But first, let’s talk about the economy.

Normally, as I sit down to write this blog, I try to pretend that “the economy isn’t happening”… although, ironically, even Johnny Truant has recently been seen making occasional posts about the economy.

Sometimes, though, I have to face the facts.  Those facts are:

• Teachers in my system are being asked to “voluntarily donate” part of their salary to help offset our system’s budget shortfall.
• When teachers leave the system for any reason, their positions are not being filled with new hires (we can’t afford them, but that will increase class size).
• If I do have a job, the local school system may opt not to supplement the state’s salary I earn (resulting in thousands of dollars less for teaching more students… see above).
• There is no absolute guarantee that I or my wife will have a job next year anyway.
• Obama’s tax cut has added a tiny bit to my monthly paycheck, which may help offset a fraction of my lost income, but it has also significantly reduced the income of the government which helps pay me… probably resulting in a smaller education budget in years to come, which will (over the long term) most likely reduce my earnings by several times the tax decrease.  Save $50 (approximation) per month now so that I can lose $5000 (pure speculation) per year later… that’s the spirit…

At times like this, there’s one thought that does offer a little comfort.

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?

(Matthew 6:28-31)

I’m toiling, and I’m spinning, and I’m doing the best I can for myself… but it’s nice to remember that God’s got my back.

I hope that this thought offers you some comfort as well in these rough times.

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I try to deal with this misbehavior, of course.  I fuss at him.  I yell at him.  I threaten to send him to the principal for disrupting his classmates (which usually does stop him from calling out).  I send letters home (after trying and failing to reach his parents by phone) letting them know that he will not receive credit for my class unless he shapes up.

It doesn’t matter.  Three things are always certain:

He will not do his work.

He will continue talking.

He won’t act even slightly resentful toward me.

It bothers me.  It gnaws at me.  Most troublesome students have the decency to get irritated with me from time to time.  They usually act like I’m interfering with their lives when I fuss or yell at them.  Practically all of them at least give me the cold shoulder and a quiet sneer when I crack down on their misdeeds.

Not this one.

He just shrugs and smiles… not sarcastically or rebelliously, but as though I’ve said something mildly humorous.  He’ll quiet down or write a couple of words on his paper, but five minutes later he’s back to talking or staring off into space.

When I run into him after school, he’s completely friendly, as though I’m his favorite teacher.

What the heck is wrong with this kid?

Does he honestly enjoy being in trouble all the time?  Is he glad that I take the time to tell him to shut his mouth and do the work?

It bugs me.  He’s a disgrace to high school dropouts everywhere.

Dang.

Some of our disaffected youth really need to learn how to act like hoodlums.

The students mostly found out either Thursday evening or Friday morning. They got the word mainly
from family members or peers, since our administrators decided not to make an official announcement.

Today was hard.

Fortunately, we already had a half-day scheduled to kick off President’s Day weekend.
I’m still grieving. He was a good man and a good teacher.

Today reminded me of old Ebenezer getting his ghostly visits. Ghosts from the past, present, and
future have visited my disheveled mind today.

Past

I was in tenth grade — about 15 or 16 years old — when I heard that my first high school art
teacher had died.

She had been one of my favorite teachers. Her dry observations about art, life, and teaching were
equal parts hilarious and insightful. She bore the stupidity of my classmates with many
longsuffering sighs, and she encouraged me to take advanced art, which was taught by her husband.

One day, on the way home from school, she had a stroke. Her car swerved and collided with other
vehicles. She was placed on life support while doctors tried to deal with the severe bleeding
inside her skull. Two weeks later, they pulled the plug.

Her husband — whose class I was taking at the time — was out for about eight or nine weeks.

Present

I don’t react immediately to tragic news. My tears flow when I witness other people’s reactions,
as though I need to empathize with others to express my own pain.

Students walk down the hall with tears streaming down their cheeks. They quietly sob in class.
They try to comfort their friends with inexperienced, ineffective pats and platitudes.

It’s all I can do to hold myself together, to act professional. I look at the grieving ones as
little as possible, trying to focus my attention on the students who were not in his class or who
are better at hiding their grief and shock.

It’s hard.

Future

Someday my time will end.

I hope that it will be many decades from now… my family tends to be long-lived, frequently
reaching the upper nineties while still sound in mind and body.

On the other hand, it may well happen during my teaching career. Looking at students’ faces today,
I know that I am seeing the same shock, the same grief that other teachers may see after I’ve lost
my sight forever.

