, I, by chance, read an ad for substitute teachers for a small-town school on the Connecticut-New York border. I interviewed a few days later and the principal gave me the job. I would close the bar up at four in the morning and usually get a call at 5:00 to go teach. As I would drive out in my jeep, I would look at all the fields that were bare dirt, no longer farmed, and the empty barns and the fences held together with rusted nails and the dull patina of barbed wire. The day I made my decision to become a full-time teacher, to dedicate my life to this profession, I was characteristically misled by romantic—and primitive—ideals. The day I made The Choice, I was “subbing” for a Resource Room (a class for students who need to work in small groups with a teacher who provides additional “resources” for these students to do well in their mainstream BOSON BOOKS
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classes, somewhere in between exclusion and inclusion in the mainstream) teacher who would have two or three students at a time, going over their work for their other classes. I had three students during one of the morning sessions. We had to go over algebra. There was a set of twins and one daft girl who was too tall and gangly for her 14 years. The twins had black hair that exploded from their heads like wire and lean, angular looks that a hard life on a dirt farm in the winter gave them. All morning, one of the twins was holding his ribs from where his father had punched him, for some reason, before the sun was even warm. But that was not the moment that made me want to pitch tent in Horatio’s camp. It was when that shy and daft girl who was too tall and too developed for a girl in her first year in high school reached toward the center of the round table for a pencil to figure some problem someone had given her, and I saw a straight line of blisters all the size and shape of the tip of a cigarette, all still soft, moist, and healing. Why would someone do that, I wondered? For not doing the dishes? Not cleaning up? Something worse? Or just for being there when the second late notice on the mortgage came? Who knew? I decided that society was evil and that we should shield these kids from it until they were strong enough to face it on their on, and that teachers were the ones who could do this. Okay, so I started out as a crusader, a minion of every Horatio Alger out there, but now, I do not know what the hell I am.
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Chapter 1 DISORDERS THAT RUN A SPECTRUM: 1 IN 500 “A queer thing I soon discovered about my little friends, and that was their lack of interest. They would come to me with eager cries of astonishment, like children, but like children they would soon stop examining me and wander away after some other toy.” H.G. Wells, The Time Machine Some form of autism affects one in every 500 children in this country. Some do not talk very much or very well, and they avoid contact with your eyes; some mutter constantly to themselves and line things up in obsessive rows, constantly arranging and rearranging; some wring their hands beneath their chins like witches at a coven while their feet dance in ritual spasms. Now and then one will stare for hours on end at the show on TV with a dull, blank stare. In some it is obvious that this person is full of something he/she cannot comprehend with the mind he/she has been given and cannot control the strength of his/her muscle. That is why, almost poetically, autism is called a “spectrum disorder,” because it can be any and all of those things—and many more that have not even been listed here. I met my first autism case when I was a substitute teacher in a farming town. In this town, the skies were a hard, steel gray and the tin roofs of the dilapidated farmhouses were rusted, torn, and fragile in the cold winds that swept across barren fields. All the land had been cleared a century before when a person could farm the land and make a go at it. But now there was nothing to stop those winds from blowing anything that was left away. And I always wondered how a kid like Schwartzy ended up in a place like that, among the boys whose muscles were hardened from hefting axes, whose eyes were keen from sighting rifles for deer season and who were always set against that wind. Schwartzy did not understand what he was in either, but that was because of how he was made. By the time I had met him in his 14th year, he had the stubby legs, the short arms, the soft, pudgy midsection and large toy-soldier head-of—almost—a dwarf. His mother always dressed him in soft clothes and he walked—to quote Charles Bukowski—“as if music had never been invented.” He had a mind like a computer with bad circuitry. I was substituting one day in the Special Education department when I was introduced to him. He looked up at me curiously and said: “Hello Christian Kahner of 31 Canticle Drive, West Apple, NY, 1x3x90. Age 25. Caucasian—“ That is when a Special Education Teacher interrupted him. “That’s pretty scary,” I said. “Don’t worry,” she said; “it’s just part of the Asperger Syndrome. They fixate on things and can’t let go of them.” BOSON BOOKS
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“Oh,” was all I could say to that. But he was harmless. He never lashed out like we who are told we are sane and we who are told we have adjusted to this society often do. No, instead, when that bulldog of a broken-down farming town sent some angry boys to throw his backpack in a rain puddle or to call him a “little retard” or a “fat ass”, all he did was cry—and cry—and cry —until his face was burning, wet and purple with some emotion that he could not even name. He would wail at the top of his lungs until his voice cracked and broke like a dog left out in the cold—and every teacher’s head was sticking out of the classroom door. I do not know what happens in a world like this to a kid like that. I do know, though, that if we –who are supposed to be so well adjusted and so finely developed—would shed tears before we shed blood, this earth would only be wet with our tears, not the blood of others. I lost touch with Schwartzy when I moved on to another district. Johnny Walker, though, was another story entirely. I met Johnny, or he met me I guess, before the bell for homeroom had rung on my first day as a full-time high school teacher. I was, as they told me to do in teacher school, writing the objectives for the day on the board. It was early; too early, really for an English major from the Bronx who was used to finishing his bartending shift at 4:30 in the morning, not getting up at 5:30 in the morning, not having a batch of 30 kids at 7:15 in the morning. It was about 7:00 a.m. when Johnny Walker edged into my classroom. He must have been 14 or so because he was in ninth grade, but he was thin, frail really, the kind of kid whose bones you see poking out of the shoulders of his shirt. He was always hunched forward in some sort of mischief, his thick black-rimmed glasses perched on the edge of his nose. Two pale, bony hands were constantly wringing beneath his chin; his eyes always darted around the room, looking for a victim. Johnny’s eyes fixed on me, then shot around the room as I was writing on the board. I stopped writing as he began a low, almost inaudible snicker: he—he—he—he. “Hello,” I said, trying to be the helpful-teacher-guy I had read about in all the teacher textbooks, none of which had mentioned anything about 14-year-old autistic kids with coke-bottle glasses on who are snickering in your doorway at 7:00 in the morning. “Are you looking for a class?” he—he—he—he—he “Are you lost?” he—he—he—he—he “Do you have your schedule with you?” he—he—he—he—he “You know what I did the other day?” he—he—he—he—he “No,” I said, “I don’t.” BOSON BOOKS
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he—he—he—he—he “I went up to this girl and I said” he—he—he—he—he “penis. I said penis.” “I’m sorry,” I said. “You said what?” he—he—he—he—he “I said penis, penis, penis.” They fixate on things, I remembered. “Oh, okay,” I said and I suddenly had this feeling that I should have stayed in bartending, where people paid great money, and tipped big, to be able to act like that. Now, it was all for free. Finally, his personal aide showed up, huffing, panting, and leaning against the edge of the doorway with the hand that held his book bag. “Peter,” he said and gasped for air, “don’t run away like that. You’ll get me fired.” And he was fired. And Johnny was shipped off to a special school somewhere in another state, a ritzy boarding school no less, all on the tab of the taxpayers of that district. The most absurd, the most amusing, the most insane situation, of them all, however, was what I like to call The Tom Collins Incident. It was my eighth year of teaching, my second in another state. In the eyes of administration and anyone else who had any sort of pull, I had done a real bang-up job and I was rated “effective in all areas,” got a handshake from my administrator in charge and was even asked what level I would like to teach next year. “Seniors,” I said. “I really had a good time teaching seniors.” Of course, since I had done such a good job and all, I was awarded five freshman sections of ninth graders, most of them scoring in the L35 range on the FCAT (which basically meant they were in danger of not meeting the graduation requirements in reading comprehension), one in 3 of them classified SLD (Specific Learning Disabilities, which ranged from “impulsivity” to actual disorders like sensory integration problems), ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder, which is usually not the disorder but someone who is too immature or who has not had the upbringing to show them decent manners; the culture of the schools usually cause symptoms that masquerade as this disorder; more on that later), ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder; see above but also add poor diet to this one), Emotionally Handicapped (which is where a student apparently cannot comprehend empathetic relationships), Bipolar Disorders, Autistic—something. There were also those who were in Dropout Prevention classes and had been labeled as At Risk of failure. My classes at times, reminded me of a scene from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” so many of them with the spaced-out look Ritalin, Prozac or antipsychotic drugs leave in a pimply 14-year-old who is trying to get used to high school. It took me all summer and several bottles of scotch whisky to wrap my mind around the fact that I would have all freshman. But it happened eventually and all seemed ready—the calendar, the room, the computer, and the supplies—until about 20 hours BOSON BOOKS
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before school was supposed to open. That is when the last faculty meeting was set to take place. As I found a seat out of the way, the director of Exceptional/Special Education (ESE) came up to me and kneeled next to my seat. I had no idea who she was. “Guess what?” she posed to me. “What?” I asked. “You hit the lottery,” she said and laughed. “Really,” I said, “oh good, I’m going home now that I’m rich.” “Well,” she said, “it’s not quite like that.” “Really? And here I thought I was rich.” “No,” she said, “you see this year with the Choice Program we have had to take on some autistic units.” “Units?” “Yes, well, there’s one. He’s from Tecumseh Middle School, and well Cathy Puddles just sings your praises, and he, well the powers-that-be, have decided that he should have all male teachers.” “Oh, really? Why’s that” “Well . . . you’ll see. You see, there is a meeting right after this one in the principal’s conference room—every one will be there. All the officials from the entire district, all his teachers here and his caseworkers from his old school will be present. Everyone, and all the administrators from here, of course.” “For this one kid?” “Yes,” she said and smiled. “Right after this meeting.” “Great,” I said, and there were fewer than 20 hours left before school started. At the meeting, there was a congress of almost a dozen people. Our principal was there, along with an assistant principal seated at his right; seated at his left was the director of Exceptional/Special Education. Then, there were the delegates from the county, a thin red-faced man who had no patience for the proceedings; a tall gangly lady with huge glasses, who was the facilitator. She had a marker in her hand and all the time frames written down for the meeting on the board. Next to the red-faced man was a man who had quit his job as a litigator and decided to go into student advocacy, “after [his] daughter went through the system and we felt that BOSON BOOKS
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she wasn’t gaining and achieving as she could have, given all the resources that are out there, so that’s when I decided that my time might be better spent advocating for those who could not advocate for themselves . . . .” And so he went on as my attention shifted from what he must have thought was a terribly valuable investment in the future of our children to his face and neck. He, to me, looked like a lizard. Yeah, I thought, no kidding, he looks just like a lizard: the eyes like slits, barely open, his loose gullet hanging down to his chest and his tongue dragging along his dry, chapped lips like a chameleon that has just snatched a fly out of the air. They obsess over certain things. Across from him were a covey of ESE teachers and caseworkers that had worked with Tom—my newest student—during his middle school years. Then, Tom turned 18 and had to be promoted not for academic reasons or reasons of pity, mercy, or practicality, but for some reason called a social promotion. Tom was supposed to have arrived by 11:00, but he and his mother were not there. The man who taught a class called Personal Interaction and Social Skills sat next to me. Next to him was the ESE teacher who had “sung my praises” and gotten me into this mess. “Well,” the gangly woman with the huge glasses started, “since time is an issue here, we should begin.” Then she turned to the covey of female ESE representatives from the middle school and asked, “Maybe we should just start going over some basic information so that we can all be on the same page, since we have sometime.” There were scarcely 18 hours before school started. “Okay,” one of the covey said as she adjusted her short hair and tried in vain to pull her pink blouse over her paunch, “you should all have a copy there in front of you. There will be a training this afternoon, when we go over this in more detail but let’s just start from the top and see how far we get. Okay, first Tom was born in the summer of 1986, which makes him 18 years old. When you see him,” and here the ESE teacher broke from the report and looked dramatically up toward the ceiling, her hands clutching at the air and landing fists full of air, “you’ll notice he is a very large, 6-foot-3, and right around 300 pounds. That’s why he has to have male teachers.” Why? I wondered. So I could fight him if any problem broke out? I’ll be damned. That’s why I left my last school. I thought of the day in my last school in New York after we had lost our third principal of the year. I had cafeteria duty and there was a rumor that two gangs were going to square off in the cafeteria that day, due to the void in power. As a show of strength, every administrator was called in, and so were the State Police. They stood side by side, the police with their hands on their semi-auto 9 m.m. pistols and the administrators with their hands on their radios for instant dispatch. I turned to the guy who had the duty with me and he said, “You know, this is really friggen’ dangerous.” He was a tall guy who was once a scholarship-caliber soccer player who had gone soft around the middle and had always been a bit goofy. “I mean, if something breaks out here, are you gonna do anything?” “No,” I started out sarcastically. “I mean, maybe for $80- even $85-thousand but definitely not for $40,000.” BOSON BOOKS
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He laughed and there was no riot that day. But here I was, 1200 miles away, with a one-man riot being put in my hands. I glanced at the behaviors checked off at the top of the page: “Behavior is impeding student’s learning or the learning of others.” “Behavior is resulting in exclusion from participation in activities or settings with peers.” “Student is engaging in behavior that places the student or others at risk or harm and/or results in substantial property damage.” “Behavioral difficulties persist despite consistently implemented behavior management strategies based on less comprehensive or systematic assessment.” I mean, if something breaks out, are you gonna do anything? No. Not for this money. As I flipped the page, I thought about a group of seniors I had right after the Columbine massacre. It was a class called Practical Communications but it could have easily been called Practically Communicating. We had a School Safety Drill one day where an administrator gets on the public address system and gives a code phrase: “Jim Morrison is in the building.” At that point, we had to lock the door to keep out the armed insurgents; pull down the shades so a sniper could not get a clean shot at anyone in the room; then, we had to put a green card under the door if all was well, and a red card if there was a problem. First, we had to gather all the students in the safest corner, lambs to slaughter, away from “points of entry.” While we were all herded into one corner, a student asked me whether I would take a bullet for any one of them. I responded, only half joking, “ I might get shot in the butt running away, but there are no heroes these days, not for this kind of money.” So what was I supposed to do if an 18-year-old, 300-pound freshman comes at me in class? Is there a drill for that? As I wondered how I might handle this sort of violence, I noticed further down the page that it was stated that there had been referrals for defiance/disrespect, threats/intimidation, urinating outdoors, battery, tardiness, profanity, several incidents of inappropriate touching (rubbing/massaging) female students, and some aggression when blocked from doing what he wanted. Then, some 45 minutes or so late, the man himself, Tom Collins, walked in. His head almost scraped the top of the doorjamb, his shoulders almost touching each side. His dark hair grew straight down on his dome and was cut straight across in bangs just above his thick black-rimmed glasses. There was a black t-shirt stretched across his chest and straining to stay over his stomach, a little lobe of flesh dangling over the elastic waistband of his cargo shorts. He waved his hands in the air frantically and creased his face with a crooked smile, apologizing, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he repeated over and over, “sorry, sorry, sorry.” The gangly lady with the big glasses showed him where to sit. Tom sat down as his mother came in. The mother had an explosion of orange-tinted hair held together by a clip in the shape of a plastic banana; the hair standing straight up. The lenses of her BOSON BOOKS
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glasses were a quarter inch thick. Her skin had been burned and tanned so many times that it had turned to loose leather with white spots. She apologized for being late: “Sorry, folks, but you have to understand that we’re in the process of changing his meds and one of the side effects is nausea in the mornings and even bedwetting, which makes him really upset, so it takes a while to get him all the way up here.” Tom lived with his brother and his mother in a town at least 40 minutes south of the high school. The county had instituted a new initiative two years prior, the Choice Plan, whereby anyone, anywhere in the county, could choose any school he wanted to attend. Everyone wanted this school, which was a long enough trip when a “Regular Ed.” kid has to take a normal route for 1.5 hours from somewhere in the south county. But, Tom, an ESE student, needed special accommodation. So, here was the plan: a teacher aide would drive 45 minutes south to wait at the bus stop with Tom and leave her car there; then, she would ride the bus to school with him and escort him to all of his classes. At the end of the day, she would ride the bus home with him and then drive 45 minutes north to go home. Also assigned to Tom would be an on-campus aide who would follow him to all of his classes, check that he is writing down notes, keeping his behavior in check as well. The problem was that his on-campus aide was a woman who was about 5 feet tall and just as wide. Her limbs stuck out of the ball of flesh that was her trunk. In one hand she always had a water bottle with a sock over it to keep it cool. “I have to drink a lot of water because of my asthma,” she told me once. She had to keep up with Brian all day; she was the first line of defense if he were to “engage in behavior that places the student or others at risk of harm and/or results in substantial property damage.” It was, I must say, quite a comical sight to see all three-hundred pounds of Tom Collins lumbering along with that goofy smile on his face while this woman, seeming to be half his height, waddled along in the August heat behind him. Huffing and heaving for air because of her asthma, she would pause, lean against the wall, and drink from her water bottle. Then, I took another look at him; he was sitting right next to me now. His hands were what my grandmother would have called “meathooks,” thick paws that looked as if they could barely bend. And his arms were just as swollen with fatty muscle, like the raw muscularity of a bear. On his face, though, pushing apart his soft, round cheeks, was a smile that said it was not his heart or his mind that was violent, but that his violence grew out of moments when he could not understand this world around him; that, just then, he was happy. In fact, as long as I knew him, he always wanted to be happy. He just did not know how or when. The gangly-lady with the big glasses said that she needed to lay down some ground rules in order to honor the schedules of the teachers involved. This case, she said, was “time-sensitive.” “Okay,” the mother interrupted just then, “I want to say before we even get started that I am a full participant in this thing here, and by my rights I have just as much say as this whole group here. It’s a one-on-one thing here.”
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The two wrangled for power for a while, and that is what this whole thing was about: the adults in the room—not Tom. At the same time, the Greek statue that I was sketching in my notebook, and not all the politics that swirled around him, fascinated Tom. Everyone in that room would, if asked, say “I’m here for the kid.” But, at least 3 out of 4 would be lying through their teeth. The mother who claimed she wanted her son to have as “normal” as educational experience as possible was not even there “for the kid.” No, she was there to tell everyone that life had given her a gargantuan son who wets his bed; who can not read; who can not write; who can not speak; who can not control himself without violence; and that he might not ever be able to do any of that. But she wanted everything that was afforded to her by her rights, by this one-on-one equality the educational charter of this state grants her. She wanted to tell us in our own jargon and dialect, that all of this that was written in those papers may well be true, but that Tom and she, the mother, should not be blamed for this. It happens to one in every 500 kids, after all. It wasn’t her fault. He shouldn’t be known as a “retard.” In fact, she went on, there were a lot of great books on this subject if you care to read them. Then, she said it was a shame that he is being held legally responsible for behaviors that are “syndrome driven.” The man who looked like a lizard, her legal advocate, nodded in tacit consent. She was right, he thought. And all I thought was, Jeez, what if he killed that lady he attacked in middle school? What if he kills this lady in high school? I pictured her keeled over a railing after trying to escape, the water from her sock-covered bottle mingling with the blood from the wound on her head. I saw Tom wandering off to hear his mother’s voice. Then, after the gangly lady pointed to the agenda and ground-rules on the board, she said it was time to introduce ourselves. Things went smoothly until it came to the ESE teacher who sat next to me. Tom snapped when he heard the title of the class: “What’s that?” he said. “What’s that name he said?” “Personal Skills and Social Interaction,” the teacher repeated. Tom wailed aloud. “You said I didn’t have to take any retard classes, mommy. You said.” The ESE teacher tried to explain: “No, it’s not like that, Tom. It’s just a class that helps you in dealing with people and situations that we face everyday.” “You said I didn’t have to take any retard classes this year, mommy,” Tom said and everyone could feel the tension ratcheting up notch by notch. “It’s not like that,” the ESE teacher tried to explain, but Tom would not hear it. He wailed again, and he pulled his t-shirt over his head from the back of the neck, revealing his soft belly and love handles. He slammed his hooded head down on the table and crossed his arms over his nape.
