Schoolville: Chapter 22
“Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years. To interpret history from this viewpoint is historical materialism; standing in opposition to this viewpoint is historical idealism.”
–Mao Tse Tung.
I only had about fifteen minutes before my first period class was over. Thanksgiving holidays were starting in two days, and it was hard to get anyone to work, most of all myself. Before me lay five glorious days of sleeping-in, lying about in the hammock, watching football, and finding new and creative ways of avoiding Thanksgiving dinner with the extended family. Who could ask for more? Glancing over, I noticed that B.D. had his feet up on the desk, and was fast asleep. Horton had evidently gone to take a powder as she was nowhere in sight.
“I’m sorry Jesse; could you go over that once more? I don’t understand your question.” I lazily glance up at a student who had asked a question while I was day dreaming.
Jesse was a special education student of whom I was very proud. He always showed up, and he always tried to do his best. I always took Jesse seriously when he asked a question.
“Well Mr. Kyle, I don’t understand. Is Thoreau saying we should overthrow injustice or not?”
“Why do you ask?” I pulled myself out of my torpor.
“Look at the second paragraph on page 119. See where it starts?”
“Ok, read it to me.” I prompted.
“It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most…” Jesse looked up at me.
“Enormous, Jesse.”
“Oh…Ok, enormous…wrong; he may still uh…have other concerns to engage hisself with; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.”
“That’s pretty good Jesse! So, what’s your question?”
“Well, doesn’t he want us to overthrow the injustice or not?”
It was tempting to answer him directly, get the thing over with, and move on. However, if I did that, another hand would only go up in a moment or two anyway. I was feeling too lazy to teach, so I decided to put the question back to them and let them talk.
“Does anyone have a thought about the passage that Jesse is asking about?” Nearly every hand went up. They were as serious about reading Thoreau’s work as the bible study students were down in Beth Minor’s room every Friday morning.
“Marisol? Do I see your hand up?”
“Yes Mr. Kyle. Please don’t make too big a deal out of it.”
“Well, I’ll try not to, but this is the first time you’ve raised your hand to speak all year. If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to savor the moment!”
That brought a few chuckles. Marisol was a twelfth grader, who was repeating eleventh grade English because she had failed last year. I was certain she had failed because she was bored shitless. She was way too bright not to understand.
“Mr. Kyle, I take it to mean that it isn’t our job to right every wrong. We don’t have to fight every bad thing; it’s just that we don’t have to support it either.”
“Pretty good Marisol! Does anyone have an example of how we can do this?” No one raised their hand, but they were all thinking very hard.
They were definitely into Thoreau. Frankly, they loved the guy. He was giving them permission to challenge authority for the first time, and a completely new world was being opened up to them. While it is true that most of them couldn’t easily understand his vocabulary or the diction of his writing, when it was made plain to them, they were enamored. Thoreau was speaking to them, and they were listening.
I decided to help them along. “Has anyone ever heard of Gandhi?”
David Gonzalez’s hand leapt up. “Oh, oh, oh, Mr. K! I’ve heard of that guy! He’s the one who threw the British out of India…or…somewhere!” He sputtered into quiet as he noticed everyone was looking at him. David was a real troublemaker. From the very first day of class when he had sauntered in, David had made it plain that he was barely tolerating me, or school. But today, he was suddenly an engaged student.
“You’ve got it David. Do you know how he did that?”
“Boycotts!” He was smiling now!
“Right again. I looked around at the rest of the class. The Indians quit buying products from England. When the market dried up, the English no longer had any reason to stay except for national pride. When Gandhi didn’t attack them directly, and treated them with respectful firmness, they had a way to leave with their pride intact. Pretty neat trick, don’t you think?”
Several students nodded.
“See, Gandhi just asked his countrymen not to buy anything from England. This was all he had to do. Later he did resort to nonviolent confrontation, but that’s another story. Can anyone think of another example?”
Francine’s hand slowly crept up.
B.D. opened one eye and spoke. “Did you see her in here this morning?”
“No, she got past me again. Did you?”
