The Rise and Fall of Me – part 6 of 9ish

December 2, 2012

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Slight review – My first year teaching was at Freehold High School in the Freehold Regional High School District, a collection of five high schools working in one system.  For the second year I was transferred to Howell High School, also in that district.  For my third year I was splitting time between both schools with classes at both Freehold and Howell.  It would be my last year in that district.

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The English Department at Howell was a great unit with an excellent leader, a former Marine named Dennis Cleary, but unfortunately for me he resigned at the end of my second year.  Had he still been there for my third year, I might also still be there.  Dennis was loved by teachers and hated by administrators because he did things his way and he did things successfully.  He knew how to respect people who respected him and how to help people who needed it, even when they didn’t ask.  He never stopped smiling because his career had been good, he bought a vineyard in California, and he was going to make his own wine in his retirement.  As soon as he was out the door, the building administration went to work.  The assistant principal Rose Traficante hired one of her best friends, a rather manly woman by the name of Maryann Banks, to dismantle the English Department.  By the end of the year, everyone from Cleary’s English troupe was either transferred to another school or released.  In New Jersey public schools, your job is protected if you make it to your fourth year in one school district.  I was one year short, I would be gone in June, and there was nothing I could do about it.

In a well-run school district, the board of education will not fire someone unless the school principal and department supervisor can prove that they’ve worked with the targeted teachers in order to help them improve and avoid being released.  In a poorly-run district, they’re happy to get rid of you and save a few bucks by hiring a new person who will be about three years down on the salary ladder from where you were before they kicked you out.  This was not a well-run district.  In fact, they went out of their way to get rid of me, and it bothered me that it was never directly explained why.  I don’t mind if someone doesn’t like me as long as they can at least state so in a polite way.  If you think I’m bossy or pushy, just tell me and be prepared with examples.

Before a teacher reaches that magic fourth year and getting a pretty much iron-clad lifetime position – also known as “tenure” – the school board can fire you for absolutely any reason or no reason at all without any proof or evidence at all.  They can just say, “We don’t think you fit well in our school.”  For me, they wanted to at least have half a leg to stand on, and that starts with finding flaws in job performance.  Usually those flaws are found during observations, when an administrator sits in your room for a full period, takes extensive notes, and writes whatever the hell they want.  I’ve read observations for teachers in which not only was the wrong name on the observation form but everything described was not only inaccurate but impossible.  Those impossibilities are sometimes just typos and clerical errors, but that is enough to disqualify a poor evaluation.  For me, my job performance was fine, but they still found a way.

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Teachers with tenure usually get one or two observations a year.  Non-tenured teachers get at least three.  My first one that year was about a week before Christmas.  My second one was the very next day, and that wasn’t a coincidence.  After the first observation, the supervisor gave me a bunch of recommendations for things I should do differently.  She came in the following day, too soon for me to have made all of her changes, but she gave me a very poor evaluation because of exactly that – I had not employed her recommendations.  On the day before the holiday break, she told me that I would be gone at the end of the year.  There’s a “stocking stuffer” for you.

My teaching day was split, with Howell for the first four classes and Freehold for the last of the usual five class periods for high school teachers.  When I asked about monthly staff meetings at Howell, I was told to just attend meetings at Freehold because everything was the same since it was all the same school district.  That didn’t stop the supervisor from downgrading my evaluation on the basis that I never attended any staff meetings at Howell.  Sneaky bitch that Ms. Banks.  I tried to defend myself at the “Soooo sorry to see you go” meeting at the end of the year with the principal and supervisor, but it didn’t matter.  My representative told me ahead of time not to waste my time putting up a fight.  When they want to cut you loose, they can do it without a reason.  And they did it.  It was my first time being fired but not the last.

One last note about Howell:  I had an interesting discussion one day with the principal, a very smart but slick guy named Matt Herman.  It was right about when all high schools were hit with a statewide test called the HSPE – High School Proficiency Exam.  I didn’t know much about it, but Dr. Herman said, “This new test is going to ruin education.  Just you wait and see.”  In a later chapter I’ll explain how right he was.

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The following year I was unable to secure a full-time teaching position, but I was able to snag a job as a replacement for a teacher who was taking the year off to have a baby, also known as “maternity leave.”  That was at a middle school in Hillside, NJ.  Here’s how Hillside was described to me:  “If you can make it out of Newark, you go to Elizabeth.  And if you can make it out of Elizabeth, you go to Hillside.”  So it was about on the third level of bad cities in the state.  It didn’t take long to find that out.