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There was a tense silence. Everyone looked at each other. Then, trying to break the tension, the ESE teacher made a joke: “See, that’s why you need the class,” and then he laughed. Tom heard this through his hood, and he must have imagined we were all cackling in hysterical laughter, pointing at him, calling him a retard. In their minds, these autistic kids have fantastic theaters. The acoustics though are too loud, and the drama is too great. The sensations are too intense for them. A book dropped across the room resonates like a bomb. A slimy jelly from a sandwich feels like an octopus crawling up his back. An insult is worse than a bullet to the head for someone who has no sense of reckoning, no moral compass, no sense of action and reaction. Then, without raising his head, Tom threw a fist in the air and erected his middle finger, flashing it to everyone: principal, assistant principal, teachers, caseworkers, everyone. But no one did anything. He was an exception, so the rule did not apply. We all just sat there as he flipped us “the bird,” from the principal. I tried not to laugh. Tom eventually felt himself losing control and stormed out of the room. The student advocate followed him, his gullet shaking, licking his dry lips. There were only two things that pacified Tom: his mother’s voice and computers. So, after a few minutes of computer play, Tom was back. He apologized and shook his hands in the air, smiling again, like Richard Nixon, I thought. “I am not a retard.” The advocate, who now returned, explained to us how he had “de-escalated the situation”: “You see, I saw that he was getting worked up so I calmly explained to him that after a few minutes of playing on the computer, he would have to come back into the meeting. And now here he is.” “This is all syndrome-driven behavior,” the mother chimed in. “This isn’t my son, really. If you knew Timmy, you’d know that this is the result of his syndrome.” Timmy was calm now but still didn’t know what was coming out of his mouth or how to stop himself from speaking the truth. I loved that about Tom. He took a big swig off of a bottle of soda someone had bought him, and immediately after he swallowed, he asked the lady in the pink shirt who had been reading to us all, “Are you pregnant?” “Tom!” his mother yelled. “Don’t be rude!” “No, no, no,” he stumbled, “it’s just that she’s really fat and last time I asked a lady why she was really fat she said she was pregnant.” I put my notebook over my face, and I am sure everyone knew I was laughing. That meeting broke up soon after that. We were supposed to create a plan for success for Timmy that day, but nothing got done. The mother refused to read the old confidential papers that had been negotiated in middle school, stating that “she doesn’t process information this way. She was not that kind of learner, she said, spitting the venom BOSON BOOKS
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of our institutional Esperanto back at us. I began wonder if the mother was just on one long filibuster, the content of which was a litany of rights as she perceived them, culled from Internet sites and heard from student advocates who looked like lizards. But what was she stalling for? What time was her desired goal? What was supposed to be accomplished? Nothing, really, is the answer. This lady, like so many people in this phase of our “liberal democracy”, believe that not only does everyone deserve the same equality of opportunity, but that they deserve the same exact appearance, the same exact outcome, the same exact process. These were the parents, who have plenty of allies in the ranks of teachers and administrators and advocates, who took the concept of mainstreaming ESE students and ruined it. As I alluded to earlier, originally, only one ESE teacher escorted a select few ESE students who had shown they were able to swim in the “mainstream”, and now drown, in small numbers into a class. Then, one by one, other parents wanted their kids to appear “normal” as well, and they invoked their legal rights to have their children in the “least restrictive setting.” Soon the mainstream was the exception; that is, there was no “main” stream left to sink in or to swim in. There was no level to which to aspire. If a class is 45% ESE, 25% Dropout Prevention, 10% 504 Plan, and the rest average to low-achieving students, then what are we asking our students to learn? How to tolerate being in a huddled mass? How to watch as a teacher stops class to “de-escalate” a situation wrought with imminent violence? How to be mediocre in the context of a mediocre group? Whether you want to believe it or not, whether you want to say teachers need to figure a way to challenge these students, or lay the blame elsewhere, that is what is happening—and more and more as the days go by. The most frustrating aspect is that the meeting produced nothing, and that Tom did not last long. Of the 15 days he was officially on my roster, he was there about five. He was late almost everyday, or he was suspended other days. His behavioral infractions could have been predicted: One day he wanted to hear his mother’s voice so he walked into the one place where he knew there was a telephone—the principal’s office—and started dialing up his home number. That cost him a couple of days. One day he wanted to get on the secretary’s computer, but she would not turn it on for him, so he picked it up in his “meat hooks” and slammed it against the desk a few times. Finally, one day he got mad at that poor teacher aide, the one who was five feet wide and tall. He grabbed her water bottle with the sock covering it, and he squirted the water all over her face and chest. Then, he hit her over the head with the empty bottle, very similar to the beating he gave another teacher aide with a sofa cushion in a resource room back in middle school. Charges are still pending in both cases. The jury is still out. BOSON BOOKS
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It was weird having Tom as a student. I definitely liked him; it was just that he was a hand full. He even thought I was funny. What does that say about me? I do not know. The last I heard, the mother escorting Tom off campus, after what we’ll call the “water bottle incident.” According to one witness who watched his exodus, Tom was groping his mother’s chest and crotch as they headed to their car. But that is all “hearsay.” All I know for a fact is that on the final paperwork necessary to reassign a student, especially an autistic “unit,” I wrote that I was sorry, but that pity was useless. I wrote that as much as I liked the kid and wanted to help the kid, he has a dis-order in our finely tuned order that we call an institution and that he would never be able to function in those confines. He would never be able to understand why he was being asked to do what he was being asked to do. Sometimes, when all the “normal” kids are filtering into Timmy’s old class I picture the teacher aide huffing behind him, and I see him tottering along with that smile on his face. I think of Lenny from Of Mice and Men and how Lenny did not mean to hurt anyone or anything. But he always did. And he died for it in the end. That is the sadness of his disorder: that he will never be able to understand why? Yup, he was a sad case, a little funny maybe, but I try not to obsess over certain things.
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Chapter 2 A DISORDER AT THE OTHER END OF THE SPECTRUM: THE DEBBIE HARMON AFFAIR “I sat on the edge of the well telling myself that at any rate, there was nothing to fear, and that there I must descend for the solution of my difficulties. And withal I was afraid to go.” H.G. Wells, The Time Machine We all have flaws. Some of us are able to hide them behind the façade of a wellsculpted body and some behind a lovely aspect and perfect hair. Most of us know what is wrong with ourselves, and maybe not as many can admit it. Most of us know the flaw and we just keep it to ourselves. Schwartzy, Johnny Walker and Tom Collins knew it; they just didn’t ever understand it. It is only those tragic figures in literature, history and the lives we live who have this wonderful faculty of blindness that allows them to think that nothing is wrong and that there are no forces in this world that could tell them such. There have never been many of them, but there have always been a few. Debbie Harmon was one of those few, a real tragedy. I had a ninth-grade homeroom that year of about 35 nubile pubescents who had no idea what to do with all the hormones running through them. The girls had developed in ways and in places that drove the young boys mad. Suddenly, the boys were sprouting sparse hairs on their chins and a few spare hairs on their chests and the occasional red dot on the cheek, chin or forehead. Girls who were thin, scraggly and revolting just one summer before were suddenly swathed in perfumes and painted with makeup, eyeliner, lipsticks and rouge. The boys had decided they had grown muscles and so they rolled their sleeves up over their biceps, flexed even while grabbing a pen. Not one of them—boy or girl—could shut up, either. Though, there was always a pause for the Pledge of Allegiance. During that silence, I always thought of this kid, Mickey Doyle, who was a year older than I, who went to our “rival” high school, when the Pledge was being recited, all 35 of those ninth graders with their hands over their hearts, pledging their lives and their allegiance to one nation, one god, indivisible. Mickey used to wear his hair in long spikes that he called sarcastically “like the Statue of Liberty.” When the Pledge was being recited over the public address system, Mickey, wearing his ratty Sex Pistols t-shirt and his ripped jeans that had slogans on it like “The economy is trickling down my leg” and “Reagan looks good on the cover,” would throw his arm out in front of himself in a Nazi salute. Then, he would stare stonily at the Flag while all the other students put their hands over their hearts and said they believed in one God, one nation. But no one did that stuff anymore. They knew there was too much at stake to chance something like that on your permanent record. It was not time to do that, they would say. Or their parents would say there was a time and a place for that, but that it was not here and it was not now. The future was at stake after all and you did not, I always heard BOSON BOOKS
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parents say, want the past to screw up the future, or anything done in the heat of the moment to determine the outcome of a student’s fate. So they all pretty much stayed in line. They saw the same invisible parameters that had been drawn for them from the first time a kindergarten teacher told them to line up against the wall; when to walk; when to stop. It was the same invisible division that stood between naptime and snack-time, playtime and lunchtime, between home and school. Stay in line or you get no snack. Later it is detentions, suspensions and expulsions in rare, extreme cases and the only ones who could afford to abuse the moment were those who saw, to paraphrase Mickey’s favorite band, there was no future in our dreaming. The future, for instance, meant nothing to the one kid who sat in the corner of that homeroom by the unused file cabinet and the waste paper recycling bin. He would exile himself to that place for the amount of time it took for homeroom to end, because, so I was told, he lived in a trailer with no running water on the side of a hill somewhere by the reservoir that sent water to the big city 160 miles away. There was a trailer with walls to divide it up into rooms, but there was no light when the sun went down; there was, though, a wall of empty beer cans and boxes that the local kids would knock down with rocks every chance they got. His clothes had that smell of a tent at a campsite that has been soaked with rain and dried in the sun, a smell of earthly musk. His skin shone with the oils that all the others used washes, lotions, and cleansers to avoid. What the hell did the future mean to him? Nothing. So he would sit there, standing mute, looking out the window until the bell rang. He was the other end of the spectrum from the likes of Debbie Harmon who, from the moment she could understand a word, had been told that the future was hers for the taking, that the future always belonged to the brilliant and the beautiful; by the time she was a senior in high school she had blossomed into a tall, slender blond who seemed even leaner and more dangerous than her actual dimensions. She had a way of flicking back her long, blonde hair without her hands because she always had her hands full: an oboe, a book bag, a purse with her beeper, her makeup, her money, her jewels. And that’s how she appeared the morning the whole affair started, except that morning she had the studied look of an actress who had just been told that in this scene her lover had just left her. But in her hand, creased from being wrapped between her palm and the handle of her oboe case, was her report card, a note of reality. I smiled and said hello. Then, with a sort of grunt, she dropped her oboe case, flicked her blonde hair back without her hands, poised the crumpled report card in the air and said through a voice on the verge of cracking with tears, “What is this?” She must have thought I was a real wiseass or just a real moron when I said, “Your report card.” “No,” she said, “I mean the grade. You gave me a 65.”
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“Yeah,” I said, “actually it was much lower than that, but I didn’t want you to fail, so I gave you some points.” “Gave me some points!” she said, shocked at my clemency. “Yeah,” I said, “see there were three essays and you only handed in one so you really had a 33, but I couldn’t put that down.” “I did those essays,” she said, picked up her oboe and left before she was overtaken by some real emotion like fear, or, more likely, sheer hatred of me, who was now the step o’er which she must leap or stumble, to paraphrase MacBeth; or the stone wall between her and her future. Anyway, that’s how act one ended. She storms out of the room and we’ve got all the elements in place for a nice little tragedy: the tragically flawed princess destined by the stars at birth for great things, the kingdom that is her school, and, of course, the antithesis, the antagonist: me. Act two started a few short minutes later when Marie Pynchon, Debbie’s guidance counselor, walked in. This lady was short with the squat limbs and elongated forehead that made me think that she had missed being a dwarf by one, maybe two specks of DNA. She always wore terribly high heels, the clicking of which became the cue from my director to lock my door and to stay out of sight. She was always looking for some exception to the rule, a flaw in a grade’s calculation, a variable that had not been accounted for, any gap in the equation that gave her leverage to change a grade that should have been a black-and-white matter. But nothing was black or white with her; she claimed that she was a “trained student advocate” and the source of her powers always fell back on recanting the superintendent’s latest catch phrase: “All grades are written in pencil so they can be changed.” I’m not sure to this day if I was slow that day, or if I just assumed that the Debbie Harmon affair was over after the initial skirmish. But I did not lock my door and duck that morning—and I should have, because there she was, Mary Pynchon, perilously poised on her 4-inch heels with the report card she had tried to smooth the wrinkles out of. I tried the next best thing—if not the most immature—I didn’t look at her. I just kept shuffling some papers around. Mary cleared her throat. I looked up, smiled briefly and looked down. Looking away, I heard those heels clicking against the tile of the floor. I knew this was—like so many things in teaching—going to end badly and take a very long time. “Hello,” she said in her pat way. Defeated, I looked at her. “Let me guess,” I said, “You need to discuss Debbie Harmon’s grade with me.” BOSON BOOKS
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“Yes,” she started, “well, she’s very upset about all of this and I was just wondering if there was anyway you could explain this to me so that I can explain this to the mother. See, the mother can be very . . . well she’s very passionate, I guess, about Debbie’s future and she wants to know why the grade was so low.” I stood mute and presented the only evidence I had in my favor, the only tool teachers had before everything had gone computerized, the one thing you took with you during fire drills for safekeeping: the grade book. I pointed out where there were zeroes where there should have been grades. “See,” I quoted her, almost imitating her tone, “the grade should have been much lower, actually, but she’s a senior and I figured, you know, so close to graduation, she might just be slacking off a bit.” “Oh my,” Mary said with what could have passed for genuine concern as she wrote down notes from my grade book. Damn her, I thought, using my own evidence against me. “Oh my,” she said again to buy enough time to complete her notes. “Okay,” she said finally, “I’ll present this to the mother and see how she accepts this. Okay?” “Great,” I said and hoped that she did not note the tone of sarcasm, but I had a feeling this was not going to end. In fact, it can’t end—there are three more acts to go. That was just a little rising action to get you to the technical climax, where the character is changed forever by some event and cannot ever go back in time to repair whatever damage has been done. Or, to quote Mac Beth, “What’s done can not be undone.” We had only “scorched the snake,” not killed it. Act III is set in the learning lab down the hall from my classroom. A lady who was more of a technology coordinator than anything else ran it, though she would sit down with any kid who asked for her help. She was always nice to me. The kid who smelled like a camping tent was in the far corner on a computer, next to a kid who, autistic, was writing a novel based, to quote, on “a character that is pure evil. You know how some characters are a little good and a little evil. Well, this one is just pure evil, see?” I told him nothing was that simple. Characters, places, and all of that stuff were very complex and you couldn’t boil it down to one thing, like just being pure evil. That is when I heard the clicking of Mary Pynchon’s heels and I suddenly changed my mind: there could be pure evil in the world. It could be. I tried to ignore her again but there is no avoiding what’s meant to be and I should have known that. My father, who also went to Fordham University once, after three pints of Clan Macgregor scotch whiskey, wrote something I would always remember: “fate leads those who are willing and drags those who are not”—on the brown paper bag full of stuff I was bringing back to school. And, so, in stepped our agent of fate in the form of a woman who sidestepped dwarfism in the womb by a speck of DNA
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I tried to concentrate on helping another kid with a book he was reading. The kid was legally blind. His eyes were glazed over with cataracts and bulged beyond his lids. He was absurdly thin, pale and almost too frail to touch; but he was forever hunched over these large-print books the county bought for him, deciphering one word at a time with what looked like something an expert in gems would use to inspect diamonds. In spite of my efforts, Mary Pynchon was leaning over my shoulder. I had that feeling that her vision was boring into me. I turned and I said over my shoulder: “Yes?” “Oh, hi,” she stammered, “I don’t mean to interrupt.” “But you will,” I said and smiled to cover up the barb. She forced a quick chuckle and then reformed her tone to being more serious: “Okay, well, I talked to Deborah’s mother and she was wondering if you could give her a call sometime this morning.” “I don’t know what else I would tell her,” I said. “It’s all right there, see?” “Well,” Mary started, “ I explained that to her and she said she just wanted to touch base with you on a couple of things. And I wanted to ask if there was any way you could maybe just go back over the grades and find something you overlooked or maybe find some credit you may have forgotten about.” “Go back over the grades?” I asked and I know I must have sounded preposterous. “Find some credit somewhere? What exactly are you asking me to do?” “Just to reevaluate the grades,” she said, “to see if you may have forgotten something.” My first instinct was to lash out and to tell her that I had evaluated and reevaluated the entire thing. I felt like telling her that she was up to something devious, back-handed, malicious; that she was the worm at the core of an apple; that she was destroying what we, as teachers, were trying to accomplish here in this school; that her purposeful manipulation was horrible and that she did it all behind the guise of being what she called a “trained student advocate.” I was going to explode but then I looked in her eyes and she was sincere; she actually believed in what she was doing and that this was her role; that what she was doing was not just right, but necessary. Her eyes almost pled for a recount. Still, if I had to give in, if they believed that much in what they were doing, then who was I to stand in the way. After all, fate leads those who are willing and drags those who are not. “You know what?” I said. “You saw the grades. I saw the grades. We both know what the grades are.”
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“But she really has her heart set on Yale.” “So be it,” I said, “put in any grade you want. You want an A, go ahead, put in A.” And I meant what I said because “you”/Mary Pynchon were the one who wanted the A as much as anyone; when Debbie goes to Yale that guidance counselor in the foothills of New York could say she had fought for that cause too. These causes, unfortunately, were the only sense of meaning we had—teachers, students, parents and even counselors. It was the creation of meaning in a void that were the years between the innocence of childhood and the fulfillment of the next step in their lives. And when they get there, they realize it is only another institution, another set of rules, another abyss where meaning falls through the cracks in favor of the needs of the institution. Maybe that was the tragedy: that this student, this mother, this advocate, and this teacher even though there was some real meaning we were fighting over. Anyway, I went on with what I thought was what I meant to say, or what I thought was a statement filled with great meaning: “And, if she goes to Yale, and I was wrong about her grade, then she deserves to be there; if I was right, though, even generous, then she’ll do this again. But I don’t think she will get too far with a professor at Yale. Either way, the truth will come out—it always does.” “Oh, okay,” she said, and somehow I think she missed everything that I said except for “put in any grade you want.” Either way, I still had to call the mother. So Act 3 ends with what I thought was a Pyrrhic victory. The battle was over, I had technically won, but all my boats were burning in the sea. Then comes Act 4, the slippery slope that leads to what the Greeks called the catastrophe, which put the world of the play back into its right order. In a comedy, the right couples are wedded; in a tragedy, the flawed figure must be removed, one way or another, from the scene. I had not seen Debbie Harmon since her rather studied performance during homeroom, but, I guessed, it was still all about her: her pride, her future, her aspirations. Then I thought again, as in some of the greatest tragedies like Othello, sometimes you can’t tell if it’s Othello himself or Iago who is at fault, and everyone ends up dead anyway. Either way, I knew there had to be more to it than emotion, feeling badly for someone or about something and just giving in. Yet, like all tragedies, the writing is on the wall, the end seems obvious enough but no one, of course, wants to acknowledge the sticky situation ahead, or, as Macbeth put it when confronted with his fate: “I live a charmed life.” Maybe all of us—Mary, Debbie, the mother and me—had that same stupid pride that no one can seem to avoid. I went to the faculty lounge to call the mother. “Hello,” I heard a deep, rushed voice. This was no study in anger and perturbation; this was anger and perturbation. I said, trying to be formal, “Hello, this is Christian Kahner from . . .”
