Tales from the Shark Tank

Every so often, someone asks me why we stay in the house we’re in.  It’s small, cold in the winter, drafty, old, and has mice, which is why we have cats in spite of allergies.  We don’t have room to put half our stuff away, it doesn’t have much closet space, and there isn’t a level floor surface in it.  Indoor plumbing is an afterthought, and electricity arrived with rural electrification.  It was built and added on to by a succession of farmers with no concept of building according to a plan, and it shows.

But then there are the redeeming features.  Our landlady is a joy.  Last winter, when the power went out, she and her husband brought us a generator without being asked.  She calls to chat and to check on me now and then.  We’re friends. Our neighbors are wonderful too.   It’s just comfortable.

And most of all, there is the school district.  I have seen huge urban school districts.  Even the good ones seem to do only what they must, and because they have so many kids there’s a lot of “one size fits all” thinking.  It’s entirely too easy for a kid to slip through the cracks.

Not here.  Every teacher knows every child in every grade.  There’s no “kids will be kids” or ignoring bullying.  A lot of schools say they don’t tolerate it, but in reality turn a totally blind eye.  Not here.   Last year, when it came to the teachers’ attention that our son was being excluded on the play ground, and told “game closed”, they stepped in.  There were to be no closed games.  Period.  It took a matter of a few days for me to have a happy kid again.

And then we come to today.  Some 7th graders decided it would be fun to torment the 6th grade boys in the locker room.  One of  the 6th graders was my son.  Not to worry; he’s fine, because it was handled very well indeed.  The principal and guidance counselor were right on it.  They got statements from all concerned.  They made sure the younger kids were very clear that it wasn’t their fault.  They asked the victims what consequence they would consider fair.  They did the same for the parents.  I got a call from the principal and counselor at 6:00 pm, and they talked to me for half an hour.  The bullies will get in-school suspension (they do their class work, but are separate from the other kids), will not be allowed back until they and their parents have had a conference with the administrators, and will be required to research and write a paper about autism, to help make them aware of non-visible disabilities.  They will also be required to apologize to the kids they tormented.

Punishment to fit the offense, tailored to the children in question.  Input from and empowerment of the victims. Requiring the bullies to accept responsibility, and using the opportunity to teach about tolerance, empathy and diversity.

This school system is a tiny gem.  Why ever would we leave?

Some months back, our temple started adult Hebrew language classes. They were far more basic than I’d anticipated, but I figured a review couldn’t hurt me. What I wanted from it was comprehension – vocabulary, grammar, that sort of thing. When I was a kid, we were taught the alphabet, and how to sound out words, and that was all. It remained meaningless phonemes. To me, that was pointless. It’s not supposed to be an incantation to be recited without any understanding.

But somehow even with the Titanic-sized holes in my knowledge, I turned out to be far ahead of the others. So rather than sit there and be politely bored, (a thing I have never done gracefully) I started helping the woman who was struggling the most, pointing to each syllable (sometimes each letter) and reminding her of the sound of it when she asked. The rabbi, teaching the class, worked with the other five people and mostly left H. to me. I thought it made perfect sense. H. needs more than all the rest of us put together, and even if it isn’t saying much, I’m still the most advanced of the group.

It seems teaching is teaching. The rabbi took me aside this morning, said she’d been watching me with H. and that it was clear I knew how to teach, and asked me to take the intermediate Hebrew class for the Hebrew School. She’d thought of everything, including arranging someone else to take the class once a month so that I could go down to Indy when I needed to. So I’ll be doing that, and teaching the kids the songs as well. Not a thing I ever envisioned myself doing, but here I am. It’s a good thing J. is going to be in the bar mitzvah prep class as of this coming year, because he really doesn’t want to be in Mom’s class. And the real challenge? Staying one jump ahead of my students. At least I won’t forget my Hebrew again.

I have found that I have an effective bribe reward to make the ninth graders behave.

Music.

Somewhere or other, they figured out that I sing, that I’m pretty good, and that I’m vulnerable in the vanity for it.  Now of course the first thing they thought of was that perhaps, just perhaps, they could distract me from teaching them Algebra (or Social Studies or Composition) by pestering me to sing.  Didn’t work.