The teacher I replaced was a well-loved grandmotherly type, so it wasn’t going to be easy for a short, big-mouthed white guy to replace her.  Skipping ahead, I can tell you that I was asked to stay another year when that teacher announced she wasn’t returning, but I turned them down.

That year was the only time I ever had a student bring a gun to school.  Well, the only time of which I’m aware.  I’m sure there have been other times, but those kids kept them hidden and nobody knew.  Although I’m not certain, there’s a good chance the kids who weren’t caught with a weapon were smart enough not to bring a rifle.  Not the kid in my class.  He walked into the room with a backpack on and the barrel of a small rifle sticking in the air like an antenna.  I was amazed the kid had made it up to the third floor of a school with nobody seeming to notice.  I watched as he strolled to the back of the room and hung up his backpack on a hook in a long coat closet before taking his seat.  First, I sent a kid down to get the principal.  Then, I walked to the closet, took the backpack with the rifle, and carried it up to my desk.  When the kid saw that I had his rifle, he panicked, ran to the window, and climbed up on the ledge.  It was one of those older, more traditional schools with the tall, narrow windows.  He put one foot on the outside ledge.  I yelled, “Wait!”  Everyone froze.  “Look down,” I said.  “You see a red car?”  He shook his head.  I said, “Okay.  Class, take out your homework.”  The kids were shocked that I was ignoring him.  He was shocked but also sad and returned to his desk.  Wasn’t long before the principal arrived to escort him away.  Never saw him again.

By this time, my wife (future ex-wife) had graduated college and was also teaching, but it wasn’t a major problem when I told her I wasn’t going back to that school when June arrived.  I applied to many other schools and was very lucky to land the best teaching job I ever had, which I would then hold for the next six years until, like an idiot, I walked away from it.  Yeah, I’ll explain, don’t worry.

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There are two main reasons you’ve likely heard of Seaside Heights, NJ.  One is for the stupid TV show Jersey Shore and its cast of idiots.  The second reason is Hurricane Sandy and the devastation it brought to the expansive boardwalk there.  You’ve likely seen the image of the rollercoaster in the ocean.  I spent many summers working on that boardwalk during my college years.  Just north of Seaside is Ortley Beach, a small town full of hotels, motels, and bars.  North of Ortley is Lavallette, a lovely little town that just happens to have a great beach.  Take away the beach and it seems like any other small town with a handful of great restaurants.  Joe Pesci has a home there.  When I left Hillside, I interviewed in Lavallette, and things went well enough that I was called for a second interview, but there was a tough decision to make before that interview.

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I had relatives with a summer home in town, and my uncle spent many summer nights at a local bar with most of the members of the board of education.  Seemed like a no-brainer to call up Uncle Ray, let him know that his bar buddies were interviewing me, and he’d take care of the rest.  The problem was that my uncle was kind of an Archie Bunker type.  You just never know when he might shoot his mouth off about something.  The guy was always great to me, but I wasn’t sure how well received he was by the bar buddies.  What if he just happened to piss someone off on the day before I called him?  I decided to keep quiet and either win or lose the job on my own.  Luckily, I won.  On the first day of school, two board members walked into my classroom and said, “Why didn’t you tell us you were Ray’s nephew?  It would have saved us all a lot of time.”  That’s a double-edged sword with public education.  Lots of teachers, maybe 50%, get their job because of who they know and not what they know.  I can’t complain.  It has worked in my favor on a few occasions.

I grew up going to the beach for a week, sometimes two weeks every summer.  I waited a long time every year to have my nostrils filled with that unmistakable ocean air when we hit the bridge that reached over to Long Beach Island, and at some point I promised myself that I would do whatever I could to be able to smell that ocean every day.  Working in a school only one block from the ocean was pretty close.  It was a wonderful school, nice kids, great teachers, all in one building that ran from kindergarten to 8th grade before sending students to another town for high school.  To this day, I occasionally go to their website and read the staff directory to see the people I worked with, great people, friendly, helpful, everything.  Some of the staff are now former students, and I like to think I had something to do with their choice to be a teacher.  I sometimes think about taking a drive and visiting, but then I’d just feel really sad for having walked away.