As with Ebenezer and his final ghost, I see one possible future haunting the faces of my students
today. Like Ebenezer, I hope that this future does not arrive.

Like Ebenezer, all I can do is accept my own mortality and live my life as best I can.

Please

Please pray for the family, the friends, the co-workers, and — perhaps most of all — the students
of our departed teacher.

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I could answer this question with some starry-eyed fluffy-footed flannel-pajama-clad tripe about the youthful enthusiasm and innocence that radiates from the eager young minds as they enter my classroom, their intellectual safe haven, where they can express their love of learning and curiosity about the world without fear of criticism from their peers.

I could, but I do like to include a “shred of truth” with every blog post, and such an answer would pretty much close the door to that.

So… why do I teach?

Because sometimes, in between reminding this girl to watch her language and that boy to stop wasting our time and those kids not to throw things, not ever, in my classroom, especially not 1100-page textbooks from a distance of 20 feet…

…in between being harassed by parents because it’s obviously my fault the kids never turned in their essays or returned their books or learned that sometimes the real world kinda sucks and they’d better get used to it…

…in between the parents who think their 14-year-old should still be reading the Ramona books but never, ever, that Harry Potter witchcraft devil’s work and certainly nothing with cussing and the parents who don’t want their child to learn about the Holocaust or the Civil Rights Movement or any of that other wussy liberal crap I’m trying to shove down their throats…

…in between the administrators who want me to monitor the boys’ bathroom even though I could lose my certificate over it and the state officials who think my students need to know exactly what curriculum standards we’re learning today, even though the standards are written in jargon my students would need college degrees to understand, and due to the very nature of English and Language Arts we’re doing about fifteen standards at once, anyway…

…sometimes, more frequently than you’d expect, a student asks a question or makes a comment that, deliberately or not, leaves me laughing my head off, or that makes me pause and consider something really cool that I’d never thought about before, or that reminds me that a precious few really are interested in learning what I have to teach.

Occasionally, in between the your-boyfriend-snuck-off-with-that-girl drama and the I’m-not-reading-because-Shakespeare-didn’t-ride-bulls-like-me apathy, I even have a former student walking in through my door between classes to tell me how much they enjoyed my class and miss me, especially since now they have that teacher for English and I was way cooler.

Those are nice.  The ones I like even better are the ones who don’t say I’m cooler, but instead say I taught them more than most of their teachers.

The times I like most of all, the times that are so rare that I almost forget they happen at all, are when a student walks in on a teacher work day (when no students are supposed to be at school) and thanks me for all I’ve done for them.

I think that’s happened about three or four times in the last three years.

Once, this happened while a parent was whining to me out in the hall about something for which her sweet angel really shouldn’t have been penalized (yeah, right).  The ex-student who had come to visit stood around awkwardly for a minute before walking into my classroom and scrounging up paper and a pen.  She wrote for a while, then left with a quiet wave.

When my entirely calm, pleasant, denser-than-a-neutron-star demeanor completely frustrated the upset parent, who stormed off in search of an administrator (who fussed at her for wasting my time, heh heh), I entered my classroom.  On top of my desk was a note.

Coach Mac, Mr. MacOdys, (sorry)
You taught me more about English than most of my English teachers ever have, and along the way I learned more history than any of my high school history teachers even tried to teach.

You encouraged me to work hard and told me you were proud of me.

Thank you for inspiring me and being the best teacher I’ve ever had.

I think I’ll make it to retirement, yeah.

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Training is key.

There was a fight in my hall today.  It’s the first genuine fight I’ve witnessed since becoming a teacher; most of them tend to happen elsewhere on campus.When I was a student, I was completely nonaggressive.  I never got in a fight; in fact, I never provoked anyone to the point where he tried to start one.  I also never played any sport or took part in any other physical extracurricular activity.  I can count on one hand the number of times I play-wrestled with my friends.

As a result, the prospect of having to break up a student fight invariably leaves me shaking with tension.  Heroically charging in and separating two beefy farm boys who are trying to kill each other doesn’t exactly fit with my personality.

On the other hand, I am more or less obligated to do so.  If I stand by and allow Billy Bob and Jimbo Joe to crack each other’s bones, I could be considered neglectful of my duty to maintain a safe learning environment.

All of this flashed through my mind before I reluctantly charged… er, stumbled… heroically forward.

The blur zipping past me, fortunately, was the football coach from across the hall.