So a couple of weeks ago when I was subbing for the algebra teacher, they started this shtick.  In order to shut down the begging without yelling about it, I told them that if they behaved, if they were quiet and attentive and did their work and didn’t get up out of their chairs every other minute (requiring increasingly sharp reminders to sit down) and didn’t call across the room to each other or poke each other or grab the next kid’s pencil or otherwise behave in ways the kids in kindergarten know they shouldn’t, then when there were 5 minutes left to the period, I would sing.

They weren’t perfect, but they were far more cooperative than they’d ever been before, so I sang.  I don’t know current music, so I sang the first thing I thought of.  It was from Pippin, and they were delighted.  Next hour the same thing happened; the kids from 4th period Algebra told the kids in 5th period, so the whole thing got repeated.  Okay, then.  Once-lucky.

But evidently it wasn’t.  The first thing that happened when I walked into Algebra today was that a kid saw that I was the sub, and asked me to sing a Christmas song.  Same deal.  They behave, I sing.  Except that that first class didn’t behave.  Five minutes before the end of class, I heard “Will you sing now?”  And I told them no; that they had made me spend the whole period reminding them what they were supposed to be doing, and so there would be no reward.

You should have heard them on the way out the door.  They didn’t try to argue with me, but they were coming down hard on the worst offenders “because now Mrs. C. didn’t sing!”  Next class behaved like absolute angels, and they got their song – Gloria In Excelsis Deo. Nor was the adventure over; a couple of the Freshmen stopped me on my way out at day’s end to say they were sorry, and ask if I would please sing for them next time I was in, “if we’re good”.

I’ve always tried to find rewards instead of using threats; if nothing else, it sets me apart and makes my version of discipline more memorable.  (It also works.)  I’ve been trying to find something for these kids since they were in 7th grade, and I have been failing.  I’ve finally found it, and it’s a thing I never would have thought of.  That’s okay.  Not only do I have it now, but it’s an easy thing to do and I will use it shamelessly.

It’s been just about 46 years since the Supreme Court first said clearly that the people in positions of authority in the schools must not, under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, promote any particular religion. That includes administrators, teachers, bureaucrats and therapists, among others. It also includes substitute teachers.

That brings us to this morning. A little group of girls walking into the high school math class I was subbing for today looked over towards the desk, saw me, and said things along the lines of “We’ve got you? Wow!” One girl even stuck her head back out into the hall and called to a friend: “Hey, Casey, it’s gonna be fine. We’ve got Ms. C.!” I’ve been greeted enthusiastically before, but this was a whole new level. Then the assistant principle came in to tell the class that if they didn’t behave, I was to send them to the office forthwith. I agreed that I would do so, adding that I didn’t expect trouble; I’d not had any previously. (I had none today either; I had only to say “Please do ‘X’” and it was done without a murmur. Liking does not mean lack of respect.) When he had left, I asked the girl nearest me what was going on – and the floodgates opened. It seems the sub they had last was auditioning for evangelical b**** of the year. Not only was her idea of maintaining order to scream at them, but she targeted one particular child and would not leave her alone. “Jesus wants you” was quoted to me, as was “Repent and return to Jesus”. The girl in question dresses as a goth, and wears a pentacle. She’s also quiet, polite, very bright and very hard-working. Everyone was angry on her behalf, even the kids I knew came from evangelical families.

I was stunned. The separation of religion and school has been clear for nearly half a century. Nor need you be an attorney to be aware of it. It’s in the news at intervals. I’ve never met a parent who didn’t know that’s how it was supposed to be, however they felt about it. I blew the proverbial gasket. The kids know, because I’ve let them see, that I’m multi-dimensional. They’ve seen my costume drawings in my sketch book. They’ve seen me hemming a cloak. They’ve heard me toss in the random bit of social history that puts some action or other in perspective in terms of the attitude of its time. And they know I’m a lawyer, who is choosing to be a mom. So when I told the child in question, in front of the whole class, that what that sub had done was not only inappropriate and rude but also illegal and that she should report it to the principal, they listened, and started asking questions. They were good ones, too; they were eager for something they could actually think about instead of just memorize. So the first quarter-hour of that class wasn’t spent on Algebra, but I think that bunch of Freshmen got a good if impromptu lesson in Constitutional rights. The kid herself was rather stunned, and very grateful to have another authority figure supporting her so unequivocally. She came up to talk to me when the others started to work on their assignments, asking me why this was so personal an issue for me. So I told her. We talked for another 20 minutes. I asked her, at one point, if she wanted me to help her with the assignment since we’d spent almost the whole class period talking. She smiled and brushed it aside, saying that math was easy and she was getting an A, and would get it done in study hall.