One person who is no longer there was Roger Caruba, the best principal/superintendent I ever worked with.  When I had a run-in with a parent because I had the “audacity” to give her the first B of her educational career (it was 7th grade), this mother wanted me tarred and feathered, but Mr. Caruba told her that I had the final say, and if it’s a B, then it’s a B.  When I learned about the heat he was taking from the parent, I offered to change the grade to an A, but he wouldn’t let me.  When I wanted to expand the school newspaper into a classroom assignment and make it a regular part of the 8th grade English curriculum, he said, “Great.  Let me know how it works out.”  And when the angry father of one of my female 8th graders came into the school wearing a gun on his hip, Roger was there to greet him at the door.

The following year – huh, what?  Oh, right, yeah – the angry father with the gun.  Okay, fine, but there really isn’t much to it.  It’s a beach town, and most kids go to the beach on most warm afternoons when school lets out.  One particular day, a girl walked past her father in her bathing suit, which was small enough that it showed some kind of a mark on her shoulder.  When her father, a prison guard, asked how she’d gotten a bruised shoulder, she flippantly said, “My teacher hit me.”  He immediately called the principal and stormed to the school in uniform, including the gun.  I was told he was coming but not why he was coming, so I really wasn’t prepared.  I practically pissed myself when the principal arrived in my room first and prepped me for the meeting.  I had absolutely no clue what the man was talking about, and I explained as such when he squeezed through the doorway into the room.  He demanded answers, I had none, and you can be sure I did not like that my non-answers only angered him more.  His daughter was at his side, perfectly quiet, until the father turned to her and asked her again how she got the bruise.  She then, rather sheepishly, admitted that it was not me who had hit her but her boyfriend.  The father turned to me and said, “Oh, sorry.”  And they left, and that was all the apology I was ever given.  And for the next three months I had to look at that little bitch of a kid and think about how her father seemed ready to shoot me, and after her little bitch lie was on the table, all he had to say was “Oh, sorry.”  I asked the principal to remove her from my class, but it wasn’t possible because the school was so small that there was only one class for each grade level, so there was nowhere to move her.  Kyla Graham.  Little lying bitch, and I don’t care that I didn’t withhold her name.

My teaching career was great.  I was the baseball coach, in charge of all of the school computers and network, having run most of the cables throughout the building with the help of a custodian.  I had various other roles that brought in extra income so I really could take summers off – because most teachers work all summer, contrary to popular belief.  I loved the school and the town.  I had my first child, a beautiful daughter who is now at Boston University, and we had enough money for my (then) wife to stay home with the kid for a couple of years.  Just when everything seemed great, I made a dumb-ass decision that sent everything to Hell.

Hell_Fire

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The Rise and Fall of Me – part 5 of 8(?)

November 19, 2012

To review the end of part 4, I finished my first year teaching without really having a clue of what I was doing.  The second year didn’t get any better.

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The Freehold Regional District was a total of five high schools, no elementary schools.  Manalapan, Marlboro, Howell, Freehold Township, and Freehold Borough were the five high schools in five towns, each town having their own, separate elementary school system.  Within the five high schools, teachers were regularly shifted around without having any say in the matter.  After my first year in Freehold Borough, I was moved over to Howell, an upper-middle class town with a world-class golf course within walking distance.  Teachers often ran out of the building at the end of the day, grabbed their golf clubs from the trunks of cars, and headed over to squeeze in as many holes as possible before dark.  I was moved without an explanation, but it didn’t matter though because I was happy to be employed.  Many years later I learned about an unwritten practice called “Pass the Lemon,” in which schools will move problem teachers to other places so as not to have to deal with them for more than a year.  It happens with principals too, but in this case it likely could have been the reason for my move.  Regardless of the reasons, I was happy about it because I was working with a much more user-friendly staff and made a few good friends but also a couple of enemies. 

First and foremost was Bob Wheeler, a very happy, round, premature-gray haired guy who could talk about movies for hours, and we did.  Since I was thin and balding and he was round and  gray, we were usually referred to as “Siskel and Ebert.”  It was business as usual for a teacher to get up and leave the faculty room, roll his or her eyes, and mutter, “Siskel and Ebert are at it again.”  We argued and debated many films but also agreed on one very important thing:  seeing a bad movie was better than no movie at all.  We both taught English, so we spent a lot of time together and, I think, we even shared a classroom.  Bob influenced where I bought my first home, in Lakewood, NJ.