I could say that Billy Bob went tumbling head over heels in one direction as Jimbo Joe slid chin-first across the floor in the other.  I could, but that would be a more obvious exaggeration than I generally like in my writing.

Suffice it to say that all I had to do was escort Billy Bob, now looking decidedly more like a B.B., to the office.

And yet… even so, as I returned to my classroom, restored order, and began writing vocabulary terms on the board, my hand was shaking.

Are you ready for some down and dirty deep-fried fisticuffs? I know I am! — Alton Brown

Ice. Death. Winter.

If autumn is my favorite season, with its luminescent leaves, portly pumpkins, and abundant acorns, it is tainted by the knowledge that winter is coming next.  Try as I might, I can never quite forgive autumn for failing to transform magically into spring as soon as it realizes its days are numbered.

In autumn, the sun is crystal clear, clean, adding a bright glow to everything it touches.  In winter, the sun is grey.  Not “g-r-a-y,” the predominant American spelling, but a full-fledged Wuthering Heights-quality GREY.  “Wuthering” is a fine word for winter, by the way… go look it up.

I hate the grey sun.

In autumn, “cold” means “bracing,” imparting a vigor to the limbs and chest; the cold air tells you that you are alive.  Autumn cold makes hot chocolate taste sweeter and coffee more soothing.  In winter, “cold” means “death” — our movements become sluggish, and our skin turns pale like that of corpses.  Winter cold makes hot chocolate and coffee seem almost futile.  Autumn air brings one to the height of life; winter air brings one to the grave.

My skin feels it, my flesh feels it, my bones feel it.  It cannot be escaped.

There can be some beauty in winter, I admit.  The cold, white beauty of icicles flashing with what little sparkle a grey sun can give; the pristine blankness of new-fallen snow; the blue tint of the sky on rare occasions when the sky isn’t grey.

I might as well say that there can be some beauty in clean, white bone.  It may be true, but I still prefer the living warmth of smooth, healthy skin over the lethal chill of dead ossium.

Winter… how I hate thee.

In the evening I went to the churchyard. It blew bleak as winter – all round was solitary. — Emily Brontë

Shivering with cold and hunger, she crept along; poor little child, she looked the picture of misery. — Hans Christian Andersen

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Second, as I was casting about for a topic for my rant, I serendipitously discovered a contest Word Sell, Inc. regarding cell phone use and abuse.  Now, I’m not a huge contest person, but there was a cash prize offered, and I did need a rant topic, so…

“Sir, cell phones are prohibited to students.”

...sigh...

He looks at me, and I can tell that if he were half — rather than twice — my age, his lower lip would be trembling.

“But what if there’s an emergency?” he almost wails.  “How will I get in touch with my son?”

“There is an emergency,” I respond.  “Your son’s grades are on life-support, and by texting in class, he’s pulling the plug.  Oh, and we have…” I pause to count on my fingers… “three land lines here at the school.  Your tax dollars at work, and all that, you know.  If you need to get in touch with your son for any reason, well, use your imagination.”

*cough*

Ok, so this scenario didn’t happen, but it could, and it might.  I have lectured parents considerably older than me about their child’s cell phone abuse.  Sometimes they don’t react well.  I can’t remember the last time that bothered me.

The real problem lies with the parents’ ignorance of and apathy toward the phones they buy and pay for.  Cell phone use can easily be monitored online; parents could, if they knew or cared, bestir themselves to check and see whether little Jenny is sending her boyfriend sweet nothings in the middle of Trigonometry.  Cell phone features can be opted-out by the person paying the bill; the girl in my Honors class who told me she’d run up a $700 bill through text messaging may have been the person at fault, but her parents could have stopped it before it happened.  Most effective is the one tactic parents seem least likely to use:

 Take away the bloomin’ phone!

It’s not an amputation.  It’s not child abuse, nor is it child neglect.  Remember little Miss Can’t-Stop-Texting?  She has her phone in her purse right now (unless she’s texting, which she probably is).  Seven hundred Washingtons isn’t enough to convince you that your so-called “social butterfly” (we used a different expression when I was a teen) can’t use a phone responsibly?  I bought my last computer for less than that!

For me, it’s irritating when any student checks their phone in class.  It’s frustrating when they try to use it during active instructional time.  It’s downright insulting that my Honors students, who claim to want to excel, whose parents claim that they’re sooo smart, prioritize their social lives above anything else.