The Bill of Rights forbids the government from establishing or supporting any particular religion. There was good cause for that: the excesses and persecutions of Protestant monarchs against Catholic subjects, and of Catholic monarchs against Protestant subjects, were still very recent when the Bill of Rights was written. The Jacobite Rebellions in England, a conflict between the Catholic James II and the Protestant William and Mary, had ended in 1745. The stories of the Protestant Huguenot exodus from France, escaping massacres that would probably now be characterized as “ethnic cleansing”, would have been part of family stories about parents and grandparents. Paul Revere’s father was one of those immigrants, settling in Boston; Revere would have absorbed that awareness of what a government-supported Church could do along with his lessons in silver craft.

That didn’t mean all was smooth sailing thereafter, of course. But in 1962 the Supreme Court said very specifically that no one religion could be presented in a public school, where the kids are a captive audience. I’m glad that’s the current standard, not only as an attorney, but as a parent. I’ve been asked, now and again, what I “have against religion”. Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. I am, in my own life, a deeply religious person. But I don’t want anyone in school, where my child has no choice but to go, teaching him religion. That’s both our job and our right, mine and my husband’s; if we delegate to other teachers, we choose them, and know that they will, for the most part, teach him the same things we would. The same is true for every child in a public school. School is a place for learning everything from science to social skills, but it is not a place for learning how to be [insert religion or lack thereof of your choice here.]

So the arrogance of this woman, whom the children do not respect and actively despise, strikes a very personal chord. I told the assistant principal about it, telling him all I knew except the name of the girl in question, because she’d asked me not to. I think the child is hoping that I and that other sub will be there on the same day. And in a way, I hope so too. I’m still boiling on behalf of a child who couldn’t defend herself, couldn’t tell that woman to go away and leave her alone, was nearly in tears just thinking about the experience. I’d relish the chance to tell Ms. Evangalist that the separation of Church and State has not expired.

I was teaching high school Civics, Government and Geography today. Most of the kids were juniors and seniors, and as is usual, I got into conversations with them on various topics.

Come lunch time, I was going down the hall, walking stick in hand because I’ve learned that attempting to rush the healing of a sprained knee only results in having trouble for a longer time, when a little group of kids called out to me. I went over, to find half a dozen seniors in a clump, with a very earnest young woman at the front. “We just wanted to tell you” she said, smiling “that you’re the tightest lady we’ve met.” It was very clearly meant as a compliment, so I smiled back and thanked them.

Then I went and found one of the regular teachers and asked for a translation, the simple fact being that I had not the least idea what she’d really said to me. Turns out it’s the current superlative.

It has been borne in upon me that I don’t speak teen anymore. I guess that makes me officially middle-aged.

I can tell that cold and virus season is picking up speed. I’m getting 2 and 3 calls to substitute every day. It’s nice to be popular.

Most of the subjects taught in high school now have remained essentially unchanged over the thirty-plus years since I was there . Computer technology was just getting started then, but otherwise it’s still Social Studies and Civics, Geometry and Algebra, Chemistry and Composition. Sure, these kids are learning things as “history” that I lived through, but that’s the nature of the subject, and it’s always interesting to see their reactions when you put something they consider to be “ancient history” into the context of your own life, standing there in front of them and obviously not so ancient as their conception of the events and people they’re reading about.

Some of the classes, however, have changed their names in ways that make me chuckle as I walk down the halls. In the Vocational Education” “Life Skills” department, there’s the “Clothing Lab” and the “Food Lab”, otherwise known as “Sewing” and “Cooking”, the two branches that made up “Home Ec.” Looking in through the doors, I see the same familiar equipment, cutting tables and sewing machines in one room, stoves and sinks and mixers in the other. And yesterday I subbed for the teacher in the “Industrial Skills Lab”.

When I took it, it was called “Shop”. There’s still only one girl in class, though.

I’m still on the planet, I just haven’t had a whole lot to talk about. I’ve been getting a lot of calls to substitute teach, which both pleases me and keeps me quite busy. And I must be doing something right here, because the high school has taken to asking me about dates a month out. I wish I could just turn this into a teaching certificate, but no such luck. That’s ok. This way I have lots of flexibility, and given the way things tend to go in my life, that’s a very good thing indeed.