Someone who did not admire Bob was a social studies teacher, Frank Sninski.  Frank didn’t like Bob for one very important reason.  They were both Vietnam Veterans but with very different approaches.  Frank spoke often about his war experience, even bragging about the number of enemy soldiers he killed.  Bob did not kill anyone, at least not that he was aware of.  Bob was so against violence that he did not hesitate to tell how he often shot at cocoanuts in the trees instead of where the enemy was hiding.  He said he would only shoot at a person if that person were openly charging at him.  Frank felt that Bob’s attitude might have cost some Americans their lives, and he’s likely correct, but it wasn’t for me to decide.  Frank was rather sadistic at times.  He wore a very large college ring and would occasionally turn the ring so the stone was on the inside of his hand.  Then he’d stroll around the room and pat kids on the head with a little extra strength and an audible “knock” on the skull.  Frank didn’t like Bob and didn’t like me either, probably because I was friends with Bob.  Frank was obsessed with the JFK assassination.  Every year around mid-November he’d facilitate an assembly in the auditorium during which he’d show – frame by frame – the Zapruder film on a large screen and explain the details of what happened, according to the Warren Commission.  Frank held to the theory that it was an inside job and not the work of one wanna-be Communist.  I tend to agree with him, but that’s not important.

Aside from teachers, there were three notable students from my second year of teaching, two of whom I can remember names, but I’ll start with the boy whose name escapes me.  I noticed in his creative writing that he spent an unusual amount of time describing females.  He used many words to detail their physical appearance as well as their clothing, and I had to remind him to get to the story and spend less time on the visuals.  It didn’t appear important at all – until the day it mattered – that he sat right behind the one high school cheerleader in class.  She was the stereotypical pretty, blonde, and dumb cheerleader, which we all know only exists in movies and TV, right?  One random day I was lecturing a sophomore class about The Scarlet Letter when I noticed the boy behind the cheerleader.  He had loose-fitting sweatpants on, and he had his hand in his pants, and he was masturbating.  I can’t imagine my first thought, but my second thought was to keep everyone’s attention on me.  He was in the back left corner of the room, so I moved to the front right corner.  I let my voice grow a little louder and got a little demonstrative.  Instead of having the kids take turns reading, I started reading aloud and made efforts to act out what was happening in the story.  I know I looked silly, and the boy looked sillier, but the last thing I wanted was for others to see him.  If they did, and if they freaked out, it would have scarred this kid for life.  He’d be talked about and ridiculed to no end.  I don’t know if he deserved it, but I just knew that I had seen something like it before, and I didn’t want history to repeat.  In one of my earlier entries I mentioned a kid who was falsely accused of masturbating in school, and it totally changed the course of his life, so I thought about that and kept all eyes and ears on my until finally the whacking boy reached orgasm and collapsed on the desk in exhaustion.  Kids turned around and looked at him, not realizing what had prefaced the collapse, and they asked him if he was okay.  He looked at me.  “Can I use the restroom?”  I wanted to say, “You should’ve thought about that ten minutes ago,” but of course I just sent him out.  Later that day I told his guidance counselor and never heard another word about it.

Another student, also sophomore, was a wide-eyed, innocent kid named Ricky.  He liked to work on cars and tried hard to make friends, but he only did well with cars.  He didn’t have great grades and often missed his homework, but he was a good, genuine nice kid.  People made fun of him sometimes because his eyes always seemed to be popping out of his head.  Ricky tried hard enough to make friends that he’d do almost anything anyone asked.  Later that year he went to what was probably his first party, and popular at the time was something called “huffing,” when you’d fill a bag with gas from something like a whipped cream can or spray paint can, inhale it, and basically get a dizzy and temporary high.  If you inhaled too deeply, it could stop your vital functions.  That’s what Ricky did while just trying to fit in.  He passed out, and other kids just thought it was a case of a lightweight who couldn’t pace himself.  They figured he’d wake up eventually, and they just stepped over him and pushed him to a corner, not realizing he was dead.  Obviously, that’s the worst part, but what fueled me further was the reaction in school.