“Naw.” B.D. drawled. “I guess that we need a day off. We’re starting to slip.”
We both glanced over at Leslie who was seated at my desk.
“Francine’s your only visitor today Mr. Kyle.”
B.D. and I looked at each other. “You lazy slob!” He laughed at me. You don’t even know who is in your class this morning.”
“All too true;” I agreed. Then pointing to Francine, I acknowledged her. “Yes Francine?”
“Awww, Mr. Kyle, I ‘spect you gonna think I’m stupid or some such, but I think Doonesbury is like that.” She was speaking very slowly and embarrassed. I wasn’t fooled though. Francine had no shame. B.D. opened one eye again. “You know she’s going somewhere with this, don’t you?”
“Let’s find out.” Then turning back to Francine, I prodded for more information. “Francine, please explain.”
“Well, he always usin’ humor to make funa people who are Republicans and such. I think he doin’ it to make a point.”
“Francine, I gotta hand it to you! I never thought of Gary Trudeau as helping to overcome injustice before. I’ll have to mull that one over.”
“O.K,” was all she said.
B.D.’s boots hit the floor with a loud THUMP. B.D. was sitting up now.
“You’re not buying this are you? I know she’s up to something now!”
“Yeah,” I chewed my lower lip as I cogitated this. “Where do you suppose she is going with this?”
B.D, who had a love affair going with Francine, pushed on. “Let’s find out, shall we?”
Francine and I had had eye contact for some time as I conversed with B.D. Now I asked. “Francine, what are you thinking?”
To her credit, she didn’t bat an eyelash, although she did blush a little. “Mr. Kyle, you got all that paper (pointing to my roll of yellow butcher paper) and you got all those pens (pointing to my huge coffee can full of permanent magic markers). I been thinking that this place could use a little cartoon work in the hallway to start people thinking, you know…kind of like that Doonesbury fellow.”
B.D. smiled, we both knew where this was going now, as did most of the rest of the kids in class.
“And just when do you propose to work on this art and not get caught?”
“Well, if you wuz to forget to lock your door during lunch, no one’d know the better…” She drifted off into an implicit silence with a shrug.
I remained silent as I mulled this request over, when the bell made me jump, releasing us for the next period. As the kids began to rise and leave, I yelled to Francine over the noise, “Let’s talk about that tomorrow, Ok?”
“Yeah, whatever; Mr. Kyle…” She languidly replied as she tried to steal my baseball cap off of my desk, saw me looking, replaced it, walked over to me and said; “You thought I wuz gonna steal your cap now, didn’t you Mr. Kyle.”
“Weren’t you?” I asked her back.
“Naw, I’d never let anyone steal from you. You can trust me you know.” I had to smile at that. For the life of me, I hoped she was telling me the truth, but I wasn’t sure.
“Go to your next class Francine, I’ll think about it.”
“You do that, Mr. Kyle.” Francine walked out.
As was my habit, I waited for the kids to leave before I left my room. Slowly the filed out the door and I grabbed several papers and turned to go to the Xerox machine in the math department. As I walked toward the door, I saw Mrs. Getty slither in and give her cold smile that so much resembled the desiccated face of a mummy. It made my stomach sag to see her, like when I rode my motorcycle past road kill that I couldn’t completely avoid. It was mildly disgusting.
“Mr. Kyle, I need your help.”
“Do tell.” I gave her my most vapid and bland look. I sure as hell wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to tweak her nose.
Her eyebrows narrowed a bit as though she was trying to figure out if I was being sarcastic or just stupid. Evidently she decided on the latter, because she let my ambiguous reply pass. “Has Rose Martinez been in your class during the last month?”
Rose had been the student that they had moved out to allow Mark Hammond to move in. She was a willing student with a super attitude. Of course, she would be the one to go to Crazy Janey’s classroom, not one of my underachievers, or a troublemaker like David Gonzalez.
Since I didn’t take attendance, I didn’t know. But, Leslie did. I knew that Leslie would probably take better attendance than me anyway.