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“Oh,” she growled and the moan lingered in the receiver so long I thought I could feel the dampness of her breath in my ear. “It’s you,” she said as if it were Mac Beth, convinced to the end that no man born of woman could end his life, had just spied MacDuff in the fray. “I’ve been waiting for you to call.” “Well, I just wanted to . . .” “What is this about this grade—a 65—a D—on my daughter’s report card?” “Yes, I was going to say . . .” “Don’t you know she’s going to Yale?” This part always interested me. Look at it objectively: You have the mother of an intelligent, pretty and musically inclined young lady. This mother desperately wants to get this young lady into an Ivy League school; Yale in fact. Her guidance counselor agrees. Now, they both want to go to Yale, or wanted to do something like that in the past; neither did; so, here is a final salvo aimed at the redemption of that dream. They can all leave those foothills; the winters can’t be as cold in Connecticut as they are in those hills, but it’s absurd because they have this girl pre-ordained to go to Yale and I almost found myself saying, “Don’t you have to get the grades and get accepted first?” But I knew that wouldn’t help matters any “No,” I started again, “ I didn—“ “Well, she is,” she said; “do you know what she got on her SATs?” “No, I do—“ “Over a 1500,” she stated flatly, “does that sound like a student who wouldn’t do her assignments?” “I di—“ “I’m sitting right here at her computer. The essay she said you said was missing is right here. Or do you think I am a liar too?” “No, but there were others as well.” “How many?” “Two,” I said. “Well,” she said, undeterred, “I’m sure they’re here as well. I mean it’s not like I’m sitting here writing these for you, if that’s what you think.” “No,” I said now resigned, “not at all.” BOSON BOOKS
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“Well,” she said with that thrusting tone, “what do you think?” “I think you should call Mary Pynchon and tell her I said any grade you feel is appropriate, is appropriate and to have it entered, even an A, if you like.” “Really,” she said, sounding caught off guard. “Well, okay, I’ll just do that then,” she went on, trying to remain gruff but her victory had taken some cutting edge off of her tone. “I’ll do that.” Again, I thought it was over. Little did I know that we were just heading into Act V—the catastrophe, the leveling of the universe, the reconstitution of order. I ran into the principal, Horatio Alger, in the hallway just after lunch. “Hey big guy,” he said to me and hit me on the shoulder. Then he asked me, “Hey you coming to play some ball tonight? We need you in the middle grabbing those rebounds, big guy.” “I don’t know,” I said, “I had a tough day.” “Oh, yeah,” Horatio said, “the mom wanted to come in and talk that over with you. You free this afternoon?” What was I going to say?“No”? I agreed and thought to myself that she had better be prepared this time. Pynchon had told me that the mother could be very “passionate” about her daughter’s future and later she added that she could be “aggressive.” The meeting was set for 2:45, a few minutes after the last bell of the day. Debbie had one lesson or another to attend, so she was not there. At around 2:45, the mother came down the hall. She was a big, broad woman, not obese or even slovenly, but disheveled the way I always pictured a mid-wife in Chaucer: a gray, ruddy skin with wild coils of dark hair salted with gray; broad, swaggering shoulders atop a body whose sex must have been sturdy, utilitarian at best. I knew right then when I saw her why this whole thing was happening: It was that she was caught in between the rock of wanting to raise her daughter and the hard place of becoming an Ivy Leaguer herself. Obstacles had to be removed. An individual had the audacity to exert his own will over that of another, ruining the whole scheme of the institution’s universe. That simply was not done. I had to be removed. I thought of Debbie as her mother approached. I could not be sure what Mary or Horatio was thinking, but I thought then that one of us may be the tragic figure, not her. I had known Debbie’s step-sister, an Asian girl who was an artist who went to Brown University to study Physics; and I had met her stepfather, a man who came to live in an artist’s colony in the hills from somewhere in China. When I met him he smelled like mineral spirits and bad wine; his whole palette stained his clothes, heavy on the green and the brown. So, in Debbie there was the artist and the musician, from somewhere there was the brilliant strand of science; and she seemed innocent to me now, just as we, the
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mother and the English teacher seemed like two fools, fighting some battle that did not concern her, benefit her. The “conference” was just like the phone call, except my heart was not in the fight anymore. I repeated what I had told Mary Pynchon in the morning, Horatio after lunch and the mother on the phone. Then, when I saw that the mother was not listening, I stood mute. I felt guilty and I probably deserved feeling that way. So, Act V ended without any bloodshed, which is odd for a classical tragedy. The typical Shakespearean tragic figure has to die, usually a very bloody, very public death in order for things to be put back in order; the Greeks let their tragic figures live on, like Oedipus, with his eyes gouged out, groping at the air in front of him, stumbling through the fields of Cithaeron. Our ending here is more complex, more like Hamlet’s, a confusing, complete failure at any real resolution. Tragedies these days in public institutions are not so bloody as Shakespeare’s, but no less ironic that anything Sophocles wrote. Anyway, here’s an epilogue: The mother left with her victory. Mary Pynchon, after seeing that I sat mute, started to apologize. I had nothing to say. Horatio, in his own way, tried to make me feel better, but nothing, none of the words they were speaking, could fill that empty feeling I had inside of my chest. I’d been gutted. I couldn’t sleep much that night. I wasn’t sure how I would deal with Debbie in class—none of my feelings were straight or true anymore and I actually felt like apologizing. Horatio stopped by when he saw my light on in my classroom the next morning. I couldn’t look him in the eye. “Hey, big guy,” he said and I felt his hand on my back. “We missed you at the game last night. Hey, I just wanted to apologize about how things went down yesterday.” “Don’t worry,” I said, almost murmuring; “it’s okay.” “Anyway,” he went as I pretended to look through my files, “I talked to the father who was much more reasonable about the whole thing and we decided on an 80, a B-.” My head dropped and my shoulders went slack. Caught in between again, I thought. What was that? It was not the A the mother had humiliated me for and it was not the D I had given her. It was not even the F that the numbers bore out to be true. It was just some numbers people came up with and put in there so that her future was secure. I would have said something profound but I just didn’t care anymore. “Okay,” I mustered, “then it’s over?” “Yeah, big guy, and sorry again about yesterday.”
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I told Horatio not to worry about it. These things happen and I shook his hand. But it wasn’t over. Myrna, the English teacher from next door, came in and had a look of shock on her face. “Oh my god,” she said and put her hand over her heart, “you have Debbie Harmon, right?” “Yes,” I said flatly. “Then you must have heard?” “Heard what?” I asked. “Last night,” Myrna went on, “after we had all that rain; well, it got very cold and the roads were very, very slick. And Debbie Harmon—something must have happened—she hit a tree while she was driving home.” “What happened?” “I’m not sure,” she said; “I just heard.” Later, the story came together: Debbie had left her music lesson and then stopped by to see her boyfriend. On the way home she was driving too fast on a tortuous mountain road that was slicked with icy rain. She was going too fast; the road was not straight; she lost control; she hit a tree. Debbie Harmon was not seen in the halls of that little high school for a couple of weeks. When she returned a cane had replaced her oboe and a walking cast had replaced her high heels. She walked slowly, limping, swaying from one side to another. There was a black crosshatch of medical stitches above her brow. And I hadn’t done a thing, I swear. They asked me if I could make an exception in her case and not mark her absence, but it was out of my hands. Then, they asked me to do an “independent study” in order to help her catch up. Me, they asked. Me, Iago. Me, MacBeth. I respectfully declined. In May of that year, I was granted tenure; in June, I quit, stating that my ideals were at stake. But that was when I thought I still had ideals. The loss of my ideals was not the real tragedy, though. That was only a matter of time. In fact, that is what the institution of public school is supposed to do. It is meant to take the individual ideals away and put in their place a set of values that the group shares in common. No one individual is supposed to abrogate that order; Mac Beth was not supposed to kill King Duncan either. But we are human and tragedies have always followed us in one form or another. No one teacher is supposed to do too much, expect too much, stand too firm, in spite of what he believes is true. After MacBeth thought he could never die until he met MacDuff, who killed him. I had overstepped my bounds no more or less than Mac Beth did when he turned the tip of that dagger away from himself and turned it outwards towards others. But here is the funny thing: I was not wrong, but I was the bad guy. And here is the sad thing: No one escaped unscathed. We all limped away.
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Chapter 3 WINSTON WESTRUP: THE CASE OF THE ‘EMPOWERED STUDENT’, OR ANOTHER SHADE OF THE SPECTRUM “Sanity is not statistical.” George Orwell, 1984 Winston Westrup, senior, from all he had told me, had lived a full life. He, somewhere along the way, had married the mother of Winston junior and split up. I was never sure if he had broken up with her because she was the one who was (according to a conversation we had thirty-five minutes before Christmas Break started while his son did homework that was over a month expired so he could pass) “really good for smoking a joint, drinking a six-pack and jumping on the back of a Harley but not much for marriage.” The mother could also have been one of the women he had met while he was running dune buggies in the California sand and the sun was setting on Manhattan Beach. I knew there were other women and other wives in Winston’s life, both junior and senior, before I had talked to the elder Winston on the phone. Though I never would have met him if the assistant principal in charge of English were not to have told me to give a call to Winston’s father because I had written him up for falling out of his chair—three times in a row. I called him and Winston, the senior, did most of the talking—as I found that would be the case in all of the meetings where he was involved. He began by telling me that he had spent eight years going to school at night learning how to be an engineer in the city of Detroit; he told me how he had played semi-professional football; he told me how he had worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard installing the columns for some bridge or something when he heard I was from new York (even though I told him I never went to Brooklyn, even for the pizza, a joke that was beyond him); he told me how he had bought several lots by a local lake and was going to sell them for about a million dollars a piece (or some absurd amount of money) and that he wanted to give all of this to Winston, if the kid could just straighten himself out; he told me how in his day they just would have “kicked his ass”, right in school, and that, if I really needed to, I could just put his son over my knee and take care of him that way. And, although the thought was not altogether unappealing, I told him teachers could no longer hit students (unless you, as it was put to me, “were in a position of direct physical threat”, which is kind of like the law where someone breaks into your house, slips on the floor and you get sued because he hurt himself in your house). Then, he told me how well his son Winston had done in a different setting: “You know while he was in Parkmen Fundamental, he ran straight A’s once I got him away from his mother. All you have to do is to tell me and I can get this thing straightened out, because, he ran straight A’s once I had him at Parkmen Fundamental …” and so on and so on until I was simply saying, “Yes…of course…yes…gotcha…right.” All the time, I was hoping the phone would disconnect.
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The irony is that Parkmen Fundamental is one of those schools where the students who cannot seem to be inducted into the institution proper are sent to learn the “fundamentals” of the “total institution” and its intricacies. In other words, a student carries a sheet that has to be signed by each teacher, each period, with immediate feedback on performance as the day progresses. This school is much more obvious in its attempt to sublimate education in favor of the “institutionalization” of the student. Winston senior was quite proud of how his progeny had done. In short, Winston, junior, got A’s for being a part of the system. Then, he went to the finest academic school the county had to offer. The chains were off, relatively speaking, and, as Geoffrey Chaucer said, “The pot tobreketh and farewell al is go.” Winston had learned how to play along in the system in that school, and he had also learned that his parents knew how to play the system for all its worth. He learned the one truth of public education: a student does not need to learn a lot to get a diploma. The student needs to “get along.” Some students do learn a lot. Some students appear to be the best students in class—and they learn a little. There are various shades in the spectrum in between the two. The worst, however, is the student who realizes that the teachers, the administrators and students are all bound by the same institutional mores: They know the rules of the game all too well. They know if they fail, they can rely on social promotion to get them to the next level. If they behave poorly, they need to have new “behavioral objectives,” so as not to be held responsible for their actions. These students know that anything can be classified and itemized to the point where it is almost an object outside of themselves, certainly not their responsibility. That was Winston, junior. As I would find out, that was his father…and his mother. Yet, after dealing with Winston flipping the middle finger to others across the room during lectures; seeing him falling out of his chair during group work; and disrupting every test I had ever handed out, I sat with him as the clock ticked toward Christmas Break. Winston, junior, did meaningless work to get a meaningless letter on a piece of paper so his father could justify his going on vacation. Some of the work he was doing was four weeks expired. Winston senior sat at my desk and told me all about his exploits in building, traveling, drinking, smoking, partying and how much he had hated school as well. Winston junior stopped working on occasion to refresh his father’s memory concerning details of the stories. Luckily, neither of them had my home number, so I did not hear from them until they had returned from a California vacation, which Winston junior had earned by passing all his classes before the Christmas Break. Winston junior returned and continued playing the system, and as the first marking period of the second semester ended, I got this e-mail from Winston, senior: Winston got a D on his report card but I have never received any indication that he was doing bad. I was getting weekly progress reports but maybe you did not fill them out????? Nor did I receive any 3 week [sic] mid marking [sic] progress report. He had a green sheet today to be filled out. Please e-mail me any day that he does not turn in his work. Also, what work has he not done this the marking period? Thanks BOSON BOOKS
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I read this e-mail at about 6:15 in the morning. My coffee had not even cooled to drinking temperature and I had to fall back on the old cynicism, the old clichés. “Am I raising your friggen’ kid?” “ If I wanted a friggen’ son, I’d at least enjoy the carnal pleasure.” “Do you think I go six weeks without telling anyone a grade?” And then, around 6:20, I got good and pessimistic: “Who are you to tell me to e-mail you when your son doesn’t do something…or, even better, why don’t you ask your son how is grades are. I don’t work for one of your multi-million dollar construction companies. I’m not one of your foremen. I’m just some schmuck who gets the same money as a garbage man to teach hundreds of Americans.” I almost hit the delete button when I decided to respond, biting my metaphorical tongue the whole time. I needed the job, and I liked the idea of the job, and most of the kids: All of this information is on GradeConnect (a system in which parents can log on to find out grades, attendance and progress as often as the grades are entered; there is no excuse; there is no waiting for paper reports to come home by means of student or postman. Apparently, Winston junior was able to get on this program and find out all of his grades; later, his father would claim to be unable to do so). He did not bring me weekly progress reports after the first couple of weeks of class this semester. Progress reports/ grades were posted in class every week. There were two days dedicated to make-up work. He, again, had all of his work given to him at least once after it was initially assigned—he did not complete it the first or second time he had the work. To sign up for GradeConnect, go to the school website; you will be able to check daily if you want to on Winstons’ [sic] progress as well as tardiness and attendance with this program. I thought that was a fair response. I did not even mention that I had dropped two grades in order that he get the D. He had an F, really. I figured—just to be totally honest—that if I gave him the D, there would be none of this blame pointed at me. That is the funny thing about the tension between home and the institution of school these days: when the student or parent is “empowered” with a true knowledge of the rules, they can be turned against the wardens, the teachers, the administrators, anyone normally in charge. Suddenly, a teacher has a jailhouse lawyer on his/her hands. “Jailhouse lawyer” is a term for one who has been found guilty, incarcerated, and then uses the time of incarceration to become a gadfly to the system—most likely knowing that full release is not a true possibility. But Winston, senior, seemed cowed for the moment, and he wrote back: I was getting progress reports weekly but guess they were not accurate But a man does not work himself out of the slums of Detroit where he would sling brick with cracked, frozen hands in the winter, and have his skin turn red in the northern BOSON BOOKS
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sun when summer came around without having some fight in him. Though momentarily cowed, he must have vowed to fight the good fight. He knew, deep down, there were still loopholes in what had steeled itself against individual intrusion—and escape: I checked the web site and their [sic] are no grades of assignments with a few exceptions. Winston has a progress report every Friday. You can e-mail me his progress on Fridays if he does not bring you the green sheet. Any problems or missed assignments should be noted on the green sheets. That is the only way that I have to monitor the situation. As we have discussed on many occasions, if he is not doing his work or has an attitude, I want to know. Getting a D is not acceptable and I should have been informed when he began slipping. The last incident was the [ex-girlfriend] thing. Grades have never been mentioned before or since. I also want to know about his attitude. I have asked the school for help concerning the [ex-girlfriend] thing for anger management but have not heard anything as yet. Thanks for your cooperation. Just two days prior, I had a conference with a student who was living with her grandmother. The grandmother, who had grown up in an age of manila folders and Smith-Corona typewriters and telephones with wires attached to the wall, had been able to get on GradeConnect and download all of the information for her grand-daughter, a 30-page document that listed every assignment, whether or not it had been done, and the grades. Here, Winston Westrup, who once explained to me how he was a math major and how he utilizes computers to detail blueprints, et cetera, claims that he was either having trouble using the website, or the information for my classes had suddenly disappeared. Was there a Black Hole in Cyberspace? Had all those grades been sucked through a vortex into another dimension? Or was this guy just avoiding responsibility for raising his troublesome son? Was he aware of a system that had holes worn into it from the passage of time, holes through which his son could escape? You, dear reader, can decide. All I know, is that he decided to dictate the terms of how I was to hold his son responsible, as if I worked for him directly…then he thanked me for my cooperation in advance. As much as sarcasm would have been my choice in this case, I had to remain political. I always ended up sounding like a press corps spokesmen: If you saw an assignment on the grading program from my class without a grade next to it that is because he had not completed the assignments. If there is no grade, then that means he has not done the assignment. All of my assignments are listed on that website. Many parents have BOSON BOOKS
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accessed information through this means. By the end of this week there will be four grades on that website. I did not receive the green reports after only a few, as I told you. I'll ask him where they are, but ultimately, this is his responsibility. The reason you have not seen many grades right now—as of today—on that grading program is because the grading period is only eight days old. So far as attitude, he had to be removed from fourth period due to it and he has been sent to the front office for being involved with potential fights with students in his new class, first period. The skirmish was mine, but when dealing with the “jailhouse lawyer” type, these things rarely go away. Malcolm X once said that the most dangerous person in society is one who has nothing to lose; the same is true for any institution. That is why inmates on Death Row are kept in solitary confinement, because once one’s life is taken away, there is no greater punishment. Thus, if all seems lost on one front, simply begin a campaign on some other front. Attack another flank, if you will: Where are we on the anger management Counselor that I requested 3 weeks ago while he was in IC and suspension? Winston Winston the Elder felt he was having little effect in his current efforts. Alone, he was just one man who had made these same complaints to these same wardens, over and over again—and the kid kept doing the same malicious stuff over and over again. But Winston had an ally in this melee, an insider no less, one who knew the rules and regulations of this “total institution” better than anyone involved to date: his ex-wife, a Staffing Specialist in the district. Not only did she work for the district, but she was also one of the wardens. I did not meet Karen Rousseau, Winston’s ex-wife, at a board meeting or a school function, or anything like that at all. In fact, it was kind of an ambush. I was tending bar on the weekends because, as we all know, teachers are poorly paid. One Friday night, I was working in the inside dining room while there was music and entertainment outside at the Tikki bar, where the serious drinking took place. A rainsquall came along and sent in some patrons, soaked, ragged and drunk. One couple sat at my end of the bar with drinks already in hand. I took one look at them and wondered if I should serve them: They looked stewed. They asked for menus, and I figured that as long as they were eating they would be okay. They ate, they drank, they asked for the bill. The lady went
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to pay with a credit card that had the logo of the district for which I worked at the time. Trying to be the Jolly Bartender, I asked: “Hey, who’s the teacher?” The lady, with her eyes practically crossed, asked in her gruffest tone: “Who’s asking?” “I am,” I said, trying to mask my sarcasm. “I teach.” “Oh, really,” she said like a bad imitation of Lauren Bacall after one too many Manhattans, “where?” I told her. She looked a little shocked. “What grade?” I told her. She looked over at her companion, who had the same look of shock—or embarrassment—it was hard to tell—in his eyes. “What subject?” I told her. “Then you probably have my son,” she said and sipped on her rum and coke, putting it down just to the left of the coaster. “Winston Westrup.” All I could say was, “Oh, yeah, Winston.” Then, she read my silence: “Go ahead,” she said with a slight slur, “you can say it.” “What?” I said, backing away, wiping off the bar nervously, “you know. It’s ninth grade. That’s a tough time in life.” “Oh no,” she said emphatically, waving her hand, her body swaying along with it. Her companion chimed in: “Yeah, he’s horrible!” “Just horrible!” the mother said. “You know what his problem is –“ “He thinks he can get away with anything,” the companion said with his brown beer bottle accenting his words in the air. “That’s right,” the mother agreed. “He got his jaw broken from running that mouth of his. He thinks he can get away with anything.” “I’ve had worse,” I said, but that was a lie. I had written maybe one referral to administration per year for the first seven years of my career—and one a week for Winston since the beginning of that school year. BOSON BOOKS
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“Oh no,” the mother said. “He is the worst.” Then, they ordered the stone crab special with a side salad, some calamari and shrimp. They had to take it to go because someone at the companion’s house was suffering from stomach cancer and had called them at the bar. The next time I saw her was at a parent-teacher conference, where her tone was quite different. She saw Winston, junior, as the product of the environment around him: he was in a class of reprobates. “How do we avoid this in the future?” she asked, but the bad behavior traveled with Winston from fourth to first period. It was not the class, it was the person, the individual. He had caused fights with his rudeness and arrogance no matter where he was. Then, the mother said that his medication was going to be regulated, and that he needed time to “adjust” and that the medication would help him “adjust.” Meanwhile, Winston, senior, was talking to the weight lifting coach—a class in which Winston had a C—about how much he lifted at the local gym. (Who had the ADD?) Any way you slice it, Winston the Elder had a powerful person in his corner at this point, who, in spite of the truth she divulged, was going to use the knowledge she had of the institutional system to the advantage of her ex-husband and the kid being raised by him. This was her first salvo: Dear [Name of School], There seems to be agreement on the following: Winston is trying to keep his Dad from finding out the truth about his failures and behavior in school. His failure and poor attitude are widespread. Gradeconnect is not working for dad. Winston is failing 9th grade. He shows a lot of anger at home and at school. What I don't get is how his report card can say that he is making progress toward his goals and that he is anticipated to meet them by year's end! Do any of you know what his goals and specific needs are? I would appreciate it if you reviewed that combined committment [sic] to help him be successful. His dad is obviously trying the hardest. Thanks for communicating, Karen Rousseau Elementary Staffing Specialist “If you can not build a better society without improving individuals" Marie Curie There are two obvious insults here: that the teachers are not working hard to get her son to pass and that none of us know his goals. But, one must sacrifice any real sense of pride if one is to thrive in the world of teaching. What she was actually doing with those BOSON BOOKS
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insults was twofold: 1) She was trying to ascend in order to re-enforce her position in the hierarchy. In other words, “Fear me; my job is more important in the structure of the institution than yours.” 2) She wanted to demonstrate that she knew the powerful institutional jargon that would get the greatest reaction. In other words, she is couching her implied threats and punishments in terms of the institution’s nomenclature. Unfortunately for her, I was in a good position: they liked me a lot at this school, no one else could handle the kids they gave me, and the state in which it was located was facing a deficit of well over ten-thousand teachers the following year. Still, there was the fact that I had made my own “secondary adjustments” to certain facets of the institution: they could not scare me like they could when I was young. What threat did they realistically have? What would the loss of this job actually deprive me of? Money? Power? Prestige? Social mobility? The answers are none, no, no, no, no. (Just for laughs, please note the irony of the quote she has chosen for her signature.) Personally, I had no intention of responding to this salvo. This was not just out of spite. It was in order to diffuse the effect she was hoping to get. Notice, for instance, that the e-mail is addressed to the entire institution, not just one particular teacher; therefore, she commits the greatest rhetorical fallacy one can: a sweeping generalization. She wanted an uproar; she wanted a glitch in the system so that she can point to its inefficiency, and, therefore, to why she and her son are not responsible for anything. What she got instead was a response from one teacher who has to deal with the intricacies of the institution’s rules and regulations: Cathy Puddles. Thus, even before the science teacher next door told me not to respond, that it was being taken care of, I had decided to do just that. Now, I got to watch the whole show from the sidelines…for now: From: Cathy Puddles: The goals we had for Winston last April address time management and organizational skills. As you know, these are actually strengths for Winston. That has been his saving grace in my Learning Strategies class because those are the very skills I address. But note, I am not teaching content—like American Government or Earth Science—where he is learning all kinds of new material he has not seen before. We all know and appreciate just how bright Winston is. Winston has behavioral issues that are impeding his success as you well know. Until he can get a handle on his comments to teachers and other students and he learns to comply with the few rules we ask him to follow, he will continue down this path he currently is on where he feels compelled to act out and get attention—negative most of the time. Cathy Puddles ESE Teacher When I read the e-mail after Puddles forwarded it to me, I thought it was restrained, definitely political. I also knew it was not what the Staffing Specialist wanted to hear. BOSON BOOKS
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She did not want to hear the first-hand observations of someone who sees her son “in action” everyday. She wanted an innocuous statement of institutional standards that would not discuss her son, the human individual, per se, but would note any set of disorders and other distracters that can be discussed aside from the truth. In short, she was seething. She copied Puddles’ e-mail and inserted the sort of clichéd jargon that would defray, splinter and hopefully destroy the whole situation. The situation would not be resolved, the student’s real needs would not be aided in any way, but the institution would not be harmed—in fact, it would be bolstered, even at the expense of her own son: Cathy Puddles writes: (Italics are her words as the mother inserted them.) The goals we had for Winston last April address time management and organizational skills. As you know, these are actually strengths for Winston. I am sorry, I disagree here. Please explain how you come to this conclusion!? That has been his saving grace in my Learning Strategies class because those are the very skills I address. He may know how to answer what are the right things to do. But his practices are definitely not good time management and organization. But note, I am not teaching content—like American Government or Earth Science—where he is learning all kinds of new material he has not seen before. We all I know and appreciate just how bright Winston is. Winston has behavioral issues that are impeding his success as you well know. Maybe he needs some goals in this area then? Until he can get a handle on his comments to teachers and other students and he learns to comply with the few rules we ask him to follow, he will continue down this path he currently is on where he feels compelled to act out and get attention—negative most of the time. I love him, but I agree, he is good at getting negative attention. It’s hard to catch him being good, but that is, hopefully, everyone’s plan now. Karen Rousseau Elementary Staffing Specialist Area I ESE “You can not build a better society without improving individuals" Marie Curie Rousseau’s conclusion says it all: “that is, hopefully, everyone’s plan now.” How does she, a woman in the throes of the educational world as a professional, come to such a BOSON BOOKS
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cavalier conclusion? I was baffled. Was she, I wondered, so naïve as to think that of the 140+ students I had each day, I was supposed to pay special attention to his good behavior, which never happened really, and, by extension, forget his bad behavior as secondary to that which was good. In fact, I was supposed—at least partially—to ignore the needs of other students in order to “catch him being good.” And let me tell you, there were not too many instances of his being good. She also goes on to state that, in proper educational/institutional terminology that he should have “behavioral goals.” This is interesting because, traditionally, these behavioral goals were instilled and perpetuated by the home sphere. Things have changed, but the clarity of the school’s institutional demands and those of each classroom are universal, expressed as well as anything, and are—if nothing else—the rudiments of common good behavior. So, to ask for behavioral goals after a student has had meetings, been in and out of special educational situations, been through various drug routines, and has had the rules of the school enforced through means of discipline, is fairly ridiculous. Everyone knew that the goal was for him to stay out of trouble. He knew what the rules were; he broke them. What this Staffing Specialist was actually asking for in her institutional Esperanto was a modification in the reactions of the teachers toward him; she wanted to negotiate a new, individual contract that suited her needs better. No wonder, I thought to myself, that, as the drunken mother confessed after three hours at the tikki bar, the kid thinks the rules do not apply to him. If he gets a bad grade, it is negotiated away; if he gets in trouble, it is “disorder-driven” behavior, not the fact that he was raised that way. This situation showed me an interesting facet of the public educational institution: it was a world unto itself, a microcosm of the country that bred the thing and a mirror image of the others around it. In this closed world, there were contradictions, just as there are apparent contradictions in every system that is instituted. In order to live in the land of the Free, you have to subject yourself to random searches at airport terminals. In order to be in the Home of the Brave, some people have to be so brave that they die and never get to live the way of life they have defended. In order to pay a debt to society, one has to surrender his entire social identity and never really participate in it fully again without stigma. The same is true here: the system in place that is meant to instill behavioral, social and intellectual standards can often create cripples out of the healthy, or at least enable a Winston never to be able to see that his actions have consequences; it does not adequately prepare him for the days later in life when someone comes up to him in a bar, offers him some cocaine, and—thinking there are no consequences—he accepts. There is a slim margin for error in this country when it comes to free will. After Winston makes that choice, he and his mother are going to have a hard time asking the warden of the local prison for behavioral goals, and his father’s money might get him a fancy barrister. But the facts will be facts: we are either guilty or not guilty, and if one institution does not fix us, the next one will. It also showed me that even the wardens, the teachers, the administrators and the other variously named power brokers of the institution can become “institutionalized.” Sure, Karen Rousseau had been sucked in a long time ago, but the science teacher whose “portable” classroom was next door e-mailed me shortly after the situation was over. BOSON BOOKS
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Rousseau had wanted to come to observe her son in his class, since he had given the son an F, under the guise of invoking her rights in the system. Mostly these observations by parents are stilted, phony, and useless, like the law in physics that states that once anything is observed it is tainted. Of course the kid will not misbehave in front of his parents. He e-mailed me back, saying the father was coming: “I hate that he said. The father won’t listen to me. The mother is in the system at least and she knows how things work.” Right there—and I could not have stated it better myself—is the tacit compliance members of an institution have with each other: We’ll play this antagonism game; we’ll even insult and play rough; but we will never ruin the structure of what supports us. That is how this teacher and this Staffing Specialist, and secondarily a mother, “knew” each other. In fact, that is how we all know each other. Welcome to the House of Love, Winston Westrum.