It’s common for schools to bring in grief counselors when a student passes away or suffers something traumatic.  After Ricky’s death, kids were visibly upset and crying in school, seeking to leave class and meet with these counselors, but it was all phony.  These kids just wanted to get out of class and get a little attention for themselves.  Not uncommon are copycat deaths, in which other kids see how much attention the deceased is getting, and their own instability drives them to commit suicide even though they’re not around to actually get the sympathy.  That didn’t happen, but what did happen was me yelling at students for their bullshit act.  I told a room full of kids that absolutely none of them, not one of them even knew Ricky’s address or even his birthday.  I told them they were all just little shits who wanted to gain a little attention from Ricky’s death and that if any of them even cared one ounce about him, they’d have stopped him from huffing because they would have known the boy probably never drank a beer in his life until the night he died.  Then I challenged them to go ahead and be one of those copycat kids, to go kill themselves, find Ricky on the other side, and go apologize to him.

The last student is probably the most regrettable moment of my 25 years in the classroom.  It was the last day before our Spring Break.  I often talked about what was happening in the news during class but not with essays, just with friendly discussions.  There was a murder case in New York in which a teenage girl was invited into the neighboring home of two or three boys.  They attempted to rape her, but instead they killed her when she put up too much of a fight.  They hid her body in their basement while authorities and volunteers searched the area for a few days, only to eventually find the body.  Although the boys denied any involvement, they later confessed.  So, just before Spring Break, I talked about that case and begged the students, especially the girls, to be careful during their week off.  During that week off, concert tickets went on sale for the band Bon Jovi, which was just becoming one of the most popular acts in the world, never mind the country.  In the local news was a story about a girl who was waiting overnight to buy tickets when they went on sale in the morning.  In the middle of the night, a guy shows up and tells some kids that he has tickets already, bought them in Pennsylvania where the rules are different and the tickets had been on sale the previous day.  All anyone had to do was walk over to his car and he’d sell them the tickets.  A girl waiting was naïve enough to believe him and followed him, only to be raped at knifepoint.  Beyond sad, but I made it worse.

The following Monday, after the break, I stood in front of the class and lectured them again, asking if they’d seen the story and shooting my mouth off.  “Didn’t you hear what I said last week?  Didn’t I tell you to be careful where you go and who you go with?  Look at this story about this poor girl and what happened to her.  Blah blah blah,” and on I went, all the while semi-noticing one girl with her head down.  I figured she was tired, partied too much during the break.  After class, she got up and left like most other kids, except one girl who stayed behind and looked at me confused.  “Didn’t you know?” she asked.  “Know what?”  “Didn’t you see Jen with her head down the whole time you were talking?  She was the girl who was raped.”  I don’t think I ever felt more stupid, not before or since, as I did at that moment.  Of all the things I’ve ever done that I wish I could take back, that’s likely at the top of the list.

Probably the only bright spot, aside from the friendship with Mr. Wheeler, was a trend that began and lasted to this day.  I noticed that there were certain kids who occasionally would come to my room after school, at lunch, or at random times during the day just to sit in my room, talk, or do nothing.  The troubled kids, the ones who were often in detention or cutting class would want to bring their situations to me for my opinion or just a sympathetic ear.  For some reason the bad kids looked at me as someone who could help or at least just listen.  It likely started when I overheard a conversation one day about hockey.  When I threw in my two cents, they were surprised to find out that a teacher knew anything about their sport.  When I told them I had been playing since I was about 10-years old, they were impressed and asked me if I could help organize a school hockey team.   That wasn’t possible, but a club could easily be done.  Not ice hockey as that was too expensive, just street hockey, sometimes called ball hockey.  We had an unofficial school team and played pick-up games a couple of afternoons a week, nothing official, but a bunch of kids staying out of trouble after school.  After the games, we’d hang around and just talk about anything, and it was the only bright spot I had felt.  They weren’t bad kids, they just needed direction, something to do, a focus or purpose.  Nobody paid attention to them.  I didn’t realize back then, but it was a clue to what

was going wrong with education.  Schools were focusing on information and tests instead of focusing on kids.  They seemed to forget that kids were people, not just names in a gradebook.

The plan was to expand the school hockey team and get a teacher in the other four schools in the district to organize a team, and then we could have a five-team high school hockey league.  I would have coached the Howell team, and I say “would have” because at the end of that year I was transferred back to Freehold, and I bet that’s not a surprise.

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Up next – the part when I get fired.  Nobody dies, but someone gets slapped.

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The Rise and Fall of Me – Part 4 of 6-ish

November 18, 2012

To review the end of part 3, I graduated college and obtained a teaching certificate.  That’s when the trouble started.