I answered her. “I don’t know…” before I could continue, she interrupted.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘YOU DON’T KNOW’?”
“I mean that I don’t remember every student that came through my door for the last month. Happily, I do keep a written record though. It is called an attendance book.” I intentionally kept my back to her as I stated this as though I really meant it.
“I know what a student attendance book is, Mr. Kyle!”
“Oh, good! Then you may recall that people often write these things down precisely so they won’t have to remember.” I turned and gave her a very friendly and very stupid smile.
She looked puzzled and poisonous simultaneously.
“Well, has she been here, or hasn’t she?”
“According to my records, she was withdrawn from my class before Halloween.” As I hastily glanced at the page for that period, I realized that she had in fact, been in my class everyday. I knew this because Leslie had written her name in at the bottom of my class rolls and had put a check by each date. But, I wasn’t going to rat her out to Sara Getty, at least not before I knew what was going on.
“Well,” Sara began to explain, with an oddly patient voice; “She has been in every class that she is supposed to be in, except her English III class with Crazy Ja… uh, I mean Mrs. Ackerman.”
I couldn’t help but smile at the fact that even a bilious old bitch like Sara Getty could actually find time to cast stones at someone else.
“Oh, so she was supposed to be in Crazy Janey’s class, but she has been skipping it? Is that what’s been going on?”
“Her name is Mrs. Ackerman!” Sara corrected me. I made no reply, so she continued. “And, yes…that appears to be the gist of the problem. Do you know anything about her whereabouts? Are you SURE that she hasn’t been here?”
“I never said that she hadn’t been here. In fact, she has been here everyday.”
“Why has she been here?” Sara was starting to get an edge on her voice again.
“This is a school, isn’t it? I don’t mean to be stupid, but aren’t kids supposed to go to class, Mrs. Getty?”
Her eyes narrowed as it began to dawn on her that I might be just as stupid as she thought. “She was transferred out of your class nearly a month ago. She shouldn’t be in this class.”
“Oh! That would account for why the attendance office dropped her name off my class roles.” I scowled in confusion myself. “But, she gave me a schedule transferring back into my class about three weeks ago.”
Sara put a very nasty sneer on her face. “Don’t hand me that! She was never handed you a schedule!”
“It may come as news to you, but I don’t have any reason to lie to you about that. As it happens, I still have it.” Reaching into the notebook, I pulled a course schedule out of the plastic pocket on the front cover of the notebook.
“Here it is, as a matter of fact.” I handed it to her.
She snatched it with a venomous look on her face and pulling back her prim little shoulders, stared at it for several minutes. Then she quietly commented. “This is the best forgery I’ve ever seen.” She showed genuine admiration on her face.
“Forgery?” I asked her as I peered around to look at the paper.
“Look here.” She pointed at the course numbers on the left hand column. “She copied this from a twelfth-grader’s schedule. Your course numbers start with a different first digit because you teach eleventh grade.”
“Wow! That looks just like the real thing.”
She nodded. “It does look real. I can see how you would be fooled by this.”
“Shall I send her to your office when she comes to class?” I asked.
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“No, that won’t be necessary;” she condescendingly replied. Spinning on her heel, she put the fake course schedule in her notebook as she left.
I leaned on the desk listening to her heels clicking on the linoleum as she marched off down the hall. I translated this to mean that she would handle this in her own inimitable style. Rose was in for a bad afternoon.
B.D was laughing as he figured out what had happened and explained it to me.
“So, Rose couldn’t stand being in Crazy Janey’s class, and forged a new schedule back into your class.”
“Yeah B.D., but I have to admit that this is embarrassing. How could I have overlooked a student in my room for a month, and not realized that I hadn’t gotten an updated roll showing she transferred back into my class! Remember how Leslie had to keep adding her name to the bottom of the roll sheet?”
“Well,” B.D. conciliated. “What can I say? They did set you up to fail by overwhelming you. It had to happen sooner or later.”
“Thanks!” I said appreciatively. I liked having such a handy excuse. Then I thought it over.