So most recently, I’ve been at the high school a lot. I never did that last year, and it’s been quite the eye-opener. It’s also been quite a lot of fun. So far I’ve convinced a poetry class that an assignment wasn’t impossible by doing it myself, writing 15 lines on the board on less than 3 minutes of thought. Unrhymed verse is so simple it’s almost seems like cheating – or else it’s so close to my normal cadence I don’t notice. But I enjoyed the look on their faces, and much enjoyed taking away their excuses.

And my son has invented an absolutely perfect word for our now 3 month old kitten’s habit of tossing things off of surfaces just to see them fall. (Not that human babies do such things, oh, no…..) When he comes in and finds the computer speakers on the floor (again), or his sunglasses being dragged across the room by one temple bar, he says they’ve been “kittenized”. My husband and I laughed ourselves silly the first time he said it, and have adopted it. I’m waiting to see if it will spread among our friends. It wouldn’t be the first time we’d done such a thing. That’s just fun.

Tonight I’m going to have dinner with friends. K.’s husband decided he wanted to put on a frontier feast for friends, with, among other things at table, bison, antelope sausage, pheasant and alligator. (I’m not eating the alligator. It’s not kosher. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.) And then the instruments get pulled out, and music just might break out. I’m quite looking forward to it.

I’ve come to treasure ordinary days. They’re entirely too rare in my life. That’s probably true of everyone, but I don’t see “everyone’s” life from the inside, I see mine, with glimpses into those of my friends.

This morning I subbed for the other second grade class, for the teacher my son had for second grade. She’s truly amazing; I’ve come to appreciate just how amazing more and more as I’ve seen other teachers. She was proctoring for the ISTEP test, so I had her class. Unlike the other second grade class, a lot of these kids know me. They have siblings a couple of years older in my son’s class, and they’ve played with him at their homes or ours. So I walked in to a chorus of “Hi, Mrs. D.!” Of course my name tag, prepared by the office in advance, reads “Ms. C.”, so it creates a bit of confusion, but only a bit – and it is Mrs. D. that sticks. Everywhere else in the world I’m known by the name I was born to, and kept when I got married. In my son’s school, I am “Mrs. D.”

But of course, since they knew me, they thought they might get away with a few things, and they were much put out to find I was not willing to be pulled off into tangential discussions of new toys, games, bikes, kittens, or whatever. We were going to do our reading – and science – and math. But that didn’t mean we wouldn’t have fun. So the discussion of desert environments included the difference between the sound a real roadrunner makes and the one the cartoon Roadrunner makes, eluding yet another of the traps and schemes of one Wile E. Coyote. A good “meep-meep!” is great for making second graders laugh. But best of all was hearing a little boy say, as I was getting my purse “Mrs. B., can we have Mrs. D. when we have a substitute after this?”

And then, of course, there is the kitten. She’s about 4 months old now, full of playfulness, much better able to get into mischief as her size increases and coordination improves. Her favorite perch is still my shoulder, but she no longer drapes herself like a stole. Now she’s much more likely to sit up properly, peering at whatever I’m doing and commenting right beside my ear. My husband says she looks like she’s practicing to be a raptor when she grows up. “I’m gonna be a hawk. I’m gonna be a hawk, and I need to practice.” Given that her “swoop” tends to happen as she leans further and further forward to see what I’m doing until she falls into whatever it is, I’d say she needs lots of practice. But she’s mastered the art of being lovable, and that’s the one that counts.

I’m substitute teaching again this year, and judging by the phone calls I’ve been getting, I’ll be able to work pretty much as much as I want to. This pleases me greatly. So today I was in a second grade classroom with a student teacher – helpful in terms of knowing tolerances and routines, less so in terms of making my own judgments about the kids, and what constituted trouble.

Any day spent with small perpetual-motion-and-energy generators has its amusing moments, and this one was no exception. Two stand out.

Take the first, during the Pledge of Allegiance:

“…and to the Republicans, for witch’s hats….”

And take the second, as the student teacher led the class in a song:

Miss. T.: “Janie, I can’t hear you singing.”

Janie: “Neither can I.”

No one seems to mind my amusement. They all wave goodbye to me when I leave, and I overheard one boy tell a friend from the other second grade class “Our substitute is pretty hard, but she’s really fun, too. She laughs a lot.”