My First Year of Teaching

I went on a handful of interviews for teaching positions after graduating college.  From what I was told, everyone wanted to be an English teacher, but I couldn’t imagine why because, for me, English was about the most boring class I could recall.  All that sentence diagramming and grammar drilling was annoying, but I had no way of knowing how well that would eventually pay off.  What I didn’t know were two things:  1. Most teachers love to kill time.  2. It was easy to kill time in English by just giving an essay to write.  Something going on in the news?  Write an essay.  Something locally?  Write an essay.  Hand out lined paper, sit back with the newspaper, and wait for the bell to ring.  Today, it’s even easier because in addition to assigning essays, you can also just show a movie.  English teachers can get away with that more than anyone, but that doesn’t stop other teachers from showing movies too.

In my daughter’s school, they’re watching movies constantly.  In math recently they were watching Finding Nemo.  In her Ceramics class they watched The DaVinci Code.  Totally true.  Years ago, it was only in English/Language Arts/Communications class that we showed movies regularly because of how they correlated and illustrated the books we had read.  We’d read Romeo and Juliet and then watch West Side Story, things like that.  Most English teachers I knew would read a book and then watch the movie version.  I’d ask them, “Why show the same movie?  You’re only telling the same story twice.  Show a different movie that’s related in some way.”  That’s just one of many reasons why most other teachers did not like me.

Of all the interviews, the only one that counted was in the Freehold Regional High School District, offices in Englishtown, NJ.  I interviewed in mid August and was one of three finalists, but the job was given to someone else.  Roughly a week later, the woman who was given the job had to give it up in order to move across the country to be with her sick, elderly mother.  The guy who was second for the job had already taken another position, so they were stuck with me and I was stuck with a career path for which I was clearly not ready.

Freehold Borough High School

How amazing it was that my first teaching position was at the same high school attended by Bruce Springsteen.  I sought out a few older teachers to ask about Springsteen’s time at that school.  There was an art teacher who not only remembered specifically how Bruce would sit in the back of his classroom and pick at his face, but the guy had kept all of his gradebooks in his time there and brought one in for me to see Springsteen’s name and grades scribbled on those familiar pages of green and white bars and columns.  A science teacher recalled how Bruce would cut class and sit with a guitar beneath a giant tree in the middle of the U-shaped school, playing and singing, and nobody bothered him.  The school had since closed the U into a box through needed expansion, and sadly the tree was no longer there.

On my first day in the building as an employee, prior to the first day for students, a group of new teachers were touring the building with one of two vice principals when we heard the glottal voice of a large man in shorts not quite his size yelling “Dick!  Dick!”  The vice principal looked at us.  “Anyone named Dick?”  For reasons I don’t need to explain, I’ve never known anyone with my first name – Richard – who preferred the name Dick, so I didn’t imagine the large man was referring to me, but he was.  The loud, overinflated man was the English department supervisor, Bob Leonard.  Nice guy with sausage-thick fingers and a slightly effeminate drawl in his voice.  He had very little interest in what I was actually doing in the classroom because he was hanging on from the days when students did what they were told because their parents made sure it happened.  Those days were fading, especially in towns like Freehold where more attention was paid to muscular instead of mental performance.

I had a rookie principal, tall and mild mannered with a slow, deep voice.  Frank Penn was very easy to talk to provided you showed the respect his title deserved.  I only recall seeing him upset one time.  It was shortly before Christmas (aka “winter holiday”), and Mr. Penn brought in a Christmas tree to help decorate the main office.  He started to assemble it early one day, but as first period approached, he asked the three office secretaries if they wouldn’t mind finishing the project.  One of them rather rudely looked at him and said, “We’re Jewish!”  Thus declaring she would not assemble the tree, nor would the others.  Penn looked at them oddly.  He didn’t intend to insult anyone’s religion and only wanted to bring a festive look to the school.  I imagine he might have insulted them more if he instead asked, “Ladies, since you’re Jewish and likely won’t assemble the Christmas tree, can you find some Christians to finish it up?  Thanks.”  The ladies were not wrong in their refusal to build the tree, but they were wrong in their response.  Usually, it’s not what you say but how you say it.  They didn’t say it well.