“Ok…so she forged a pass to get back into my room, but she couldn’t find a way off of Janey’s list, and Janey’s been counting her absent every day.” I thought aloud to B.D.
“Still,” B.D. pondered, “It is kind of flattering.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “She is breaking into my class, while so many students are looking for ways to break out of the school. I wonder where she is now.”
“Why do you ask?” B.D. was clearly curious about what I was going to do.
I went over to my computer, and was able to pull up her schedule. “Hah!” I laughed. “As it turns out, she’s right next door in Coach Lindley’s American History class. I can see her before Sara does.”
“Oh my, this should be real educational!” B.D. sarcastically giggled.
Lindley was a real sad case. Somehow, he had figured out that if he brought an old VCR from home, and showed civil war movies, he didn’t really have to teach. Since he was one of the football coaches for a football dynasty like Wilson High, he knew that he would never be called down about it. He did have nearly a 100% passing rate, since it was virtually impossible to fail his class. Sara Getty chose to allow this to continue so that he inflated the rest of the history department’s passing rates, which were nearly as dismal as the English department’s.
“No wonder the kids have never heard of Thoreau, or anyone else, for that matter!” B.D. sighed disgustedly as we walked toward Lindley’s room.
I quickly walked to the hall, and pulled open the door to Coach Lindley’s room. The kids were asleep, all except a few of them. Some funky movie with an actor playing a heroic Union officer saving a Southern Belle from a bunch of horny, drooling country boys was on the T.V. Coach Lindley was busy designing football plays when I walked in. Looking up, he smiled and walked over to join me in the hall.
“How may I help you?” He was always very friendly and polite.
I smiled back. “Do you have Rose Martinez in your class?”
“Don’t know…let me look.”
“Jesus!” B.D. was disgusted. “He doesn’t even know who his students are?”
“Well, Tom doesn’t either!” Horton had suddenly turned back up.
“Who the hell asked you?” B.D. scowled at her.
I didn’t reply, but as I looked into the room, I saw that he had finished checking his seating chart, and was walking down a row of brand new desks and waking up a student. It was Rose. She looked quite grumpy at being awakened before her usual naptime was over. I could see Coach Lindley motion toward me, and she slowly crawled out of her large flat topped desk and walked out to the hallway.
“Yes, Mr. Kyle?”
“Ummm…Rose, I think you may be in trouble.”
Giving me her best wide-eyed innocent stare, her voice was a little too casual to be real. “Why is that, Mr. Kyle?”
“Because you forged up a fake schedule so that you could come back to my class. Mrs. Getty just came to see me about it, and she’s going to call you in.”
“Oh,” she exhaled. “That!”
“Didn’t you think that they’d eventually catch you?”
“I…don’t know…what I thought. I had to come back to your class. Have you ever sat through one of Mrs. Ackerman’s classes?” Suddenly Rose became angry, and her face began to turn red.
“Well, I can only imagine what she’s like.” I sympathized. “But, probably the quickest way out of my class is to act like you want in to it. You know how things work around here.”
“Yeah.” She exhaled again. She was looking deflated. Then I saw tears begin to roll down her beautiful face and into her long, lustrous black hair.
Rose had hair that cascaded down to her waistline, which was slender. She had long skinny arms and legs for her size, but she only stood about five feet five inches tall. For this reason, Rose wore stiletto-heeled shoes, no matter what else she was wearing. She loved to wear black and red. She had soft tawny brown skin, and those large soft brown doe-eyes that melted half of the boys in the school when she swept a glance over them. With perfect teeth, and a flawless complexion on her blushing ruddy face, she was always the center of hallway attention as she would stand and toss her hair with a flip of her fingers, while pretending not to be aware of how she looked.
Rose was a straight A student, an honor roll inductee, Vice-President of the National Honor Society, and a Pep squad officer. She was also savvy enough with computers to forge a perfect fake schedule, just like the school issued. I wasn’t worried about Rose’s future.
B.D. laughed. “When they fire you from teaching, maybe she’ll hire you and you can go to work for her!”