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Chapter 4 WHAT IF THERE WERE NO SPECTRUM? THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE SYSTEM “… the Caste System. Constantly proposed, constantly rejected. There was something called Democracy. As though men were more than physico-chemically equal.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World There was a town that used to be the jewel of what was called in New York City the Jewish Alps. It was a place where horses raced at the track every season; a place of grand hotels with golf courses cut into the sides of hills; a place where the summer sun turned the flanks of mountains green; a place where light washed over the yards where bungalow colonies were rented out, left cooled and were covered in dew in the evenings. It was a place where the young comedians like Jackie Mason, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce and even the older kings of comedy like Milton Berle went each summer to play the dinner theaters of the big hotels for every family that fit in a truckster and headed west on Route 17 into the mountains. It was, though, a town without industry, and, when the new-fangled airplanes started taking families on the cheap to places like Miami, Bermuda and Fort Lauderdale, the comics started playing South Beach instead of in those hills. Then, the crowds that had burgeoned every season for those hotels, those bungalow colonies and camps stopped showing up and that town without industry was left out of work, out of a whole season. The winters seemed as long and as gray as the old steel of nails; the track where the horses ran was coated in half-thawed snow and stained white with salt that was supposed to cut through the snow and ice. The Chinese restaurant that proffered cocktails and a happy hour had no one there to celebrate the end of a work week: There was no work; there was no “week”; there was no weekly check to cash. There was no sense of time, or maybe it was that time had stopped somewhere in the past, before everyone had to hustle for a living. Everywhere were ghosts of something that had happened in the past: faded laughter in the grand ballrooms, boarded up hotels, bungalows insulated from the cold and sold to full-time residents, old autographs on black-and-white photos hanging on the wall of a diner— remnants of times when things were good. According to the teachers I met and spoke to while I was there, the schools failed without industry as well. At one time there was a nationally ranked debate and rhetoric team that traveled the country, competing and winning debates. Also, there used to be a huge Advanced Placement program for all of the subjects there, but; as one teacher, put it, “We just got fewer and fewer kids each year,” until finally that disappeared as well. And what appeared to fill that void was a different element from the city some 60 miles east on Route 17. No more were there diamond merchants with their debutante daughters, or garment district magnates looking for a few weeks of kicks. These people BOSON BOOKS
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awoke early on cold mornings in trailers with cold tin walls, or their feet fell onto the chilly floors of what used to be summer bungalows. Most of them tried not to wake their parents or had no parents at home when they woke, or their parents were still up from the night before. They all seemed to be wearing clothes they’d borrowed from a pile on someone else’s floor; pants that were too long; coats that didn’t hug them on cold mornings; shirts with worn, stretched out necks; sneakers cracked and worn at the heel. Every one of those cold mornings that I was there, the yellow school buses would roll in topped with white mounds of snow and line up in front of the school before the sun had even gotten up over the last ridges of the Catskills. All the motley students were funneled into the school through a barricade of teachers and School Resource Officers, also known as “Po-po”, “5-0”, “Charlie” or “Snoopy” since they were all white. “We try to identify the ones who are going to have problems before they even got into the building,” one assistant principal said. He was a nice guy, skinny, with white hair, who always finished his talk with a pat on the shoulder. “We also try to identify anyone who has anything like a weapon or that could be used as a weapon. Then, of course, we have rumors and gossip that we gather everyday. We take them down for questioning right away.” So, before the day even starts, the pat-down begins. These kinds of measures are almost uniform now in most schools, since massacres such as Columbine have happened, not to mention more microscopic versions of violence occurring each day. For instance, at this one school that was clinging to its reputation from back in the 1970’s as a beacon school, a student armed with six daggers attacked another student in front of the guidance office. He had secured three daggers on each side of his chest, he said, like his favorite cartoon character, a ninja-type figure. This would, he confessed, allow him to attack with both hands and to re-arm when necessary. I ended up at that school for what is called in some districts Superintendent’s Conference Day. This is where hundreds of teachers are herded into a theater or a cafeteria and shown videos or forced to listen to and applaud for board members, administrators or anyone else who has some “important information.” One time, we were shown a video that went like this: Shot: A typical high school student in jeans, t-shirt with athletic logo, sneakers and winter parka V.O. This is just another day at school for Johnny, right? . . . Wrong.
This is quite a different type of day for Johnny . . . and it could very well be his last, as well as that for others, unless you can detect the signs of potential violence and dangerous situations in your school. BOSON BOOKS
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Scene: DANGER IN YOUR SCHOOLS—HOW TO AVOID IT appears on the screen
Scene: Johnny is now seen walking off of his yellow school bus with a noticeable limp.
A wary teacher notices this limp and notifies a School Resource Officer
V.O. It seems like everything is normal with Johnny this morning, but is it? No and this cautious teacher notices something suspicious, a definite limp Johnny did not have yesterday but she does not confront this potentially dangerous situation. She simply notifies a School Resource Officer and has Johnny called down to the office.
Scene: Johnny is standing in a plain white room with a SRO next to him and a table on the other side.
V.O. You might be surprised how many ways weapons can be smuggled into your school.
(Johnny pulls out a long rifle from the leg of his pants.)
See? That limp Johnny had was no sports injury. It was a hunting rifle.
(Johnny pulls a pistol from the inside of his jacket.)
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Well, looks like Johnny was prepared for school today. That was no itch Johnny had in his armpit. It was a 9MM pistol.
(Johnny unbuckles his belt and twists off the buckle—a push dagger is evident.)
V.O. Even a simple belt can conceal a dangerous weapon.
Cut to a tie held by two hands. One hand pulls a knitting needle from the back of the tie and wraps a fist around it, making a stabbing motion.
V.O. Yes, even picture day can have its share of danger. And the video went on like that for 45 minutes, at least. Most people fell asleep, but I was laughing too hard to fall asleep. I was not laughing quite so hard, however, when the principal of that high school in that small town in the hills took me into his office and said, “Come around here. I want to show you something.” He pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk and said sarcastically, “Nice, huh.” In the drawer was an assortment of what passed for weapons. “The real stuff the cops have,” he said, “like the guns and knives and stuff like that.” He had the things that could have been used as weapons, but these things could not be proven as weapons until they were used: pieces of metal sharpened in shop class, wrapped with tape at one end for a handle; screwdrivers with beveled edges; sawed off baseball bats from the gym; bags full of ball bearings and broken sticks sharpened by boot knives. There were other items for recreation and leisure: pot pipes, E-Z wider rolling papers, lighters, glass pipes with black resin on them from smoking crack, small scales to which baggies can be clipped in order to be weighed and sold at a profit. Then, of course, there was a box cutter. The principal took it out and said, “These are popular now. You can get them for .75 cents a piece.” He took out a stack of straight razors, the kind my grandfather used to shave. “The black kids put them in their Afros so when they get into a fight and someone tries to grab their hair, they get all cut up.” He was proud that he had seized this stuff before it was ever used.
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The classroom I had at this particular school was the smallest I can remember in all my time of teaching, 12 feet by 20 feet at most, packed with 25 student desks, 5 shy if no one skipped, two teacher desks and a pretty good computer. There was a large sticker that said “Emergency Exit Only” over the window, which had been covered up completely by plywood with the ragged edges of a clear tarp, which was supposed to keep the room dry. Aside from the one door, there was no exit and the students knew it. “We all gonna die if they a fire,” one less-than-articulate student said. The time schedule was what was called a “modified block schedule,” an idea in which some educational genius decided that students need to be in class for longer periods of time. I have always wanted to meet that genius and personally ask him if he had ever taught ninth grade, and if he had, did he do it in a place that always felt like winter, where the children arm themselves like inmates and there is no emergency exit…or any way out. The first day I was there, I was exhausted and unprepared. The coordinator of Language Arts had called me the night before and asked me if I could start the next day instead of the next week. “Why not?” I said; I was supposed to start my course toward a PhD that spring and they needed a substitute to get them through to the New Year. I had decided that teaching high school was not for me, that I wanted to teach college. Monticello was supposed to be a temporary thing. I got the grade book and looked at the grades: out of almost 150 students, 4 were passing. The red chevrons she made for absent students in her role book looked like bleeding wounds on the pale green paper. On the second day, there was a two-hour delay, but it was still cold and gray. A girl who had grown just past my waist in height walked up to me and smiled. She had a mop of ungroomed blonde hair and was wearing a Garth Brooks concert t-shirt with a neck stretched out so far I could see one shoulder and the strap of a bra. “Wanna see something?” she asked, holding something behind her back. I hesitated for a moment, and then I thought, “Why not? “Sure,” I said, “let me see.” “See?” she said and she held a picture of a baby with deep brown skin and a cloud of coiled brown hair. “Oh,” I said, trying sound surprised, “beautiful baby. Who’s that? Your cousin? Your sister?” “No,” she said and she smiled. “Your niece?” “No.”
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“Okay,” I said, “Who then?” “That’s my baby,” she said and she went back to her seat in the corner. Did I mention this was ninth grade? No wonder no one did any homework around here. A few days after that, I saw one of the greatest spectacles I have ever seen in my brief career as a high school teacher. Let me explain: the average high school usually claims that teachers do not notify them about assignments, tests, essays and even detentions. They always seem shocked with that “Who me?” look accented by a hangdog look. Yet, when it comes to things such as a homecoming dance, who slept with whom on prom night, who might be pregnant, who finally graduated from pot to coke, what teacher is a “perv,” they have a memory that runs deep and wide. And when it comes to the Holy Grail of all high school rumors, The Fight, there is more than just individual attention; there is a whole network that mobilizes. There is always a meeting of lieutenants: “Why your girl gotta talk all that shit about Charity?” “Why she gotta talk all that mess about my girl?” “All right, then, right after fifth period, by English.” Then, the communication network is electrified like a human organism, like the cold thrill of fear that runs down one’s back on a roller coaster ride or when one’s car screeches to a halt in traffic. Word spreads on loose-leaf notes passed from hand to hand while the teachers write notes on the board; whispered in ears as quizzes are being passed out: “Right after fifth, by that new teacher’s room.” In the cafeteria, word spreads over the portion trays and the gray hot dogs boiled in cafeteria vats and sauerkraut cooked to transparency. The population was thrilled; something was actually happening in their world, a ray of light cracking those dark mountain skies, a fight where a decision would finally be made: there would be a loser to scapegoat and victor to champion. Young men threw punches at the air, made wrestling moves on phantoms. They sped and hung on each other’s shoulders. By the time the bell rang at the end of lunch the buzz was audible; the energy tickled the beast. Of course, I hadn’t heard a thing. I missed every cue. I went on through fifth period teaching The Miracle Worker (I swear) talking about a blind and deaf girl who could have sensed more than I did that day. We read an account of a girl who had been locked in an attic from the moment she was born. For this girl there was only darkness, a hard, wooden floor, a sloped roof and no window. The only light was the occasional beam when the mother shoved scraps of food through a hatch in the floor. They found the girl, according to the account, but all those years of living in a world without light, with only four walls and left over food had limited her. She only spoke in grunts and she could only BOSON BOOKS
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think in terms of needs. She did not know how to be held, so she would never know affection; did not know light so she would never know summer, the relief the shade of a tree could give or any sort of warmth. We finished a few minutes early so, Charity, one of the cutest ninth graders I ever had came up to talk to me. She was all of four feet and eight or nine inches with big wide glasses and straight blonde hair always pulled back. She looked like a cartoon sketch of a ninth grader with her stick limbs and waif-like torso. She was 65 pounds soaking wet. She looked at me and smiled. “What’s going on today, Charity?” She smiled and chomped on her gum. “What’s behind that smile?” I asked. “See that bitch out there,” she said pointing toward the door. It was hard to tell whom she meant. The hallway outside was packed. If I opened the door the force would push them into the vacuum of that classroom. “Who . . . I mean, don’t say that. Watch your language.” “That bitch. I’m gonna kick her ass.” The bell rang and the door sprung open, leading to a wall of people into which the students, including Charity, were consumed. Another one lost in an angry mass. The administrators came with their radios in their hands to sort out the mess. They pushed through the crowd and grabbed the two girls, who clutched onto each other’s clothes and pawed at each other’s faces. As they were pulled away, the two girls pointed at each other and swore they would get each other some other time. The crowd booed loudly and the teachers and administrators started yelling over the din of discontent, “Alright, everyone get to class. Let’s go. Back to class!” There was no fight then and there. There probably was a fight some time later, somewhere else. Unfortunately for the crowd that had gathered, there was no loser and no champion. Everyone was deflated, limping away from the scene, unsatisfied; with the urge still lingering in him or her. Until this day if anyone were to ask me the best all around teaching experience I ever had, I would have to say it was still Monticello but I don’t know why. I had to leave, and to drop my plans of going to graduate school when I heard my wife was pregnant. While talking to the principal at a school closer to home, he asked, “Why do you think there’s so much violence there?” “Because there’s nothing else to satisfy them, really. They may as well be tucked away in an attic somewhere,” I answered. “Everyone has to prove himself somehow. Everyone needs to be known somehow.” What I did not tell him is that the violence was built right into the system. I failed to tell him that even the most rational structures and institutions, even a school, is supported by irrational impulses, and that those impulses need, for an institution to be sound and effective, to be nurtured and vented in the proper ways. These irrational and violent forces that are within in each individual can be very useful in BOSON BOOKS
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creating a sense of pride for a school, or patriotism for a country. Certainly there would be no sense of institutional unity without a sense of being opposed by an-other. Thus, this irrational violence is a necessary by-product of the institutionalization process. Every inmate or student wants to be recognized, and, within the terms and confines of a given institution, one can only be recognized by achievements, usually in the name of that structure—even if it is “kicking some bitches ass.”