And you know what else?  It’s worrying.  Parents who don’t understand how to monitor their teens’ cell phone use obviously don’t understand why they should.  Ignorance of technology is unfortunate and, for me, hard to understand… but it is at least not dangerous.  Ignorance of twenty-first-century teen texting tendencies could end up wrecking a child’s future – in more ways than one.

You’re gonna want your very own ring, so all your friends will know that you’re the one ruining the movie. — Ed Helms

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...still warm...

She made cookies.

There are times when cookies are necessary.  They are sugary little emotional painkillers, morphine for the soul.

Most people don’t realize it, but many words in the English language derive from ancient onomatopoeia.  There is a reason why “fuzzy” sounds, well, fuzzy, and why pronouncing “stutter” sounds like you have a bit of a speech impediment.  Likewise, there is a reason why “cookie” has that heartbeat BUHdum rhythm to it.  Cookie.  Cookie.  Cookie, cookie, cookie, pulse getting faster as you smell the chocolate… cookiecookiecookiecookie heralds a touch of brown sugar and cinnamon.

Cookies.

I’d had one of those days that seem to come ever more frequently in late October and early November.  Strange how, when I was a student, I never seemed to notice how painful it could be when we didn’t have a mid-October “fall break” to briefly arrest our long, painful tumble toward Christmas.  As a teacher, I feel it keenly.  I begin sleeping through my alarms, shivering through scalding showers, aching deep in the marrow of bones I didn’t know I had.  My favorite students become my worst nightmares.  My worst nightmares go on strike, unable to meet the ever-more-challenging demand to be more terrifying than waking life.

On this particular day, I had slept through not one but two separate alarms, completely zoned out while sitting on the toilet (resulting in ten minutes of pins-and-needles in my upper thighs), broken an ice scraper attempting to clear my windshield, and nearly been struck by a hypercaffeinated teenager with an incomplete understanding of what “four-way stop” really means.

Then I arrived at school, and my day began.

My students didn’t seem even vaguely interested in either Zeffirelli’s 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet or in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 version – nearly unheard of, since normally the girls in the class (with occasional assistance from a guy or two… you never know) like to argue about which Romeo is hotter.  Instead, they were more concerned with asking whether I knew that Obama is a Muslim and speculating about what “color” he is.

If you can’t tell, I teach in a rural school.

They didn’t seem particularly interested in the research paper I gave them, either.  No point in letting them get the idea that watching films is all we’ll be doing for the rest of the semester.

Lunch would have been a granola bar.  Lunch would have been, had I remembered to bring one to school with me.

Days like that, I normally leave faint smudges of rubber in the parking lot at 3:30 sharp.  Sometimes 3:30 is so sharp, the minute hand on the clock hasn’t worked up the nerve to swing past the 5.  Unfortunately, the meeting scheduled to run from 3:15 to 3:45 promised to curb my enthusiasm.

“3:45,” you understand, is administrator-speak for “4:35.”

On the way home — finally – I got a text message.  “Y r u l8 nd 2 pk up gro.”  After swerving to avoid a pair of joggers who decided to jaywalk while I was fumbling with my phone, I pulled into the nearest gas station to fuel up and dry-swallow some Excedrin while trying to decipher the text.  SMS abbreviations were one of the original Egyptian plagues.  This is a little-known fact, since the sinking of Atlantis destroyed the last remaining ancient cellular towers, and since King James’s translators thought ”rofl” was Hebrew for “locust.”

Close enough.

Because Excedrin always leaves a bad taste in my mouth, causes me to feel jittery, and doesn’t actually kill the headache for at least a half-hour, by the time I arrived home sans “gro” or whatever I was supposed to “pk up,” I was not in the best of moods.  Specifically, I was all set to rant for at least an hour about the degeneration of the English language, the thickheadedness of at least three assistant principals, the ignorance of my students’ parents, and no I didn’t pick up the gro, next time spell it out, dang it.

Then I walked in the front door, took a deep breath to fuel the coming storm, and…

She had made cookies.

All the world’s a cookie jar, and all the men and women merely crumbs. … I happen to be one of the chocolate chips. — Garfield

Un biscuit ça n’a pas de spirit, c’est juste un biscuit. Mais, avant c’était du lait, des oeufs. Et, dans les oeufs, il y a la vie potentielle. — Jean-Claude Van Damme

(Shreds of Truth disclaimer: She doesn’t really use that many abbreviations… but she does make cookies.)

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