I couldn’t help it. I put my arm around her shoulders. “Rose, you’re busted. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know what to do, Mr. Kyle. What would you do?” She was quietly sobbing now.
“What else can you do, except fess up?” I shrugged. “I already told her you were in my class every day. She knows you weren’t skipping school. Since you weren’t truant, they’ll probably just give you I.S.S.”
She nodded slowly and exhaled. “My parents are gonna kill me.”
“You know, you nearly got away with it. Next time, find a way to get your name deleted off Crazy Janey’s attendance rolls! I’d love to have you back.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“Don’t take too much shit about it either. Just take your punishment and it’ll all go away. No one really wants the other students to know how you faked the pass. If you offer to keep it quiet, they probably will let you off with a stern lecture. Just turn on the water works and get a little sympathy from Mrs. Getty. Maybe that’ll work.” In the back of my mind I couldn’t help but wonder if she wasn’t playing me in much the same way.
“Ok.” She sniffled.
“OH, and by the way, next time be certain you get the right course numbers on the course schedule. That’s how you got caught, if you want to know. You copied your schedule from a senior and got the first digit wrong.”
She looked at me and smiled crookedly. “Thank you, Mr. Kyle.”
“Not a problem. I’m pleased as hell that you liked my class that much. If they’ll let you come back, I’ll be happy to take an extra student.”
She nodded. “Ok, Mr. Kyle. Thanks.” She smiled bleakly at me as she brushed her long black hair behind her ears.
“Why did they have to send me to another class? You were my favorite teacher Mr. Kyle.”
B.D. sneered at me. “You are such an easy teacher, that’s why!”
I shrugged and ignored B.D. “I wish that I could tell you Rose.” I didn’t have the heart to mention Mark Hammond. I was certain that it wouldn’t help her to feel any better.
She nodded slowly, knowing that I couldn’t help her anymore and turned to go back into Coach Lindley’s room to finish her nap. As she opened the door, I glanced quickly into Lindley’s room to see what he was teaching. He glanced up quickly and smiled. He had switched from designing football plays to reading a novel. It was “Rudy”. He turned his eyes back to the book as Rose walked toward her desk. Above his head, the heroic Yankee officer was pulling off his Yankee uniform preparing to screw the Southern Belle, who was obviously quite taken by his manly charm and good looks.
“Very symbolic, don’t you think?” B.D. asked with a wry voice. “Kind of gets you right here, don’t it.” He rolled his hand into a fist and lightly punched his heart.
Walking back to my room, I picked up my pile papers for the Xerox machine and headed off toward the math department, but changed direction instead for the English teacher’s lounge.
“Aren’t we going the wrong way?” B.D. politely urged me to turn the other way.
“Well, I lost some time with that little problem, and the English department is closer.”
“I thought that you’d decided to avoid that group. You haven’t been in there for months.”
“True…true, but I guess once won’t hurt anything, will it?”
“I guess not,” he shrugged as we turned the corner and headed for the English teacher’s lounge.
The English Teacher’s lounge was actually a very large room broken up into separate areas by the not-so-clever use of cabinets and bookcases. One of the areas was used to house a very large, cranky, oft-broken, and badly outdated copying machine. When teachers took a break around the big table in the lounge, someone could Xerox copies without disturbing them because there were several large bookcases separating the copying area from the break area. It managed to mute the sounds of the copying machine, but by some strange trick of acoustics, allowed the person at the copying machine to hear every word being said by those on the other side of the bookcases at the tables in the break area. Thus the person at the machine was privy to every word said by the people at the break area, while remaining hidden themselves unless someone actually looked around the cases to see if anyone was there. Prior to that day, I was unaware of this too, since I didn’t go into that break area.
Since I just couldn’t stand looking at my English colleagues anymore, I made a habit of walking to the science and math building to use the teacher’s lounge or the bathroom, or to do any copying. They were always having fun over there. It was real juvenile stuff, laughter, telling jokes, calling each other by their first names, stuff like that. I was actually getting to know some of the science teachers. They were nice. Many of them were new to teaching. I had even begun to sneak my lunches over and eat with them. I wasn’t thinking of any of that however, when I walked into the teacher’s lounge, and turned into the copying area and began to copy sets of review sheets about Civil Disobedience.