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Chapter 5 DIFFERENT SHADES OF THE SPECTRUM: TIMMY AND LYLE “…you couldn’t have lower caste people wasting the Community’s time over books, and that there was always the risk of their reading something which might undesirably decondition one of their reflexes.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World I was never told about the first “mainstream class” I ever had. A whole roster full of 30 students showed up. So did a tall Hispanic lady who was eating a buttery bagel, the butter glistening on her lips, holding bagel crumbs in place as she said, “No, dis ees my class, look,” and she held up a schedule with oily fingerprints all over it. She did not last too long, though. She was too interested in buying food for the students and making sure everyone got butter all over the worksheets. A lady who was five months pregnant replaced her. By three months into her stay with us, this pregnant lady came into class one day and asked if it was okay if she had to leave quickly—her bladder was very weak at this point. “Sure,” I told her; “take your time, really.” The next year, I had a guy who weighed 400 pounds who used to have nosebleeds every night because he hated his job so much. After that, I had a Lebanese lady who started teaching after her husband—through an arranged marriage—died. Cathy Puddles (from the Westrum incident) stuck around for half a year. She was the last inclusion teacher I ever had. I was not sure if the students or I were running these teachers off, but I could tell that the shelf life for this type of educator was not very long. I stopped getting inclusion teachers, honestly, because there simply were not enough. I was told there was only a certain number of dollars and they had to be focused on reading initiatives, technology initiatives, learning strategy seminars, et cetera. So I ended up alone, without any back up in some classes that seemed filled with creatures from a Fellini film. So, the last—most absurd—“inclusion experience” of them all will be simply entitled The 5th Period Project. For this project, I had no safeguards, no buffer, no reinforcements save an intercom telephone and a cadre of three SRO officers who, in a moment’s notice, could haul out to the “village” (a series of 31 “portable” trailers) in their golf carts. (Why 31 trailers and not one building you ask? This is so because the educational charter of this state—which will remain nameless for now—states that building funds will not be appropriated for buildings based on anticipated numbers, only actual numbers. Our school was a popular one, however, so our numbers swelled every year and so did the number of our “portables.”) The bottom line was that I was in a trailer—a double wide at that—a good acre from central administration; even by means of a speeding SRO’s golf cart a ten BOSON BOOKS
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minute ride, with a desperate lot of the lowest achievers the school could muster: 50% classified as SLD (Specific Learning Disabilities), Emotionally Handicapped (those who can not empathize with others), ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) or ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder); the rest had all garnered 1s and 2s on a scale of 5 on the standardized state assessment in reading. Most of them were in a program that was like the farm club for the local juvenile detention center called Dropout Prevention. For instance, there was Lenny Dionne, who at 14 looked like a Hawaiian tikki doll, 5 foot 5, and an easy 300 pounds with a puff of wild Samoan hair on his head. His head seemed to comprise half the length of his stout, shall we say, figure. Lenny had a complex about eating in the lunchroom so he wanted to eat in my trailer. I, on the other hand, just wanted quiet. So, instead of going to the lunchroom, he would stand on the wheelchair ramp of the trailer eating his lukewarm fast food, occasionally pressing the moon pie of his face against the glass. “I’m not in your trailer, though,” he would always say. “You can’t make me go away.” Cathy Puddles, his caseworker at this point, had to include some behavioral objectives for him. One of which was to eat in the lunchroom for a certain percentage of the time he was in school. His social habits had to be monitored closely. Next to him was Albert Nether, whose claim to fame, aside from reveling in the fact that he was annoying, was that he was extremely double-jointed. No one ever told me how to deal with this one in teacher’s school: I’d be talking about adverbs or gerunds or run-ons and I would turn around to see him—sans sneakers—with his leg cocked behind his head. “Albert . . . get your . . . stop doing . . . I mean . . . oh . . . darn it, put your shoes on and get your leg from behind your head.” I once got an e-mail from his guidance counselor—on behalf of a request from the father—that Albert be allowed to use silly putty in class because it would keep him on-task. I did not respond to that e-mail. I clicked and dragged it into the cyber trashcan. There were, obviously, many others, but of all those lights shining ever so dim, two of the dimmest, if you will, were Timmy and Lyle. Lyle was almost six feet tall, but he was so thin it was as if he could never hold any weight; and, in a state filled with sun, sand, water and beaches, he held no color in his skin; and though there must have been eyes to see, they were not visible behind his heavy lids. I always wondered what kinds of homes these kids come from, where no one notices the stupor their kids are in for days on end. What are the parents doing who cannot notice a kid who is almost a man with nothing that animates him? Well, my introduction to his parents came shortly after Lyle, in order to avoid a homework check, took a pair of safety scissors and cut his forearm. He came up and said he had a cut and needed to go to the clinic. Instantly, I thought about how much he must have wanted to cut himself. Those dull scissors barely cut construction paper, and here he was sawing away at his own limb. “It’s not even bleeding,” I said. “Sit down. I’ll be over to check your homework in a minute.”
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A few seconds later, he came up and said, “Look, it’s bleeding.” Apparently, he had gone to work on it while I was checking homework. I sent him to the clinic. The next morning, I got the first e-mail of many that involved me in this drama they called a family. I threw it in the cyber trash but I should have kept it. Basically, the mother said that she believed me when I said it was his responsibility. (Oh, thank you, I thought. Thank you for believing me.) The mother went on to write that his father (actually his step-father as it turns out) had believed Lyle when he said it was just an accident. The mother also said she believed Lyle when he said he did not know they were that sharp. I wrote back saying that I thought I could trust ninth-grade students with scissors, but that I was now proven wrong. I finished by saying that I would do my best to keep Lyle away from such hazards as scissors in the future. The incident, at the request of the Exceptional Education Department, had been formally documented for legal purposes. I told her that we could look forward to a much more productive year after this incident. My only question, to which I never received a response, was, “Why was he testing how sharp scissors were on his own flesh?” I received a fairly innocuous e-mail after that:
Hello to you all! I just wanted to check in to see how Lyle is doing at this point. I went onto The GradeConnect web site and checked on his grades, but it didn't give a percentage grade for each class. It appears that he is not doing very well in the main subject classes again, but when I ask him about it, he tells me he's doing better He even showed me a homework pass for Earth / Space Science class last night. I've seen one progress report so far for Algebra. He rarely brings home any homework. l ask him about it and he tells me that he gets it done at school? He has been told that if his grades do not improve by next report card that certain things will be taken from him and he'll have to earn them back by improving in school. Mr. Fowls suggested this to us at the parent teacher meeting, so we'll give it a try. I don't know what else to do to get Lyle to do his work. Please let me know via e-mail what Lyle's current grades are. I know that the grading period ends on October 29th, so he's getting down to the wire. Thank you,
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The parents, having thrown their hands in the air, began the typical process of turning to others to find a solution. The first step is always the negotiation process, or parent meeting. Here “objectives” are set (as if the class does not have any), plans are created (as if the teachers and schools and states do not have any plans for student achievement), and, almost universally, the teachers and administrators are coerced into some compromise. The student who is the cause of the meeting and the parents who created the child, both biologically and sociologically, were only asked to compromise in extreme cases. Then, there is recourse to psychological and medical resources. (Americans love to find fault with disorders instead of themselves.) After all, it is easier to say you were born this way than to acknowledge your own guilt. So, after the “scissors incident,” the doctors upped the dosage on Lyle’s medication because they feared it was wearing off before the day ended. There were some days his head swirled in slow orbits, reeling in some medicinal haze; learning nothing but not cutting his flesh. Which was better? The real trouble did not start, though, until Lyle decided he wanted to dye his hair black, get a tattoo and to stop taking his medicine. That is when the e-mails started again:
Hello: My husband and I wanted to let you all know that we've been noticing a change in Lyle the past 9 days. As you know, he got his hair colored black without our permission. He used birthday money do pay for it. He also carved words into his upper left arm at an attempt to tattoo himself, because we wouldn't give him permission to get a real tattoo. Today, after I drove him to school, I went back home and began searching his room. I found a sandwich bag with some of his medicine in it. It appears that instead of swallowing it he is spitting it out and hiding it. I also found something else hidden in his room that concerns us even more, so we've made a doctor's appointment for him today after school for blood work and testing. Mr. Ellerbe, we will be coming to pick Lyle up from school just before the end of the day today to take him to this appointment. He doesn't know that we're coming, because all of this just happened this morning. We will go to the front office and have him called from your class. Hopefully we will get to the bottom of this with the help of the doctors. We've noticed that he still has failing grades in the main subject classes, so we know what to expect on his report card. We have a lot to deal with in regard to
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Lyle, so please be patient while we try to figure out the next step. We'll keep you informed the best we can. Thank you, That following Monday morning at 6:30 in the morning, I got this e-mail from Lyle’s mother: Hello, Lyle called us to pick him up Friday, so there was no need for us to call him out of class. Anyway, we did take him to the doctor. The doctor checked the homemade tattoo to be sure it wasn't infected (it wasn't). We showed him what we found in Lyle's room and he said that it wasn't pot like we were thinking. It's just dried up flowers. When we asked Lyle about it, he said that it's been there for a while and it's just dried up flowers. He really couldn't explain why it was hidden away, other than he did that a while ago and forgot about it. We still asked the doctor to do a urine test to be sure, so they did. We won't get the results until late Monday or Tuesday sometime. As for his medicine, he confessed that he had spit some out to see how he did without it. He said that he didn't do as well at school without it, so he knows he can't spit it out anymore. We will monitor him closer when we give him his medicine for now on. There are other issues going on with Lyle, which involves a girl in two of his classes, so he's distracted by her as well. His psychologist seems to think that the ADHD medicine that Lyle takes in the morning is wearing off before the end of the school day, so he's going to do further testing. Lyle may need to take a higher dose of it in the mornings or take a second dose while he's still at school. I know that the grading period ended on Friday. Will Lyle's report card be mailed to us? We plan on going through with the suggestion that Mr. Fowls gave us back at the parent / teacher conference, which is to take everything out of Lyle’s room except for his bed and clothes if his grades don't improve. We don't know if this will make a difference with Lyle's performance at school, but we're willing to give it a try and hope for the best. Mr. Ellerbe, I will most likely be the one to follow Lyle around to all of his classes as you suggested. I'll have to do it on Friday, because I started a new job as a dental assistant and my hours are M- Thurs, 7:15am to 5:15pm.. I'll still be BOSON BOOKS
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working with my brother on Fridays, but I'll go in late the Friday I'm at school with Lyle. My husband doesn't feel it will make one bit of difference in Lyle's performance, so he's not willing to do it. I'll communicate to you all again when I know the results of the urine test. The observation never happened. The dates could not be arranged. Somehow the parents could not make it. Lyle, for a while, became a more manageable student as the dosages of his medicine were increased, but no more productive. He grew physically taller and leaner, his eyes receding deeper into the shadows of his brow. He dyed his hair every shade of the spectrum, a new color almost every week. His behavior grew more odd, disoriented and ran rampant without compunction. I saw him one day with a friend of his. They both had on plastic gloves and they were holding huge garbage bags as they strolled through the campus picking up garbage. They were doing work detail for stealing an SRO’s golf cart for a joyride. After that, he spent an evening in the county juvenile detention center because he and a friend had skipped their afternoon classes, gone to the middle school and stolen bikes in order to hock for quick cash. He and his friend said it was not that bad in jail. It was actually better than school. You got cookies, and you got to watch movies if you were good. I guess they are ready for the next phase of institutionalization. In fact, right now, three days before summer vacation, his orangedyed head is resting on his lithe arms, sleeping blissfully through his final exam. He learned one thing this year, I guess. Good inmates get good things. Good students get the same, even if their time in school is simply about waiting and doing nothing. Timmy came to my class from another state where he had lived with his grandmother who, according to what he told me one day, was too lazy to get a job, so she collected SSI and the subsidy the state granted her for keeping Timmy. He looked like Alfred E. Newman straight off of the cover of Mad Magazine, though his hair was much shorter and was brown, not quite so red. But he had that large, round face sprinkled with freckles set on top of a frail body that may as well have belonged to a nine year old—70 pounds soaking wet. He always had a vacant smile and dim glare that said, “What? Me worry?” He looked even smaller than his actual frame because he wore all of his clothes two sizes too big, an affectation suburban white kids had caught on to in the early 1980s. It was a fashion of sneakers with no laces because in jail they take away your laces so you cannot commit suicide. They wore baggy pants with the boxers exposed, hanging below the buttocks because in jail they wore their pants like that for easy access to rape or be raped. The shirts were two sizes too big because in the city they would tape pistols to their chests or inherit the shirts from older, bigger brothers and sisters. There was Timmy with his baggy pants, baggy shirt and sneakers flopping around loose. It was cool to be a gangster; it was cool to be in jail; it was even cooler to be just out of jail. It was cool, suddenly, to listen to gangster rap like Niggas With Attitude and Public Enemy who had albums like “America’s Most Wanted,” “Fear of a Black Planet,” and were filled with songs that were entitled “Fuck the Police” and “Burn, Hollywood, Burn.” Everyone suddenly had a gangster stroll that looked like a stiff-kneed limp, whether one was walking out of a tenement subdivision in South Tampa or a 3-million dollar home in White BOSON BOOKS
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Plains, NY. There was a sudden identification with marginalization on the part of white kids everywhere. These white kids were marginalized from real meaning and any opportunity to forge an identity for themselves, so they identified with those others who had been marginalized and the revolutionaries they possessed in their ranks like Malcolm X and Huey Newton. These suburban white kids even paid lip service to the revolution itself, which, for Blacks may have meant a chance at social justice or a sheer expression of rage. For white suburban kids who had nothing but money and security, it was just a way to define an outline of one’s self the way a cop leaves the stiff contour of a dead man on a street after a drive-by shooting. The needs were totally different but the means were exactly the same: justice, fair value, and recognition, attention that must be paid. Then, Timmy stepped out of the crowd and on to the stage of my attention while I was checking homework. (It is always when I am checking homework.) As I was walking up and down the rows to check the work, I saw Timmy—all 70 pounds of him—in his baggy clothes, “gangster strolling” toward a tall black kid who had just transferred into the school. Timmy, to equalize matters of size, held his bike helmet in his hand. “I’m small, I know,” he said later, “but I’m not gonna take any shit.” So, he was going to haul off and hit this black kid, a six-foot tall football player, in order to prove his worth, his credibility in terms of this culture. He had no other choice. Timmy stood with his fist tightening around the strap of his bike helmet, trying to harden his face with a frown. The black kid looked down at Timmy who peaked out at his chest. “What you gonna do?” the black kid asked. “What you gonna do?” Timmy parroted I stood in between the two of them as they challenged each other to do something, both of them looking for a cause to fight, to do something. Each was looking for a catalyst. But, I told them both to go to the front office, one ten minutes after the other so they would not jump each other along the way. Everyone was deflated because there was no fight, no winners, no losers that day, and no violent outburst of recognition for anyone. Though nothing happened, it was a typical confrontation for a generation that had not launched itself into space like my generation or that of my father. It was a generation plugged into cyberspace; one that was enchanted by their perceptions of things like life and death and bloodshed that are taken from ultra-violent video-games where, when one character dies, the player hits restart and life begins again; a generation that held no sanctity for the classroom, teachers, words and books, but whose mantras were pounded into their skulls from portable CD players at top volume from rappers and punk musicians, their only bearers of what they mistake for meaning: “see I’m the type of nigga that’s built to win and if you f*ck with me, you gonna find out where I been/see, I don’t give a fuck cuz I be chillin’/ yo man, why the f*ck are they killin’/ gangsta, gangsta”; a generation that had never settled into a home, a family, an alma mater or One Nation Under God. And there was the symbol of the generation, a peanut-sized kid white kid BOSON BOOKS
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who was the entire Eastern seaboard from where his family had for years called “home.” Where does one go when one is ripped from the earth beneath one’s feet? What does one do? Torn up from the soil of tradition as is most of this generation, he had to make a name, an identity wherever he stood, and there he was standing up to a 6-foot tall black kid who had no home either. The black kid lived with his grandmother, and he had for all 15 years of his life. His mother is only 13 years his senior; and I, standing between them, must have reminded them of the last white guy they saw who was over 30 with gray hair, wearing a tie: a custody hearing master, a judge, a lawyer, a principal or a cop—anyone but a father. Anyway, the black kid kept harassing Timmy to the point where he was put into a disciplinary setting, a part-time jail where they do little more than keep certain kids away from other kids. Timmy escaped his share of the blame, but things did not improve for him. This was the first of a series of e-mails I got concerning him in the months following the incident: Your Observations of Timmy This afternoon Timmy has an intake evaluation for mental health services. I was hoping that I could get your comments in response to my e-mail last week about your observations of Timmy's behaviors and social skills. It would provide valuable information to the psychiatrist and therapist so that we can get him the help he needs. Thank you. I had no interest in supplying my personal, truly subjective, totally inflamed, amateur analysis of a kid who had only one problem: he needed attention. Sure, he was immature, but most ninth graders are. As the e-mails continued to pop up on my account at school, and his “ooh-ooh-oohs” while raising his hand to give answers in class got louder, I knew he was one of a drifting generation. But a different image came to mind this time as I read the e-mails from his stepmother. This generation had a home, but it was as nebulous, as amorphous, as the cyberspace on the Internet they logged onto. There, they were constantly searching for that one new game everyone was talking about, to download that one song out of nowhere no one else had on his MP3 player, to find some new website out there no one else had found, to find that one exit on the “information super highway” that will put a light in their eyes and pass for some sort of meaning that words like, “knowledge,” “truth,” “democracy,” “history,” “allegiance,” and even phrases like “one nation under god” never seemed to import. Timmy was one of the thousands I had seen over eight years who had wandered in between bells that signaled where they should be, with heavy earphones pumping signals into their ear canals, their clothes signifying every fashion from Fubu to Karl Kani to Volcom to every sneaker brand the local mall could hold. Timmy was also typical of this generation because all the attempts at connecting with something greater, something full of meaning, had failed. Nothing was found on the BOSON BOOKS
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Internet. Nothing filled him from cyberspace. None of the status symbols meant anything. Attention was not paid. Then, when each attempt had failed, and his anger raged, he was sent off to a professional, a psychiatrist, a counselor, in order to find out how he could adjust to the institutions of his school and his home, as much of a stranger as he was in each. That is what happened with Timmy: You may very well have problems with Timmy in class today. Please send him to Mrs. Wallace or Mrs. Crays if you need to. We are going though a bit of a crisis with Timmy, and his behaviors are escalating. He doesn't like that he has to follow rules and has expectations. From the moment that he walked in the door from school yesterday, we had problems. As a result, we adjusted his consequences (copy attached for your info) and he got more upset. His father is very, very frustrated and doesn't know what to do with him. Last night Timmy packed his suitcases and, apparently, destroyed his notebooks. He decided that he is going back north today and plans to call the Custody Hearing Master to set everything up. He doesn't understand that he has no control over this. I have left a message for his therapist to see if we can get an emergency session with her today. Thank you. You are wrong lady, was the first thing that I remember thinking. You are wrong, I wanted to tell her because Timmy does know that he has no control over his situation. He knows it all too well. Someone else is his Master, and he has little control over his fate. Every time he moves there are consequences and repercussions, all of which are veiled behind this mask of social adjustment. Everyone claims to want to get to the root of his problems, but the truth is that he has no roots. He is moved from one sort of confinement to the next without any real choice involved. They say he chooses his own actions, but if he does choose from the set of options the school or his parents lay out for him, then he is judged wrong…and the “consequences” are rigid. The attachment the mother sent was 6 pages, a mutually binding agreement of social and financial incentives for Timmy to behave:
Lying, Bad Attitude and Talking Back: For the 24-hour period following anyone of the behaviors listed above, you will: Be grounded to your room, with the exception of using the bathroom, taking a shower, and eating meals.
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Not be allowed to watch any TV. Not be allowed to talk to anyone on the telephone including your Grandmother and Aunt Lorrie. Not be allowed to have any treats. If you have earned allowance as a result of good grades, you will lose your right to cash and it will all go into your savings account. ,"
$34.00 a week as follows: $12.40 deposited into savings account, $21.60 cash
Weekly School Progress Reports You must have your weekly progress report completed, signed and brought home every Friday. Any changes or corrections must be signed by your teacher. If there is a substitute, the substitute MUST sign it. There can be no grade lower than a C for the week in any area. Homework cannot be circled as a problem area. Attitude must be satisfactory or higher. Or, you will be grounded! Consequences will be as follows if you’re in any class is: Below a C (or you don t bring home a completed Progress Report) = .No allowance.. All gift money will be deposited into savings account! Telephone calls will be limited to a total of 30 minutes per day, and you may only speak to your Mom, Grandma, and Aunt Lorrie. No contact with friends. You must raise your grade to at least a C
You may not: BOSON BOOKS
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Watch TV at all Play video games Play with trading cards o Go to Tae Kwon Do Go to the YMCA o Go on bike rides o Have any treats. C= No allowance. to:
All gift money will be deposited into savings account! ./ You will be allowed Talk on the telephone to friends and family for a total of 30 minutes per day.