As for me, I knew nothing about earning respect, and I earned none.  I earned so little the I was actually punched by a student, and a girl at that, but there’s a circumstance here.  Her name was Joann, and she had a black eye.  I knew she had a boyfriend who was an angry bastard, and I correctly suspected he had punched her, but I didn’t yet know that when I saw the eye.  Her explanation was that she was brushing her friend’s hair, the brush got stuck in a knot, she pulled, the knot slipped, and she ended up punching herself in the eye.  I did the wrong thing.  I kept pushing.  In my own stupid way of trying to help, I called her a liar and told her that I’d bet anything her boyfriend knocked her a good one.  Eventually, with all my bothering, she extended an arm and popped me in the middle of the chest.  I had a decision to make, and my plan was to get her in a great amount of trouble for hitting a teacher until another teacher intervened.  He called me up and asked if I was really going to pursue the matter against the girl, and yes, I was.  The gentleman explained to me a few things about the student’s background, homelife, and whether or not I was reacting to the embarrassment of being punched as opposed to what’s best for the student.  I thought about it more, about the role that I played in it, and whether or not I deserved to be punched.  Nobody deserves to be punched, but the punch certainly would not have happened without be being annoying – so I decided to drop the issue.

There are three other notable students to discuss, and one is “Froggy.”  Let me start by saying that I only knew Froggy about two years before he died.  I had to look at him several times when I first met him in order to totally understand what I was seeing.  Froggy had a disease called “ectodermal dysplasia,” the result of which is that he did not have working sweat glands which causes the body to age rapidly.  His hair was very thin and sparse, his teeth not well, and his skin looked like that of a wrinkly elephant.  His voice was also affected, thus the nickname Froggy.  What was amazing about him was how positive a person he was despite knowing he likely wouldn’t live beyond 17, but I guess he had already dealt with it a long time ago, and it was more of an issue for others who met him, like me.  He was a great baseball fan, knew everything about the New York Mets, and possibly liked me more than he should have because he thought I looked a lot like Mets catcher Gary Carter.  I had him in class freshman year, and he died about three years later.  He was the first student I had who had died but unfortunately not the last.

There was another student in the same class as Froggy, but I sadly can’t remember the boy’s name.  I can picture him as well as anyone – blonde hair, wire frame glasses, average size.  What wasn’t average was how he reacted the first time I called on him to answer a question and he had no answer.  He froze up and turned red.  When I tried to talk to him about relaxing and not worrying about not having an answer, he turned purple.  Other kids got involved, rubbed his back, and spoke softly to him while I stood in the dark.  I later learned that he had a serious condition in which he would easily get nervous and embarrassed, which would then tighten his chest and practically stop his heart.  I knew nothing about it, but that was back in 1987.  Today’s rules and laws would likely have me well aware of him before ever meeting him.  Probably.  Unfortunately, he died about the same time as Froggy, and it wasn’t a happy time at that school.

not actually Thomas Battle

The last memorable student that first year was Thomas Battle.  He was a sophomore in my freshmen class because he was not a great student and had failed English the previous year, but not a great student doesn’t mean not a great person.  When the class would get a little loud and out of control, Thomas would straighten them out.  He’d stand up and tell them to “show some respect.”  His exact words that I never forgot.  I didn’t deserve respect yet, or at least I hadn’t yet earned it.  Back then, education classes in college did not spend much time on classroom management.  Thomas was a star on the football team, and it’s very likely that his coaches instilled that “respect” idea within him.  I always wanted to thank him for what he tried to do, but to thank him would have been to admit that I had no clue what I was doing.  I did not want to admit that, but I also did not like not acknowledging his attempt to help.  Last year, 25 years later, I was at my younger daughter’s high school graduation and listened as they announced names of students, and I heard “Thomas Battle.”  I looked up and saw one of the very few black students in not just the school but the town.  I realized now I didn’t mention earlier that the Thomas Battle in my class was black, as were most of the kids.  When I saw this Thomas Battle, I immediately did some math.  Back in ’87, my Thomas Battle was about 15 or 16 and would now be about 41.  The kid at graduation was about 13, so it could easily be the son of the student I had.  I looked for him in the parking lot after graduation and saw a guy who looked a great deal like the student I had, but I didn’t approach him.  I have no idea why, but I wish I had.  Fortunately, I can easily find out if that student is still in school in town, which would likely mean his father would still be around for me to find and ask if he’s the same Thomas.  I hope he is, and I hope I have the guts to approach him and say “hi” and “thanks.”

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Up next:   Good People and Getting Fired

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