I was about halfway through my first set of papers when I began to tune in to the conversation going on behind the bookshelves.
“Yeah, he loves to wear that motorcycle helmet out to the parking lot, so that he can show it off, doesn’t he!” That was Crazy Janey’s voice.
An artificially high falsetto voice: “EWWW, like I’m soooo impressed!” I recognized it as Brenda Moss, who was presently completing her fourth divorce, and had made sure that I heard all about it during the first week of school during her ‘All men are scum’ speech. “He’s such a weenie.”
“Who does he think he is?” It was Crazy Janey again. “Did you hear him bragging about his big paying job before he was a teacher? Like I believe that!”
Jessica Miller’s voice: What’s he doing teaching if he made that kind of money? I’d sure as hell be anywhere but here! I don’t believe it anyway. You know what they say about men who teach! ‘Those who can . . . do; those who can’t . . . teach.” Her voice trailed off.
B.D. looked at me and smirked. “She’s right…you know…”.
“Oh, I know!” I answered back.
“He’s such a whiner. He keeps saying that he can’t keep up with all of the work. Maybe he should go back to sales!” This voice took me a moment to recognize. It was Margaret Atwood’s voice. She was the self-appointed expert and queen maven of Advanced Placement English. She continued: “I told him the other day that he hadn’t earned the right to complain until he had been here at least two years!”
B.D. looked over at me. “Did she tell you that?”
I nodded my head, “Yep.” Then I held my finger to my lips and signaled for him to remain quiet. I wanted to hear more.
“He really thinks he’s special because he teaches ESL, doesn’t he?” It was Brenda Moss again.
For the first time, I heard Rose Ann McMillan: “He’ll catch hell when he actually has to teach them something hard, like Civil Disobedience. His kids won’t all be talking so highly of him when he begins to bore them to death too.”
“Oh God!” It was Crazy Janey again. “You should hear them gush on and on about how he doesn’t bore them. It’s all I ever hear about. His students don’t know a damned thing either!”
Rose Ann: “I have some of his students for psychology. They go ooonnn… and ooonnn… about what a nice teacher he is!”
Glenda Voss spoke up for the first time in her nasally twang. “I hear it in speech class too! He really thinks he’s special! He actually likes the little fuckers!”
Rose Ann: “And he’s all they talk about. I had one kid who suggested I should run my class to bedlam like he does, so I can ‘be cool’ too! It’s as if he’s building some sort of cult following or something. I think he’s dangerous.”
“Oh my God!”
Jessica Miller: He won’t be that nice once he’s been around for a few years, no one is.”
That comment brought much agreement, and then Jessica spoke again. “He’ll learn.”
Rose Ann McMillan: “He sure will!”
I just couldn’t take it anymore. I pulled my papers off the machine, shut it off, and left before they knew I was there. B.D. was still goggling over what had he had just overheard. “What are you going to do?”
“Well for one thing, do you remember how Francine wanted to make some cartoons and put them up?”
“Yeah.”
“As long as she is willing to include those cows, I’m gonna supply the paper and markers!”
We walked quietly back toward the room, then I added as an afterthought. “Why should the kids sneak around and make ’em at lunch. I think they should make the posters in class. I’ll call it a ‘civil disobedience lab’. And another thing…I think everyone should contribute to this project. We don’t need to hide it either. I think it’s time for a little applied Civil Disobedience. I’m gonna put them right out in the hallway for everyone to see!”
“Well, that should be interesting!”
“Won’t it though?” I couldn’t help but smile at what that bunch in the teacher’s lounge were going to look like by the time Francine and the others were done drawing them.
“When are we going to start?”
“The day we get back from Thanksgiving!”
“Well, Thoreau would be proud.” B.D. said.
“I wonder if I’m headed for jail, like he did.”
“Margaret was right about one thing though, you are a world class whiner.” B.D. added just to make me feel better.