(If you receive a call from a family member, it will not be added to your 30 minutes. In other words, all calls that you initiate are counted in the 30 minutes, but family calls made to you are not counted.) Allowance = $34.00 a week as follows: $12.40 deposited into savings account, $21.60 cash See friends on the weekends. Watch 30 minutes of TV per day. 0 Have treats at Dad s discretion. B= 50% of Allowance. 50% of gift money will be deposited into savings account! You will be allowed to: Talk on the telephone to friends and family for a total of 30 minutes per day. (If you receive a call from a family member, it will not be added to your 30 minutes. In other words, all calls that you initiate are counted in the 30 minutes, but family calls made to you are not counted.) See friends on the weekends. Watch 30 minutes of television per day. BOSON BOOKS
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Have treats at dad’s discretion. B= 50% allowance 50% of gift money will be deposited into savings account! You will be allowed to: Talk on the telephone to friends and family for a total of 30 minutes per day. (If you receive a call from a family member, it will not be added to your 30 minutes. In other words, all calls that you initiate are counted in the 30 minutes, but family calls made to you are not counted.) See friends on the weekends. Watch 60 minutes of television per day. No more than 30 minutes may be spent playing video games. Have treats at dad’s discretion See friends on the weekends. Have up to 60 minutes of TV time per day. No more than 30 minutes may be spent playing video games. Have treats at Dad s discretion. A= 100% of allowance. 25% of gift money will be deposited into savings account! . You will be allowed to: Talk on the telephone to friends and family for a total of 30 minutes per day. (If you receive a call from a family member, it will not be added to your 30 minutes. In other words, all calls that you initiate are counted in the 30 minutes, but family calls made to you are not counted.) See friends on the weekends. Have up to 60 minutes of TV time per day. No more than 30 minutes may be spent playing video games. Have treats at Dad s discretion. BOSON BOOKS
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Allowance = $34.00 a week as follows: $12.40 deposited into savings account, $21.60 cash
I read the contract and I knew that it was considered “positive discipline”, assertive behavior plans, and good parenting for this day and age. But then I thought of living life in terms of a contract, especially in terms negotiated with parents who are more like lawyers than anything else. I started to picture Timmy in a brave new world. It was a room that had no ceiling. He could look above him as high as he wanted and they told him there was only the sky above to stop him. There were four walls that ran up into the clouds of that sky they said was the only ceiling in his world. And there were windows but one was a television that ran for 60 minutes if he was good or 30 minutes if he was fair. A gray sky appeared on the screen if he had broken some part of the 6-page agreement. There was a computer that poured out into cyberspace like some vortex the scientists speak of taking him to other places; rushing him everywhere in a moment’s time by emails and the click and drag of a mouse. But it could only last 60 minutes at the most. Treats appear on a table when he is good. Other times there are none. The rest of the time I saw Timmy alone, scratching his name on the walls: “Timmy was here,” over and over again. “Timmy was here.” I still could not say I liked him, but I could say that I started to understand him—and Lyle. I guess I started to comprehend the bulk of this drifting generation. In the end, it was a group of kids that had no World Wars, no frontiers like the American West, and no Crusades. So, it became one that would rather square off against an opponent, trembling, with a bike helmet in their hands, who would kill him in a second. It evolved into a group that would rather take a razor blade and etch a design in his arm than to accept some arbitrary ruling of “No, you can’t have a tattoo.” What is the worst thing that could happen? They could bleed. They could end up infected, with broken bones, scarred flesh. They would feel pain and the pain would trigger something inside of them and they would feel alive, recognized by their scabbed scars, their swollen eyes and their bruised ribs. They would be alive, if not in pain. There would be someone always talking about how they got that bruise, that scar, that bandage. The Custody Hearing Masters, the principals, the teachers, the parents could not control that. They could only up the dosage of the medicine and make sure you swallowed it, instead of hiding it beneath your bed. Sure, it all started to make sense. The next morning, I received this e-mail from Timmy’s mother: It has come to our attention that Timmy has been staying after school under the pretense of having work to make up. In fact he is simply wandering around campus seeking attention. Unless he has a specific purpose for being on campus, he is not to be allowed to stay there. BOSON BOOKS
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Thank you. I had never felt so unsure as to what to say, and, for an Irish-Catholic English Major from the Bronx, having nothing to say is anathema. Who was she to tell me what to do? She paid the taxes, I guess. What gave her the gall to tell me what to do? She was under the impression that one institution overlapped with the other. But, it was her son. I was just a teacher damn it, not a psychologist, but then I thought of what a social studies teacher in that little school in the hills once told me: “If you’re not an amateur psychologist, you’re not long for this job.” So, I saved the e-mail; closed the program. I put the arrow on special, clicked and shut it down. I guessed he was right, that social studies teacher up in the hills. I guess so. Then, as I picked up my bag and stepped onto the wheelchair ramp and into the tropical sun, I thought of my favorite play, Death of a Salesman. “Attention must be paid,” Willy Loman’s wife, said to her son, Biff, because her husband had been suffering through a life without hope, without advancement, without any sort of recognition. Willy Loman was no prince as was Hamlet, no king as was Oedipus. Willy was not even a villain like Iago. He was just an average guy who was trying to make it through this life, the kind of guy whom life crushes and splits into shards. He is the guy life leaves muttering on a New York City street—or dying his hair black, or carving tattoos into his flesh, or exploding like Timmy and Lyle. Yes, “Attention must be paid.” We humans all need to be recognized. It is only a matter of degree. The problem is that we are trying to fit into a world where there are no more of the old icons and archetypes to follow; there are no more of the old heroes who endured for hundreds of years. Moreover, the family is gone, along with its support and ability to nurture and protect, for the most part. Add to that the fact that these kids are by and large trained how to socialize, instead of being academically and morally educated, and there is a rash of lost Americans who are looking for the next best thing to pop-up on a computer screen, to latch onto the next fashion that struts across the television. So, when they are told the sky is the limit, they look up and see status symbols and material goods, not Sir Gawain standing before the Green Knight, issuing a challenge to lop off his head. They hear rappers talking about malt liquor, marijuana and big-screen television sets instead of anything else. Blinded by a lack of vision. Muted by the noise of music. Confined by the moment. Violent. Misguided souls. That is what the generation comes down to. BOSON BOOKS
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It was hot that day that I got the last e-mail about Timmy. The dirt paths between portables were dry and dusty. As sunlight broke through the columns of the second floor of building four, I saw Timmy ensconced in light, a silhouette. His expensive sneakers were scuffling against the same dust as mine, and, as the dust rose around him, what struck me was that he was so alone. Worse than that, as the light shone through building four, he was left only a shadow of what I had known to have been a boy, a person. It was all gone. Nothing animated him now.
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Chapter 6 THE DARK SIDE OF THE SPECTRUM: JANELL DIXIE AND THE AMERICAN DREAM “…and so we beat on, boast against the current …” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby Teaching has not always been funny, frustrating or absurd for me. A times, it has been plain sad. Luckily, when I was younger, I had a certain callousness one can only have in youth, I guess—or at least that my youth lent me. All that wore away over the years, though, and now that I think about it, there were some damned sad stories. There was, of course, that special ed. girl who was a little too tall for a thirteen-yearold girl, who had developed physically but not mentally, who had cigarette burns all on the backs of her hands. Some of them were so fresh they still had the white pus filling the bubbles of skin. I noticed them as she reached for a pencil in the middle of the table. There was one kid on an opposing basketball team from a poor, rural area who was incontinent at the age of thirteen. He played point guard and every time he went to cut to the basket, the ref had to blow the whistle, stop play and have the janitor come out to wipe up the feces that fell out of his drawers. I wondered how the kid could stand it. One kid in a huge “inclusion” class I had my second year of teaching had an aide who followed him everywhere. He was a little slow intellectually, and he had a pretty lousy work ethic. Neither of those was the problem, though. The aide went with him from class to class to make sure, basically, that he did not harm himself and while in class that he did not fall into a semi-catatonic stupor. See, the kid had lived in a nice house in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains with his parents and little brother. One day he was playing with matches and the drapes in the living room caught on fire. He got out with minimal damage; his little brother lived too—with third degree burns over most of his body. The family did not have the money to replace some of their belongings. After all, how do you replace First Communion pictures and birthday cards from relatives that are nine years old? Insurance only covers so much. In that same class, there was a big country boy who lived with his brother and his mother in a tin-can trailer. He did little work, had little real interest in school and he only came to school in order to learn how to work on cars. For that reason, he came to class everyday after having auto shop all morning. One day, he stopped coming. No one had heard what happened to him. The Special Education teacher who had him in his caseload and I speculated as to what it could have happened. There were no answers, but we knew it was not good when a kid just stopped showing up. It meant a relapse into drugs, a beating so brutal they can’t show in school, or a crime that went wrong. Not the case for this kid, we all found out what had happened when the newspaper came out on Friday morning. The headline read something about a home ablaze and the picture below showed the young kid and his brother—angry looks on their faces—trudging BOSON BOOKS
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through the charred ruins of their belongings, everything damp from the fire hoses the night before. We never saw that kid again. There were many others, true; but the saddest, perhaps, of them was the story of Janell Dixie, who was in my junior class during my one year at Thomas Paine Senior High School. She was about to hit the mandatory graduation age for New York, age 21, when I had her in junior English. She was also taking senior English, along with all of her other core courses for both years. The thing was that she did not look any older than most of the seventeen and eighteen year olds around her. There was a sadness in her eyes, a forlorn quality I’ve only seen in women now that I am much older—a weariness that this life can only give you in time; something most of us don’t have when we’re young. They were the eyes of a wounded doe. Her skin was almost as brown as buckskin, too. It was soft, unblemished. She had high Mayan cheekbones and full pink lips. For the first few weeks, she was there dutifully each day with her notebook, her pens and the book we were reading and discussing in class, The Old man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway. It was first period and as I read passages of the old man, Santiago, struggling against the ropes that held in the fish of his dreams, how his back was lashed and how he told himself that he had to be better, stronger, her doe eyes would flutter to fight off falling asleep. But she always fought it off and I would start to talk about the Code Hero, about Hemingway’s idea of grace under pressure; how a person really did not know who he or she was, in the essence, until he or she had been in war, lost a love, faced death or been destroyed in some way—only to recover, or not. I would always tell the story of how, when I was twenty-four, I decided to try to be a hero, in an age when no one cared about being a hero. I had been without the woman I ended up marrying for about two years. She had moved away for some “time and space”, which turned into almost three years of her living and working in Ohio. Anyway, I get this romantic notion one afternoon to hop in my jeep and drive through Pennsylvania to Columbus, Ohio. When I get there, the romance had worn off, I told the students. I was beat; my eyes were bloodshot, my teeth were mossy from coffee and NoDoz, my skin was stale with sweat. I showed up at her door and what I expected and what happened could not have been more different. I expected, I told them, that she would see the romance of what I had done and she would invite me in and we would make up and live happily ever after. Reality, though, I was always sure to point out, is not romantic. Life has its winners and its losers, I instructed, and it has its own justice. It turns out she had a date that night—and had for some time—with a guy who posed for calendars in loincloths. She told me it was only a matter of time; to hang in there; that things would work out; that she needed time and space; but that he was coming back form a shoot in Florida and would be home any time, so I had to go. I was in Ohio an hour, maybe two, before I turned around and left. That’s grace under pressure, as I thought Hemingway had defined it, or so I was proud enough to tell them.
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I forgot one simple thing, though. I was at least ten years older than the average kid in that class, but I was only seven years older than Janell. And, as I found out through memos from the guidance department and through the rumors coming from her other English teacher, she had lived in New Jersey, Texas, Florida and then New York (two more states than I). She had married a military man that had moved her from base to base and they had a child together. (I had been married a few months and it would be two years before I heard that I would be father.) She had split from her husband a couple of times, only to get back with him because of the kid, and now she was determined to get her degree before she turned twenty one and the state of New York relegated her to night school. (I had never held my own child, with fever or running nose, with or without a spouse, with or without money, in any state of this union.) And here I was telling her all about “grace under pressure.” Janell did well the first ten-week marking period. I think she got a B and showed up just about every day. Then she turned into one of those who just didn’t show up anymore. There were signs with her at least. Her attendance became more sporadic; she had guilt in her eyes when she showed up late, just out of bed, her books piled in her hands. The absences became longer; she kept showing up later. She seemed more frayed each day; more nervous, but worn down. Dark circles formed under her eyes and that buck-colored skin started to fade and lose its hue. Then she was gone. I figured her husband had gotten a transfer and they had to move again, or that the schedule of being a mother and a student was just too much. Either way, I figure things just didn’t work out. At least that’s what I always told myself in those situations, but I should have known better, having seen the cigarette burns on the hands of kids, kids with black eyes, kids with pregnant bellies, kids with police ankle bracelets on the whole variety of neglect. It was easier to tell myself that. But reality, as I told my students but never myself, is not that easy, not that romantic, and one day I found out what was real. I was sitting at the table at the center of the English department on my free period when Becky Nagar sat down across from me. “I hear you have Janell Dixon?” “Yes,” I said. “Had anyway.” “Oh,” she said and looked over her shoulder and leaned over the table, “then you know?” “Know what?” I asked, looking down at the essays I was grading on Hemingway’s Code Hero. “Why she’s not in school,” Becky said. “Someone did tell you, right?” “No,” I said, “I haven’t heard a thing.” “Oh God,” Becky started, “it’s just horrible. Well, you know she has the kid, right?” I nodded.
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“And her husband is in the army, you know?” I nodded again, hoping she would get to the point soon. “Well,” she lowered her voice, “I guess she’s left him before for, you know, being really violent.” I put my papers down. Violence always bothered me. It made me want to hurt somebody. I could feel myself getting angry. “What do you mean? He beat her up or something?” “Yeah,” she said and then shook her head, “but that’s not the worst of it. He raped her, too.” “What do you mean he raped her?” They were married. I didn’t get it. I mean I could get it if he was too rough while something was going on, but that term? “In the butt,” she said and she pointed to her posterior. “That’s what he did.” His own wife, I thought. I tried to picture it. I tried to think of how the fight happens. I imagined it in the living room with second-hand furniture; they were fighting; even yelling in Spanish; he hit her; but she had been hit before. I tried to think of what kind of hate he must have—but I couldn’t articulate anything about the images in my head, and all I could think to say was, “She won’t make it, I guess?” Becky shook her head and went back to grading her papers. *** About a week later, the guidance department was looking for a homebound tutor to teach Janell at home. She qualified for this accommodation because she had been hospitalized after her ordeal and still hadn’t fully recovered. I had no idea what they meant by “fully recovered.” But I just felt like helping. I was supposed to go there on Wednesday afternoons right after school to help her with both of her English courses; another tutor took on Social Studies. I went there and knocked on the door. She opened the door just a crack and then saw it was me and stepped into the darkness behind the door as I walked in. The place was almost as I had pictured it. The furniture was borrowed and worn; the carpets were flat; the walls were scuffed; there was the odor of a litter box in the whole place but she wouldn’t open the windows. The baby was sleeping so we had to be very quiet. She walked over and gingerly shut the door of the baby’s room. The only light in the whole place was a shaft of light that came in from the kitchen window. Otherwise, it was dark. “How’ve you been?” I asked and then felt pretty stupid.
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“Fine,” she said and then she turned the left side of her face further away from me. “Thank you for coming.” “No sweat,” I told her. “They do pay me for this, you know?” She almost smiled, but as her cheeks began to crease, she stopped and turned toward the darkness again. “Well,” I said, feeling totally uncomfortable, “this first session, all I really wanted to do was to drop off your books so you could get started. There are study guides and question in there, too. Maybe we could go over the first three chapters next Wednesday?” “Okay,” she said, but her voice sounded hollow and tinny, almost distant, as if that day didn’t matter. “What book is it anyway?” “The Great Gatsby,” I told her. “What’s it about?” she asked, looking at the cover, a night sky filled with fireworks; darkness filled with explosions. “The American Dream,” I said. And then I looked at her. Her face scanned the cover of the book. These were the books she wanted to read; those books that everyone said mattered, and here they were all about the American Dream, heroes with grace under pressure, gardens full of rich people, old men named after saints. I knew she would never get past the cover, and I think she thought the same thing. “So,” I began hesitantly, “next Wednesday, then? First three chapters?” “Okay,” she said. “Call me at the school if you have any questions, okay?” “Okay,” she said, but I knew somehow that I would not hear from her. There would be no questions, and she would not read about the American Dream. Anyone could see none of that mattered anymore. Something inside of her was trying to survive—plain and simple. She had a baby to worry about above all else. There was no time for dreams about gardens and rich people from seventy years before. I turned to walk toward the door and she stepped out of the darkness to lock the door behind me. I stopped to check for my keys and turned back toward her and I saw why she kept to the darkness, why there was only one window open and why the door had to be locked when I left. Her left eye was still pinched shut with a bruise and the high Mayan cheekbone had a purple bump on it where her husband’s fist must have landed, at least once. “Oh,” I said as I fumbled in my coat pocket and looked down to the worn carpet. I found my keys and then said, absently, “Sorry.”
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“For what?” she said. “You didn’t do anything, right?” She was right. I didn’t do anything. No one had done anything, except lie to ourselves every time a student disappeared; we lied and told ourselves it was the truth because it was easy for us. We pretended it wasn’t real, and we pretended to have really romantic ideals about people who get beaten and raped, especially since we’re not the people who don’t get beaten and raped. So, we do nothing, because doing nothing causes no reaction, I guess, and we’re one day closer to retirement. And she was right again, because she probably didn’t do anything either, not to deserve what happened to her. Yet it happened. Sure, I told myself just as I had told my students so many times, life has its winners and its losers, but it wasn’t enough this time. That ideal just didn’t work. I felt too old for it or something, or as if something else had been beaten and destroyed when I saw Janell that day—something I used to call my Code.
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Chapter 7 UNDER THE RAINBOW: BALLOONS, BEEPERS AND BEATINGS IN THE HIGH SCHOOL CAFETERIA “He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had food always tasted like this? He looked around the canteen. A low ceiling, crowded room, its wall grimy from contact of innumerable bodies. Battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching …” George Orwell, 1984 I Every prison movie has a few key elements. There’s the guy who’s been sentenced to jail for some reason—usually unjust—so we have sympathy for him; our protagonist. Then, there’s the quirky little friend with the inside track on everything from bubblegum to how to get the good jobs in the Big House. There are the sneering, snorting guards that are called Bulls. Of course, no jail movie would be complete without the cafeteria scene. In this scene, the new guy walks away from the food line with all eyes on him, everyone waiting to see his first, decisive move. The Bad Guy tracks him as the New Guy looks for his niche among the inmates. The guards patrol on the catwalks above with carbines and batons. The audience has to wonder what he’s going to do. Will he sit in the wrong seat and draw the rage of the Bad Guy and his crew? Will he back down in front of the whole cafeteria and be called a Punk for the rest of his time in the joint? Or will he pull one of those really slick moves where he whacks the guy in the face with his metal tray and then knees him in the groin as a crowd circles around them, the Bulls clambering down the catwalks and pushing through the crowd to break up the fight. The crowd takes sides and cheers. Bets are placed. Something interesting and meaningful has happened in the dull routine of their lives. Suddenly, there is no more order; there will be a winner and a loser; an instantaneous justice, if their man wins. Yet, win or lose, no matter which side is chosen, they’re still in jail and the guys who fight have to spend time in The Hole for what they’ve done and sweat it out in solitary confinement. That’s the way institutions work: they create stressful orders and identities in inmates who are dependent on that order; then, when one violently defends that sense of self, that one is out of line and must be punished. The institution would almost perish without the occasional test of the order and the authorities that maintain it. It’s like that occasional brush fire that razes a forest, only to clear the land for new shrubs: a replenishment of the way of things. All of this is true for the typical public high school cafeteria as well, with few notable exceptions. In fact, the regimentation of high school cafeterias is even more arbitrary, more superficial and more socially regulated and fostered since it is all in the name of “education”, “progress”, “democracy” and “growth.” At least in the Northeast, most high schools are like warehouses or factories, built in that mid-twentieth-century style that reflected the places where the kids would work after they had been institutionalized in high school. The cafeterias usually have long row benches attached to tables that fold out BOSON BOOKS
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from the wall; they’re usually some industrial gray or white color. The walls are almost inevitably cinder block painted over a thousand times, sometimes with a mural of the school mascot or paintings by the art majors. In the cold months the walls harden and chill; in the hot months they sweat with humidity as the kids swarm in and swelter in the concrete room, eating chicken nuggets and tater tots, pizza squares or soupy tacos off of plastic partition trays. After some jockeying in the first few days, the seating arrangements are set except for the sporadic break up of a couple or a move in social group—like one going from the Jocks to the Stoners, or from the Preps to the Punks. These are rare and often ill advised; after all, as in jail, one has only one’s credibility, one’s identity as a shield, and a move from one social identity to another can be tenuous. One’s “place” is physical, sure, but it is also abstract in this sense. If one take’s another’s seat, one may as well have pissed on another’s shoes and told that person it was raining. In short, such things are not taken lightly. The teachers who are assigned to be Bulls for cafeteria duty are either rookies who do not know any better and/or have no say in the assignment, or they are older teachers who are getting a subtle hint as to their stature in the eyes of those who create the assignment schedule: the wardens, also known as the principals. Moreover, these teachers who have this assignment are guards of an impossible situation. Normally, they are numbered by at least 50 to 1, and I, personally, have been outnumbered by as much as 100 to 1 (that’s not including the auxiliary forces of the cooks and lunch line staff, of course). In jail or in high school, conflicts from the outside are dragged inside. The cafeteria presents enough in the way of cover in the crowd to start a fight, to confront the guy who hit on your girlfriend, to insult the Punk who stepped on your new Bally shoes or to get back at that “dude who was talking shit third period.” Any affront to the social character of an individual can be addressed and corrected in the lunchroom, in or out of jail. *** I had seen all of this jail-like action more than once, but the first time I ever saw it in the cafeteria proper was in a school called Thomas Payne Senior High School, established right around the time Richard Nixon was proclaiming he was not a crook and America was beginning to wonder if the Vietnam War would ever end. It was a particularly dull and drab high school. The school colors were blue and gray and their mascot was a Patriot, of course. I think every school in that state was named after an Indian tribe or a patriot from the Revolution. And, like all the high schools in the county, it was built adjacent to an IBM, and almost purposefully with the same design: square red brick with dull, dark halls that led to little segmented work spaces where the time was controlled by bells and breaks. Above the school ran thick powerlines held up by steel towers. It might be my imagination but I can number the sunny days of that year on one hand. I was a rookie there, so I got cafeteria duty. Since I was a male, though, and an exrugby player, I got a special warden duty; I used to take the Internal Suspension kids from their isolation room to the mainstream population for lunch every day, where, although BOSON BOOKS
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they were in the mainstream, they had to sit at one table and eat among themselves. We had our own table and the seating arrangements around us settled quickly. In fact, it got to the point where I could predict who would be sitting where and when. Given a day of the week, I could predict what would be on their trays. Though dull and monotonous, this routine provided no sort of challenge—until the day the Indian girl decided to switch groups and sit with her new friends. There was a group of Hispanic girls and a few boys who sat in the table parallel to that of my inmates. They were boisterous, and even tried to sneak out for cigarettes behind the school whenever possible, but they were mostly all bluff and I had some of their friends in class so they gave me little—if any—grief. There was one girl who I remembered wore a yellow fleece jacket through most of the year, hot or cold. I wasn’t sure what she was hiding, but she wore that jacket so often that it was like a symbol of those days, burning yellow in the dim gray and blue and dust of cinder blocks. She sat in the same seat every day and ate whatever the main entrée was (turkey cubes in gravy. Tacos, whatever) and had an ice cream sandwich. She ate the ice cream sandwich first, so it didn’t melt in the swelter and her food could cool down. Smart, I thought, but it was the same routine every day…until the Indian girl came along and threw off the whole balance of things. The Indian girl didn’t mean any harm, no more than the poor slob who gets thrown in jail for something he claims he never did. She just wanted to sit with some new friends. But even I, as apathetic I was about that job in that school, knew it was trouble when she headed over to that table parallel to my inmates and sat down right where I always saw that yellow fleece jacket. Not good, I thought to myself. Then, I asked myself, Should I do anything? But I decided, as usual, to allow fate its hand in things, and, as usual, I was wrong to do so. I knew I was wrong when I saw the girl with the yellow fleece jacket emerge from the lunch line with her tray, an ice cream cone perched on the edge. Meanwhile, the Indian girl was smiling, greeting her new friends and sitting down in what turned out to be the wrong spot. The girl with the yellow fleece stopped in her tracks at the far end of the table when she saw the Indian girl in her seat; she stiffened; her shoulders seemed to square; her eyes hardened. At this point, I thought to myself that I should intervene. I should say something to one of them before something happened, but then I remembered the words of the guy who worked with me when I was a student-teacher in a high school on the other side of town: “It looks like something is going to happen. We better get out of here.” But it was too late. I had decided that would be a good time for a stroll down the hall when the girl in the yellow fleece went over and tapped the Indian girl on the shoulder. Damn it, I thought. Now I have to do something.
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“Uh,” the Hispanic girl in the yellow fleece said as she poised one hand on her waist and bobbed her head for emphasis, “are you lost?” The Indian girl turned around slowly and looked over her shoulder and said something like, “What the f**k do you want?” The girl in the yellow fleece snapped back, “My seat, bitch! That’s what I want! Now get the f**k out!” The Indian girl stood up now as she said, “Oh no you did not say that!” As the Indian girl rose to her feet, her legs twisted and caught by the fold-out bench, I knew fate had indeed intervened, only to drag me into a situation I wanted no part of. Shoot, I muttered underneath my breath. Now I have to go over there and do something. I strolled over slowly to give myself some time to think about how to respond. When I got there, the two girls were in each other’s faces yelling profanity about each other, each other’s families, each other’s mothers and, if I’m not mistaken, the Indian girl even said something about the Hispanic girl’s pet dog. But I’m not sure about that. My imagination runs wild sometimes. I stepped in between them and thought—stupidly—that my size and the fact that I was one those “cool” and accepted teachers that they would simply step back and I could broker some measure of peace. “Okay, ladies,” I started, “what’s the….” I didn’t get to finish my sentence before the Indian girl lunged over my shoulders and grabbed the Hispanic girl’s hair; the Hispanic girl did the same. Their arms straddled over my shoulders and as I moved, they swayed. Streams of profanities flowed over my shoulders; vows to kill each other’s mothers; swears to kick each other in unmentionable places; all of which were spoken so close to my face I could smell the nicotine on the Spanish girl’s breath and garlic from the Indian girl. Now I was in a tight spot, in a couple of ways. I couldn’t move well in between the benches and a circle of students had gathered around, some standing on the tables themselves to form a second tier for viewing. Fists were pumping in the air; kids were screaming and cheering. I had two girls dangling from my shoulders and if they were boys, I would have elbowed them in the guts and pushed them away. Or, if they were male, I would have pushed them away by the chest. If one of them fell, the principal would have simply said that he had to get off his ass and get to the office. But these were girls. The chest…no, not a good spot. At or near the waist…not good publicity. The legs …of teenage girls…potential problems there. Finally, through these fragmented thoughts I decided I would grab the first set of wrists I could get. The wrists…there’s nothing sexual about wrists, right? So, I ended up with the Indian girl’s wrists, her wriggling the whole time to fulfill her vows to kick the other girl in various places, hurt her mother and, apparently, even her pet dog. A female math teacher—an older lady—took the Hispanic girl away. Meanwhile, the Indian girl had been backing away, slowly climbing up the table until she was standing on the table itself, amid spilled trays and oozing cartons of milk, yelling, “Let it be known! Let it be known!” The whole time I was wondering what the hell she wanted to be known, but she kept recanting, “Let it be BOSON BOOKS
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known! Let it be known!” as if to say that she was to be known and that it should be known that she would not move from her space—her new space. I thought it had to end soon, until I looked over my shoulder and saw the Hispanic girl breaking free from the math teacher. Everything slowed down like in one of those Blist prison movies. The sounds slur together and the motions crawl along the screen. The Hispanic girl ran towards me with what seemed like real hatred in her eyes, screaming something about the Indian girl in Spanish. The Indian girl did not speak. Instead, as I turned to look at her, I heard a deep gurgling sound coming up from her lungs, clearing her throat and mouth of mucus and saliva. Then, just as the Hispanic girl was at my back I heard the Indian girl hock and spit, a warm mist of spittle covering my right cheek. God, I thought. They never told me about this one in any of the textbooks. So, I let go of the Indian girl’s wrists and figured they wanted to fight more than I wanted to be spat upon, or, at that point even have the damned job at Thomas Payne High School, and I stepped away. They grappled, swore vengeance on each other’s families and tore at each other’s hair while the crowd cheered them on. Finally, the school safety officers broke through the crowd and broke up the melee. Just outside the circle of cheering students, I stood wiping spit off of my cheek with a cafeteria napkin. A ninth-grader stood next to me. He was laughing. He thought this was just great, the coolest thing he’d ever seen. I didn’t hate him for it. Instead, I just said as I held up the spit soaked napkin, “This is what seven years college and two degrees gets you these days kid. Think before you choose your job.” Then, I adopted the policy of leaving before I had to do something—but never followed it. II Before the cell phone revolution of the late 20th and early 21st century, beepers and public pay phones were the best way to stay “plugged in.” Most of us will remember the little plastic boxes clipped to a person’s waist, the annoying beeps in meetings and at movies—or right in the middle of a conversation. Then, the person would say, “I have to take this,” which meant he/she had to run off to find a phone. Nowadays, the phone and the beep is right inside the person’s pocket or purse. The beepers became fashion statements after a while, complete with designer covers and designs and ring tones, just like cell phones today. Then, in the inner-cities, they became status symbols: the more beepers you had, the more people you had to stay in contact with; thus, the more important you were. One could be raised to the level of a crack dealer—one who always had to be in touch with clients. I had an eight period inclusion class that had 33 kids in it, each of them loaded to the brim with beepers. On Friday afternoons, since they had to put them on vibrate or flash while in school, some of them would be lighting up like Christmas trees or shaking like an BOSON BOOKS
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epileptic with so many calls. Finally, I found an old, discarded beeper on the green in Woodstock, New York. I told that class that the next person whose beeper went off would watch as I took it away and then hurled it against the wall. “You ain’t gonna do that,” one said. “You can’t,” another said. “He can’t break our stuff.” “Watch me,” I said calmly and I walked around all week with that defunct beeper in my pocket, just waiting for the Friday afternoon light show. I loved stuff like this. Friday rolled around, the weekly vocabulary quiz was over; everyone had barely passed and then, in the few minutes left over, the vibrating and the flashing began. They tried to cover up their beepers, thinking I might just be serious about the whole thing. There was a silence after the first round. I decided I would confiscate the first one that rang after the silence. Joey Smith’s phone went off. “Give me the beeper Smith,” I said calmly. “You can’t take my stuff,” he said. “I’ll call the school safety officer,” I snapped back and that was the final straw. Actually, I had abrogated protocol. I had jumped to the “triple-dog-dare” phase without any preliminary warning. But Smith was cornered; he had no recourse, whether I had stepped out of line or not. Just about any action on his part would violate his probation, and that would screw up everything for him, even his weekend plans. He had to think whether it was worth a beeper to him. It wasn’t. Reluctantly, he handed it over. I reached into my pocket for the defunct beeper while everyone watched me take Smith’s machine. Then I started my act, “Now, I told you. I told everyone of you that if I heard another one of these things in this classroom that I was going to throw it against the wall and smash it to a million pieces.” “Go ahead,” someone said,” I dare you.” “Shut up!” Smith said and then added, “Mess with your own sh*t! Besides,” Smith said turning to me, “he ain’t allowed to break our stuff. And he ain’t got the guts.” “Watch me,” I said calmly, and I threw the defunct beeper against the wall. It shattered into a thousand pieces. As the beeper flew through the air, there were the only moments of silence I ever experienced in that class. They were in awe, watching the technological base of their culture hurtling toward its demise. I may as well have been burning Crosses in front of Christians or Zeig Heil-ing in front of Jews. The plastic cracked and rained down and then made a slight tinkling noise as they hit the ground. There was a shock in the silence. In that void of sound, I stood imperiously, my hands behind my back, and theatrically said, “I told you I would break a beeper then next time I heard one.”
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“You can’t do that!” Smith protested and he stood, but before he could charge at me and break the rules of his probation, I pulled out his shiny new machine, and I said, “I didn’t say it was going to be yours, but I think you got the message.” My pun fell flat. Everyone laughed and Smith was only mad because he had fallen for it. *** In this same era of the beeper, in the cafeteria where the fight between the Indian girl and the Hispanic girl took place, maybe a week later, I had another beeper-related incident. This time justice was served cold. After the fight I had broken up the week before, I had decided to stick more closely to the advice I had been given while I being trained in the art of teaching, which was basically that if you see something about to go down, leave before you have to do something. And I had been doing pretty well, until I heard a group of ninth graders chattering my name in ragged unison like seas gulls on a dock: “Kahner! Kahner! Kahner!” I told myself to keep walking around, to keep finding things to pick up on the floor, to stay near my Internal Suspension kids, but they wore me down. “Kahner! Kahner! Kahner!” I finally reacted just so they would shut up. As I walked over to the table, I said, “What do you want!” “Look!” said a skinny kid with red hair whose mouth was primed with chewed white bread, peanut butter and jelly. He pointed down the length of the fold-out table to the public pay phone on the wall. The rules governing the phone were that it could be used while one was in lunch, and at no other time. Of course, every student in the place had some reason as to why he was out of math and in there using the phone. I didn’t know what the big deal was. “What?” I asked. “What are pointing at?” “The phone!” the red-haired kid said again and then went on chewing his cud. The ninth graders who flanked him chattered. “Go look at it.” Okay, I thought. I had bitten, so I might as well go down there and see what the big deal was about the phone. The whole gang of ninth graders was trying their damnedest not to laugh before I saw what was on the phone, and when I got there, and I saw the two lubricated condoms that had been slid on each end of the receiver, they exploded into laughter. I guess the reaction on my face did it. I was both shocked and impressed: Yeah, it was pretty disgusting, but the actual size of the condoms was impressive, big enough for an old pay phone receiver, circa 1970 or so. It was another one of those moments when everyone was waiting for me, the teacher, to react. I had to remain calm, but I had to remove the condoms with—I guessed—some sense of dignity, all the while the ninth graders were erupting in fits of laughter as I approached the deed. I went back over to the red-haired kid and I said with a British stage affectation, “Might I use this napkin.” He consented. “I’m afraid you won’t be BOSON BOOKS
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getting it back, nor will you want it back, I suppose.” Then, to the rest of the table, who were holding back another spasm of giggles, I said, “Gentlemen, you are about to see what seven years in college and two degrees gets you.” I walked down and as I removed the rather heavily lubricated condoms, they erupted again. I dropped them in the trashcan and hoped that was that, but this is where the Age of the Beeper comes into play. A girl who was probably in tenth or eleventh grade came walking into the cafeteria, knowing full well she wasn’t supposed to be there using the phone. There are only two ways to approach that situation: either the student sneaks in while no one is looking and tries to use the phone, or they hide in plain sight, as if nothing is wrong, and walk over as if they own the place. She just walked right over. Quite frankly, I didn’t care if she was returning a call from someone who had paged her or not; I had a table full of Internal Suspension kids who were trying to sneak off for a cigarette after eating. Usually, I let it slide, but I thought I had to say something about the condom. The girl was checking messages on two different beepers attached to her waist when I walked over. She simply did not pay any attention to me. Good strategy, I thought, but I said, “Excuse me, you really shouldn’t use that phone.” There are only three ways a student can react at that point: give in and walk away, make up some really good excuse, or attack first and attack hard. She decided to attack. She flashed what was probably a fake yellow pass in my face and said, “What you mean I can’t use this phone? I got a pass. I got a pass.” It didn’t matter whether she had a pass or not. She wasn’t supposed to use the phone, and anyway, that was not the point. I told her, “I didn’t say you couldn’t. I just said you shouldn’t.” “I don’t care!” she said and defiantly turned toward the phone while removing the beeper from her waist to check the number she had to dial. As she cradled the phone between her shoulder and her ear, the receiver pressing against her cheek as she searched for coins, she must have felt that odd sensation of spermicidal lubrication and perhaps even the aroma of latex. She may have even put the two together and known what had been on the phone. Whether she did or not, her face wrinkled with revulsion and she backed away, the receiver swinging then dangling on the silver cord as she backed away, disgusted. The ninth graders exploded again. All I had to say was, “I didn’t say you couldn’t use the phone. I just said you shouldn’t use the phone.” “M**herf**ker!” she yelled and stormed out of the cafeteria.
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I laughed a little with the ninth graders and then took the Internal Suspension kids back up to their little isolation unit. As I walked back down to my classroom, I thought to myself, so this is what seven years of college and two degrees gets you, huh? III There’s that cliché in jails, even more so in mental institutions, but definitely in public schools as well, that “the inmates cannot run the asylum.” Of course, this means that the people in the institution have to be controlled by various means and methods, whatever those may be. Basically, the inmates can’t just do whatever they want because when order breaks down, the whole system falters. I have seen many situations teetering on the edge of anarchy, but only once have I seen the inmates run the asylum: the last day of school at King’s Town Senior High School during my first year of teaching. Closing Day is what most schools call the last day of classes, an appropriate enough name. There are, however, many potential problems with this final stretch of time in the institution: —Institutions can only regulate and compel certain actions while the inmates are incarcerated. Thus, if there is a kid who is not returning—be it a senior or a dropout or some maladjusted sociopath—there is no real retribution possible against this kid. —Knowing this, all “beefs” and vendettas are saved up for this final day when there is limited opportunity for retribution and also the cover of disorder: widespread skipping and fire alarms being pulled, all this behavior “allowed” by the alleviation of authority. —A mass hysteria ensues and the weak of mind and spirit are consumed by a growing body of miscreants; a sort of saturnalia ensues and a lawlessness can potentially prevail.
All of these factors combined for one of the most absurd and confusing in my years as a teacher. Of course, the day started off hot, yes, but it was one of those Northeastern days when the sun never seems to break over the horizon and a steely gray sky keeps everything damp and humid. Even before the bell for first period rang, my shirt was soaked, even with all the windows opened and a box fan in the doorway. I kept telling myself all I had to do was to review for the final, just go over Romeo and Juliet and the day would pass quickly enough. It didn’t. Soon after the homeroom bell rang, a fire alarm was pulled. The King’s Town Fire Department showed up; we all stood outside; everything was cleared and then we all went BOSON BOOKS
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back inside. I got in about twenty minutes of review of Romeo and Juliet when the second fire alarm was pulled during second period. We were all outside again. The humidity had made us all wilted, cranky and irritable. After the fire trucks pulled away again, we dragged ourselves back inside. This went on all morning. Rumors began to circulate. Stories spread about what was happening up on the hill, the rise on which the soccer field was perched that overlooked the veranda of the cafeteria. The seniors were planning something. They had been seen smuggling in things in bags. No one knew exactly what. In years past, they had released mice in the cafeteria; thrown live chickens in the hallways; they even ordered 50 pizzas to be delivered to the faculty lounge, the bill to be sent to the principal himself—a stroke of genius if you ask me. So, none of us knew what was going to happen, but we did know it was building, climbing like the humidity and the heat. The inmates made their first foray during fifth period lunch, my lunch duty. The assault was launched from the hill overlooking the veranda by the loading dock on which kids ate their lunch. The rumors were true. But no one could have foreseen the scope, the audacity, and the planning that was involved. When it was all over, I was actually proud that they had followed through on such an ambitious plan, since they had done precious little else. I got my first taste of the action as I walked toward the door that opened up to the loading dock and entered the veranda. My hand was on the knob when a water balloon exploded against the chicken-wire reinforced glass. I stepped away from the glass like a Bull in a jail movie just before the cafeteria riot starts. Through the slim angle I had gained by peering through the water-smeared glass, I could see a whole squad of senior insurgents up on the hill. Each one was holding a water balloon in each hand, or grabbing ammo from backpacks and gym bags. Clever, I thought. Gym bags. That’s what the scuttlebutt was all about. A hall monitor came down the hallway. I held up my hand and told her to stay back, unless she wanted to get good and soaked. “Go get Brooks,” I said, meaning the assistant principal in charge of discipline. “Things are getting ugly out here.” One by one the students retreated from the open veranda to eat indoors. The teachers retreated too. We had to close all the windows, because their marksmanship was superior, lobbing several projectiles through the windows into the cafeteria itself. With the windows closed, the place sweltered in heat. There weren’t enough seats, so kids were standing in a soup of exploded water balloons, tap water and the red clay mud on which the school was built. Soon, that puddle would be mixed with blood. An announcement went over the loudspeaker that all available teachers were to report to the cafeteria, just like the president invoking his powers of martial law in an BOSON BOOKS
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emergency. More people added up to more heat and more anger. A football player, Teddy, had a score to settle with another kid. The two of them squared off in the middle of the cafeteria, each of them well over six feet tall. A circle formed around them and sides were drawn. Allies of each combatant were scattered in the crowd, taunting the other to start the fight. The teachers closed in cautiously, pushing through the crowd. The hulking teens tried to grapple but with the wet floor they could barely hold onto each other. They tugged at each other’s sweaty t-shirts, both proclaiming they were members of the same King’s Town football squad. Their feet scampered beneath them. They fell to their knees and pulled each other back up, jockeying for a clean shot at the other. I was the first one on the scene, of course, and, young and idealistic, I went to push the two apart. But, I slipped in the muck and mire and fell right on my butt. So much for ideals. The fight stopped for a moment to laugh at the teacher sitting in the swamp. I could feel the warm solution seeping through my pants. Luckily, other teachers arrived and the fight was broken up, the two of them escorted down to an already full In-House Suspension room for the rest of the day. As the crowd was dispersing, however, a young Italian kid from the wrestling team who had been aching to hurt someone, randomly elbowed a kid who was walking behind him. His elbow shattered the kid’s nose and laid him out flat. He, too, was escorted away with the others, and the first ambulance of the day was called. There was one more fire alarm pulled; one more visit from the fire department, this time with the State Troopers and the Fire Chief himself in tow. A true Police State was in effect, just in time to load the kids on the buses and watch them hanging out of the windows, throwing their notebooks and papers onto the side of route 18 and start their summer vacation. The repercussions were few. A few seniors were not allowed to walk down the aisle to get their diplomas; they got them in the mail. A few kids were given suspensions for the beginning of the next year. One kid was kicked out of school, the one who broke the other kid’s nose, but he was looking for a reason to drop out anyway. In the end it was just a flaw in the system, and the inmates knew that. They probably still talk about it until this day.
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Chapter 8 EVERY SHADE IN THE SPECTRUM: AN AVERAGE “CLASS” IN A SCHOOL RANKED IN THE TOP 100 OF THE COUNTRY “ “The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we know it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” George Orwell 1984 I Definition according to Webster’s dictionary: class (klas) n. an order or division or grouping of persons or things possessing the same characteristics or status; a group of pupils or students taught together; a grouping of plants or animals; rank or standing in society. v.t. to arrange in classes; to rank together; v.i. to rank. Taking this definition as true, in part or whole, Doctor Watson, let us look at an “average” grouping of “plants or animals”, depending on the day, or even “persons”, who share the same status and who are “taught together”, and see which part of this definition is most true: In the first row adjacent to my desk there was a 15-year-old African American girl. She always dressed in brilliant colors: sharp yellow basketball jerseys, fluorescent green sneakers, chartreuse skirts and pink silk jackets, all set against the dark palette of her skin. She often walked in after the bell had rung, letting the door slam and take her seat. She was forever distracted: constantly chattering, digging through her purse, passing notes. One day I intercepted a picture she was passing to the boy behind her (Winston Westrum). It was a set of pictures of her with a woman who looked like she could be her older sister and a man who looked just as young. His white teeth flash over the girl’s shoulder; he was wearing a green jumpsuit and I could see other subtle glimmers of silvery chains around his waist, around his wrists and running down the length of his legs, shackles. The girl stood in between the two. The writing on the pocket of the jumpsuit said that he was property of a county jail, a whole state away from where his daughter who “does seat time” in a classroom every fourth period, while he “does time” eight hours away. The backdrop behind the three of them is of a cool, blue sky with puffy clouds like the kind of picture in a frame bought at the store. There it is, I thought, as I looked at the picture. The family in chains, shackled by one institution or another. All three of them BOSON BOOKS
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bound together; their arms interlocked; interwoven biologically. An aging, almost obsolete institution set against the false landscape of a greeting card. But I still felt something for them and they all seemed to be happy. So, it was like a movie where you sit in a dark theater, alone, and watch a mixture of real people in a phony story and it moves you somehow. “They have backdrops like that in jail?” I asked, another awkward moment in teaching. “Oh, yeah,” she said, “they got all kinds of stuff in prison. See look.” She showed me another picture with the man in the green jumpsuit standing behind them this time, a range of airbrushed mountains and a hint of orange sky behind them. The girl, though, never saw where the illusion ended and the reality began, or vice versa. As the realities of the institution of school pressed down on her with in-school suspensions, detentions, extended learning sessions, she fled further into that illusory landscape against which she was set in that picture, thinking it was real. Moreover, she believed her mother and her father would be there, waiting for her, smiling before the camera, smiles, shackles glimmering. Maybe that’s why she was always distracted, I thought. Then it got worse. She started to “act out,” as the counselors say. The institution responded with its graduated consequences of their behavior model. There were meetings, adjustments to the behavioral objectives, new behavioral models. There were in –school suspensions and out-of-school suspensions, but she was never expelled out of school and into that false horizon. Schools just did not do that anymore. Yet, by just past halfway through her freshman year, she was doing everything she could to get expelled. But no one could pin down exactly why she acting this way. Slowly, this unspecified need became a combustible fuel that pushed her toward the fulfillment of that ultimate, though well hidden, desire to be thrown out. When asked directly, she could not tell you why she did these things. She could not say what she liked or disliked, what jobs she did or did not want. She had no vision of the future. When asked how she felt, she said she was bored, tired, or that she wanted to be left alone. Everything was stupid, dumb, and useless. Nothing had meaning. So, her behaviors went from disrupting class, to not doing any work on top of that, to skipping class entirely, to lying about skipping class, and finally to lying about everything else in between. In fact, in a world where she could not identify her damning motivation, her lies became the only truth she had. The doctors would call this a pathology. One time she told me she was not skipping while she was standing ten feet from the door of the class in which she was still enrolled. The students behind me laughed and saw the absurdity. I did not know what to say, but one girl just shook her head and laughed. “Don’t worry,” the girl said, “you won’t be seeing her for a while.” At the time, I did not know what she meant, exactly. Later that night at a basketball game, one of the SRO’s told me the African-American girl had gotten out of In-School Suspension somehow and stolen a car from the student BOSON BOOKS
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parking lot. She drove in that stolen car down the highway at speeds that reached 90 miles per hour—until she crashed, ironically, by the entrance to the local library. “Grand theft auto,” the SRO said proudly. “That’s what I’m charging her with.” “Really,” I said. “Does her family know this?” “Oh yeah,” the SRO said with a smile on his face. “I’ve arrested almost everyone in her family by now, I guess. They know me pretty well. I just arrested her cousin a couple of weeks ago.” The next morning I ran into Cathy Puddles, who was her caseworker, in front of the administration building. I asked her if she had heard the news. “Oh, yes,” Puddles said, “but did you hear the rest?” I said I guess I had not. Puddles went on to tell me that the girl was pregnant the whole time. There was no response to that. If there was a response, it did not come to my mind. I could only wonder whom she was trying to kill? Or, was it more like she was trying to get somewhere too fast? What was she speeding toward? Was this the last crash? No one had any answers for me. Teachers always talk about in these things in hushed, reverent tones and then try to turn away from them as soon as possible. The girl was placed in a juvenile detention center. Her baby was aborted. And, for the next few days, dark-comical pictures of her holding a baby in her hands as shackles hung from her wrists plagued me. It was set against an airbrushed mountain range like you would see on a postcard from the West. I never saw her again. II On the other side of the room was that all-too-common string of outcasts who always find their way to the fringes of the classroom when they pass through the hole in the wall called a doorway. They find themselves further out on the fringes of an even greater, larger world. All together, the few of them had little in common with each other except for a sense of failure, desperation and some vague need to escape; so all four of them sat at their desks, their shoulders pressed against the wall or their knuckles tapping on it so they could hear the two inches of emptiness that surrounded them, kept them confined, away from the outside where they imagine they might be free; a wall so thin they actually would ball their fists up and feign blows at it, jab at it with a pen like a man chipping at the concrete walls of Alcatraz, not knowing or not caring that there are deep waters full of sharks outside. Nolan had the prized jewel of all seats as far as slackers were concerned: the back corner diagonally and diametrically opposed to the teacher’s desk. I had his brother Zach the year before and Nolan was doing all he could to maintain the family tradition set forth by his brother: walk into class as the bell rang, take a seat where no one can detect him and, in the cold months anyway, wrap his sweatshirt or coat over his arms to form a BOSON BOOKS
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pillow and go to sleep. He was, I guess, resigned to his fate; he was not going to butt up against a wall. No, Nolan and his brothers were good inmates, the types of kids you don’t mind having in these derelict classes. In between answering questions on quizzes with answers like “Romeo is a guy in a play” or “Juliet’s father is the guy who married Juliet’s mother,” he answers enough correctly, honestly or not, to justify a D in the teacher’s mind. Then all he has to worry about is The State and its standards. Nolan was given an F one time, but only because of a 2-week out-of-school suspension he got after he and his two brothers pummeled three other boys at lunchtime. When Nolan came back from his time out of class, I asked him what had caused the violence and he said that three boys, three brothers as well, had been “talking shit” and that he and his brothers had to fight, you know, to keep their respect in the school. What people think you are is what you are. That is what he was getting at, and it reminded me of what everyone ever said about prison: Pick someone you can beat up the first day you’re in there and let everyone think you’re not afraid. Perception, however, is far from reality, which is not that everyone is alone, stuck and isolated, but that no one perceives that. But after two weeks of isolation from the school’s general population, Nolan was “doing good time.” He handed out books, collected tests, even wore glasses every once in a while to appear as a student should . . . and he reveled in that fight. Told one hundred times, the story went from a schoolyard fight to an epic brawl that ended with his being pulled off a kid named Dustin by an SRO, the kid, of course, bloodied beyond recognition. Nolan’s silence only seemed to confirm the epic versions of the tale; after all, he had finally created a character for himself. III Carlton Carrera, also known as C.C., looked as if he had just taken a drag off of a “blunt” (a cigar emptied of tobacco and refilled with marijuana), choked and then coughed until his eyes exploded red and bloody. He was short with dark, spiky hair; he wore shirts that hung bloused and huge over him. He wore shorts that swam wide halfway past his knees to his ankles. C.C. was always late, always lost, always looking for some answer that was on the board in front of him, some solution to some question that I had just gone over, which was on the sheet in front of him. Over the first week of school, he would show up to the wrong period all the time. C.C. was in fourth period, but he showed up to second period once and convinced the girl who was sitting there that she was in his seat; and, as she stood in front of me with her books in her hand, I looked over at C.C. and said, “C.C. you’re in fourth period.” “I know,” C.C. said, and he slumped down in his chair. “Well,” I said, “this is second period.” C.C. stood up and put his backpack on, which was filled with books and papers and pens he never used, and said, “Are you sure?” “Yes,” I told him, “pretty sure, but, hey, at least you weren’t late this time.” BOSON BOOKS
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“True that,” C.C. said as he flashed me a peace sign and then stopped. “Oh, yeah, can I get a pass? I’m a be late to my next class…third period.” “You mean second,” I said. “Yeah, but this is second, Dahl, and I’m going to my next class, third.” I was going to explain to him that there were other classes going on in his absence, which he did not have to be there in order for a class to be real. But it didn’t matter to him. If he left a class called “second period”, in his estimation, he naturally went to the next, also known as “third.” There were no other options. That’s the way it was all laid out: One could not, according to him, break the string of time or all the beads would tumble to the floor. His “point”, his “objective” was to be in a certain place at a certain time when a bell rang and to leave for another destination when another bell tolled. He did not know time and place; he only knew behavior and consequences. He was the product of sheer behaviorism, a school of thought that “takes the objective evidence of behavior ... as the only concerns of its research and the only basis of its theory without reference to conscious experience.” (Webster’s Dictionary) I thought about telling C.C. what had happened to him during his time in these institutions like public schools, but trying to explain about being “conscious” of other things, of being aware of life and yourself, would have been like explaining the color yellow to a man blind since birth. So, instead of trying to explain this to him, I wrote him a pass that simply said, “please admit.” I thought C.C. was fooling me when I first had him in class. I thought he was one of those kids who played dumb, played sick or played a fool in order to play a system from which there was no true release. Then, one day C.C. walked in about ten minutes late. I began to believe that he was completely unconscious, wandering from one point to another at the prompting of electric bells set to go off at the end of every hour. I asked, “Where were you?” “I went to fifth period,” C.C. said blankly with his eyes glaring red. “Do you expect me to believe that garbage?” I asked. That is when a girl in the front row chimed in: “Yeah, he’s not lying. He’s just totally lost all the time, been like that since sixth grade.” Meanwhile, C.C. just smiled, probably not at the comprehension of what the young girl had just said in his defense, or that I even cared enough to ask where he had been, but simply because he was high on “pot” and that his mind had moved onto some other place—even if his body had not. It journeyed to wherever it wanted to be at that moment on the string of beads, which are the minutes that make his days. His body wandered from one classroom to another, after the bell that means “on time”, but before
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the bell that means you are in trouble, and sometimes he was in the completely wrong time and place. But his mind was with other things. But it was okay. He did not care. He was where he was. He was what he was. There was only the moment and nothing outside of it and if there is only that very singular, solitary moment, then there is no struggle, there is no objective to attain, no tomorrow to shape or to be shaped with today’s diligence. There is only the satisfaction of that one moment. The time and the place could be anywhere. I always looked at kids like C.C. and wondered if his clouds of pot smoke might part someday, and there would be a moment of clarity in which he would see through the illusion of the bells, the walls, the clocks and the classrooms with their paper-thin walls. And if this happened, I wondered, would he stop “behaving.” No. It would never happen. They get them young. I mean, it could happen, I guess, but by the time they are in Kindergarten, they have their lines to go to lunch, lines for the libraries, everywhere and everything. They have them playing games to make sure they know how to compete on teams. They eat, sleep and play and study the same subject at the same time every day until they believe there is nothing else but this group-routine. So, they are afraid to step out of line for fear of nothing being there. After all, they have always been told stepping out of line was bad. When I see a kid like C.C., I believe that is the only “tension” between the home and the institution that remains—if blind obedience qualifies. IV Next up was Mickey Collinson, who with Jim Morsley in the second row, broke into a house in their own neighborhood and then, so the stories go, stole a car. While transporting stolen goods in a stolen car, they were pulled over by the police. They had their pot-smoking paraphernalia on them aside from all they had stolen. The two of them did about six weeks in the juvenile detention center. He made it back for the end of the school year, only to drop out the next year. V Skip one desk forward over Mickey Collinson and there is Allen Bender. If Nolan had fought with his bare hands by his brother’s side to create some sense of honor, some terms of decency in a perceived void, and had created an identity through the vulgarity of violence, Allen did not (my emphasis). If C.C. had decided to remain in some narcotic haze, floating from one place to the next each time a bell rang, Allen did not. In fact, to look at the computer screen where his grades were supposed to be was to look at the absence of his presence, being, and activity: homework #1:0. Homework #2: 0, quiz #1:0, quiz #2:0 and so on until at the end of the row is another zero because nothing added to nothing leaves nothing—and takes nothing to produce. A zero is the BOSON BOOKS
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absence of anything, but, still, something must be there. Something must animate this creature. So what is there? A fourteen-year-old boy whose face seems as drawn of color as a sheet in a hospital ward, save the pale-pink remnants of blemishes and the eyes that seem to quail from the light when the bell rings and the door opens as if the sun is too much. They are always colorless, squinting, looking for relief from the light. He had let his pinstraight hair grow down to his shoulders. From where it sprouted sparsely down the center of his head; his locks were a washed-out Irish red, until it hung below his ears where it was still black from the dye he added from the summer before. There were only two shades: the dark and the light. His body was wrapped in tight, black leather and denim. He had boots that went up to his knee with hard, thick heels and black straps securing the Nazi leather to his legs. He wore t-shirts that said, “Overkill”, “Don’t let your mind wander…it’s too little to be out alone” and “Some say curiosity killed the cat, but it was really me.” And he would sit still in the second best seat in the house: just as far away as Nolan but near the side door to make a quick escape at the bell, only to go to another class and wait; doing nothing. Allen was doing “good time”, or “seat time” as they say in education. Allen and his mother were hoping to get an Exceptional Education exemption from the State Standards, which would require little more than his attendance. The state and federal laws, however, had changed for these institutions of learning and he had to meet the normal criteria for graduation, whether he wanted to learn anything or not. Yet, if he played the game just right, they would have to let him out eventually. They could not keep him past the age of twenty, so he would wait and do good time, like men on Death Row who wait to hear from the governor before they have to take that final stroll. He would keep his notebook neat—if not empty—the way they keep their cells neat; he would stay quiet the way they keep their mouths shut; he would not bother me or anyone the same way that they do not annoy the Bulls and the warden. It’s only a matter of time, not merit, not activity and certainly not dogged perseverance—just a matter of a certain number of birthdays coming to pass. Allen, and all of these kids, would seem to be dumb, as most people would deem them. But who wakes up in the morning and decides to be stupid that day? Whose objective is it to be a failure? Of course, the only real question is, Why does this happen? The answer is what some have called the “neurosis of boredom” in which the seeming pointlessness of education, for all the reasons we have examined here, leads to boredom that obliterates any sense of hope for progress. Basically, a person can not learn when his true, repressed thoughts are leading his mind off elsewhere, into to some illusion, some far-off reality, some daydream of escape. The other aspect of this apparent “stupidity” is stubbornness stemming from frustration, a sort of defense mechanism where the student automatically says, “I can’t. You can’t make me.” So their brains are never activated. Eventually, the potential for academic success atrophies like the muscles beneath a cast while broken bone heals. In the end, the potential diminishes and can be lost. As with Allen, it is that he will not and that he does not. It is not so much that he cannot.
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So these are the highlights—with about twenty others sprinkled in between—of an average “class”, with all its commonalities, and its random variables. It is a “body of students”, a “group sharing common status,” “a set of continuous values” and “random variables, “ as well as a “division based on grade,” just as Webster’s defined. But in this station one must belong one way or another, because, if one does not belong, even as a silent witness, standing mute for four years, then one will be re-adjusted until one belongs to the scheme of the institution, in some way, shape or form. One will learn, as Winston Smith did in 1984, that it is not enough to say you love Big Brother, but that one must to seem to mean it…if not dissolve into that phrase’s meaning and lose one’s self. Public schools do not call it the House of Love, as Orwell did in his book. No, they call it an adjustment of behavioral objectives; a behavior plan; and Individual Education Plan; the Federal Government calls it a 504 Plan. No matter what it is called, there is a plan for each one of them. And it is rarely education. VI John Hatty sat in the middle of things, equidistant from each door, the teacher and the hollow walls. Yet, the other students insulated him. Each day he timed his arrival with the late bell, so he was not late and he was not so early as to have to talk with anyone. He wore all black; his hair was black; his face, spindly arms and twiggy legs were so pale one could see his veins. He kept his eyes trained on the ground by his feet, shuffling along with a hunched back and bony shoulders that heaved with heavy breaths. All he ever carried was whatever science fiction book he was reading at the time. I would start class and he did not hear the jokes I tried, the objectives for the day or the crude remarks of Terence in the front row, which made everyone else laugh. He just breathed heavily and kept reading about outer space, alternate universes, travelling through time, creatures with super powers and men who could weave magical spells. The only time he ever said a word to me was after we had read the first chapter of The Time Machine in class. He closed his Asimov book and stood by the edge of my desk, stooped over, leering at me. “Yes,” I said. For a moment I thought he may have a gun or something. “There are better science fiction books, you know?” he said with complete disdain. I did know. I had read quite a few books myself. All I said, though, was, “Oh really, like what?” “Like War of the Worlds,” he said and sneered at me. Then, he just walked away and he never spoke to me again. After he failed all of his classes, there was a meeting in the guidance department. John did not show; his mother did not show either. Cathy Puddles, his guidance counselor, his science teacher, a “staffing specialist” and I discussed his case. It was a weird situation where the mother had left the father after he was put in jail for molestation charges. The father had supervised visitation rights because of his criminal BOSON BOOKS
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problems. From what we had heard, the father had molested the daughter and there was speculation that John may have been damaged, too. They thought he may well be autistic. That’s what the “staffing specialist” thought anyway. The science teacher was worried about he couldn’t seem to complete a basic assignment, but that he could read the entire period. “I’ll bring that up to staffing,” the specialist said. Then, I had to say something. He’s not autistic, I said. He’s probably a genius, but I had seen him start writing answers down and then not have the energy to finish anything more than a multiple-choice quiz. There was not enough strength within him. Visibly, he would droop and drop the pen. All the experts didn’t know what it was if it wasn’t SLD, ADD, ADHD, EH or autism. Not everything has a name, I said. But, I went on, think about how much energy it takes just to get through the day. Then imagine how much more energy it to takes to repress the memories of being molested by your father, of your sister crying in your arms, and then the craving to murder your own father. Of course he didn’t have the energy to write an essay. He was doing everything he could not to kill me, a man, an authority, a father. You could see the hatred in his eyes, I told them. “Oh,” the “staffing specialist” said, “okay. I’ll bring that back up with staffing. Maybe a psychiatric evaluation?” John left the class after that meeting. He spent the rest of his year in the ESE department, reading books of his choice. I sent over a bag full of Asimov and Vonnegut I thought he might like to read. At the end of the year, he disappeared. Cathy Puddles wasn’t sure where he went, but she thought it was someplace where they could “deal with his case a little better.”
Conclusion: These were only a few highlights out of almost thirty kids. The rest had more predictable problems, more common ailments. For instance, one kid only cared about “souping” up his lawn mower to go four-wheeling; another cried every day over her boyfriend; a different one always talked about the new Mercedes her father was buying. Typical stuff. But in the end, the definition of a “class” accounts only for the most arbitrary aspects of a “class”, which is basically a group of people who are thrown together by people they don’t know for reasons that matter little to them—and then they have to survive in the situation. You have seen how they do it, one way or another. What it does not account for is the random nature of the variables involved; basically, what is thrown into the hands of a teacher. How many of those kids were beaten at night? How many of them were stoned and drunk? How many of them harbored secret thoughts of murder and molestation? How many of them watched crying babies while BOSON BOOKS
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their parents worked all night or got drunk? And then the teacher scolds them for not doing a vocabulary unit the next day. “Kids these days,” the teacher will say, “are just so lazy. In my day, this never would have happened.” The only response I, or anyone, could have to that is that it is not “your day” anymore. The world is different. Everyone can launch into cyberspace, not just specially trained astronauts who end up on Tang bottles. Families don’t live together anymore. One parent can’t support a family anymore. People, in general, don’t fear God anymore. And if you want to find out what happens when you take the weight of the Cross off of a country’s back, just look in your public high schools. I don’t mean that in a Fundamentalist Christian sense. No, I only mean that the old mores are gone, or as Nietzsche said, “God is dead.” The problem is, and has been for a few decades now, what comes next? Until that question is addressed, there will be a whole spectrum of disorders.
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