Schoolville: Chapter Four
“Welcome to Duloc, such a perfect town.
Here we have some rules, let us lay them down.
Don’t make waves, stay in line,
and we’ll get along fine.
Duloc is a perfect place.”
–From the movie “Shrek”.
Chapter Four
My second day of preparation began with a faculty meeting in the library, which featured a cake and a welcome speech by Mr. Gage, the Principal. After that, we broke up into department meetings before being allowed to work in our rooms. The English department had been instructed to meet in the room of the English Dean, Jessica Miller. She had a palace.
“Good morning ladies.” Jessica smiled toothily. “How was your summer?” All the teachers around me sat up straight and tall. Glenda, who sat in the desk next to me leaned forward scowling. Lisa Daniels, who could not possibly slide into a student desk had rolled Jessica’s desk chair around to the front of the room, and was leaning back in it, her polyester mumu sliding halfway up her immense thighs, which she couldn’t pull together. Utterly disinterested in whatever was going on, she carefully ate another piece of cake from the “Welcome back faculty” party that we had just left in the library.
I found it hard to look away from Lisa. She was fascinating, yet horrifying to gaze upon; a one-person Cirque de Freak. Her giant paws neatly manipulated her fork as she primly sat and managed to scrape every crumb from her plate, and slide it into a mouth so small, a postage stamp could cover it as it sat atop three jiggling chins. Her total concentration lay on the crumbs in front of her, as she began carefully cleaning the plate with her fingers and licking them.
“Jesus! What a pig!” B.D. leaned back and crossed his arms as he gazed at Lisa.
“Now don’t judge a book by its cover.” Horton intoned.
“Why don’t we get started girls?” Jessica beamed. “Let’s start with the introductions, shall we? Margaret, let’s start with you.”
B.D. shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Aren’t we the only new ones here?” He whispered to me.
Margaret turned around to look at me. “I’m Margaret Atwood. I teach the 11th grade Advanced Placement.”
“Are you the only A.P. teacher in 11th grade?” Jessica prompted her.
“Oh no, Vanessa teaches two sections.”
Vanessa Reagan smiled at me. “At least she smiles!” B.D. noticed.
Then Jessica began to scan the room. “Bill Crane’s the only one missing. He never comes before the first day of school.” Then she smiled at Lisa. “Why don’t you introduce yourself, Lisa?”
“No!” Lisa abruptly replied as she sadly contemplated her empty plate and began to struggle up from her chair. “He met me last spring. If he doesn’t remember who I am, that’s his problem.” She made it to her feet and began waddling. “I’ll be back in a minute.” She swayed out carrying her plate with a greedy look in her beady little eyes. Her tiny mouth was pursed into an “O”.
B.D. turned to Horton. “So…is this the book or is this the cover?”
Horton glared at him.
Vanessa Reagan, who was sitting on my left, turned and smiled at me again. “Lisa really is a very nice person.”
Jessica Miller nodded in agreement, adding to what Vanessa told me. “You’ll learn after you’ve been here a while, that you have to adjust your expectations for Lisa.” She smiled as though this information would be helpful to me in some way.
B.D. again: “Yeah, adjust your expectations downward. Apparently no one expects her to raise her behavior to that of a polite adult.”
Suddenly Horton spoke up from behind me. “Lisa has been one of the faculty of Wilson High for over twenty years. She has earned special privileges.”
B.D. lit into her. “OH, yes indeedy! It seems those privileges include permission to be caustic, discourteous, and thoughtless, and no one will expect anything better of her! The district can’t fire her because she has a continuing contract, so instead, everyone has to tolerate her lousy social skills. That’s her ‘special privilege’!”
Horton sniffed in disapproval. “Why would they do that, Mr. Know-it-all?”
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“You figure it out Mrs. Moron!” B.D. drawled back. “But since she’s a teacher, she certainly is living down to my expectations. Lisa’s a WHALE of a success as an ‘educator’ though, just like you!” He sneered at Horton, who promptly put her nose in the air, rose, and left.
Beth Minor covered the awkward moment by reintroducing herself. Beth had platinum blonde hair that was slightly lighter at the roots. She had reached middle age a bit overweight, but she was still very charming. She was wearing a solid black dress. The last time I saw her she was wearing a solid blue dress. She loved to wear these to set off her hair color and her baby blue eyes.
Inevitably I glanced back at Glenda. She was scowling at her hands on her desk top.
Jessica was droning on introducing Janey Ackerman, Rose Ann McMillan, Brenda Moss and Lorraine Hodges in the meantime. I noticed that Janey and Brenda were staring hard at me. Something in their stare made me a bit queasy. Glancing, neither of them had on a wedding ring. I quickly shifted my gaze. This was becoming too weird.
“Hot times at Wilson High, HUH Kimosabe?”
“Stuff it, B.D!”
Jessica came to me last. “This is Tom Kyle, the newest member of our 11th grade English faculty. You may have met him last April when he interviewed for Elmer Friesenhahn’s position when Elmer retired.”
Several of those present rolled their eyes while others smiled. Jessica continued. “We all know Elmer was ready to retire. After 30 years, he was a bit too negative.” A murmur of agreement gathered voice as Lisa Daniels waddled around the door frame and back to her chair carrying her third piece of cake piled onto a tiny white Styrofoam plate.
B.D. snickered. “…So, old Elmer was considered negative by this group? He must have been a real piece of work!”
Jessica glanced at Lisa before continuing. “I told Tom that I was hiring him to replace Elmer. We needed a token male on the 11th grade faculty since we were losing Elmer.”
This was as true as it had been surprising. Being retired from a business career, I assumed Jessica was joking when she had said this during our interview. In the business world, no one would ever tell a new-hire that they were “being hired as a token” unless they wanted to court a lawsuit, not to mention having to spend six miserable months in sensitivity training.
Jessica then rose and began passing out large stacks of paper to each teacher as she walked up and down the capacious aisles of her palace. “These are the lists of additional duties that we have assigned each of you, along with lists of the special education students and their modifications.”
The modifications, or “mods”, were forms listing all the extra considerations I had to give each special education student when I taught them, so they wouldn’t fail. Each student had a different list of modifications. Some students had as many as ten mods.
Long ago, the Supreme Court had mandated that students with special needs had to be “mainstreamed”. This was a term meaning they had to be taught in a regular classroom, if at all possible, and it was almost always theoretically possible. Because each of these complex students had different needs, I had to be all things to all people in order to fulfill everything on my list of mods. I glanced at the top page. It was the mods for a student named Donita Anderson. Because she had Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), I was to allow her freedom to move about the classroom during teaching time, or at least to overlook her fidgeting and redirect her as necessary.
“How are you going to allow her to roam around in that tiny little hole you teach in?” B.D. snickered. “You don’t even have room for aisles wider than eight inches?”
The next mod for Donita was that I was to encourage her to work in groups as much as possible because it was too much to expect her to sit still for 90 minutes at a time. She had six other mods too. Among others, I was to give her extra time for homework, extra time for tests, and preferential seating, whatever that meant.
“That means you have to put her in the front row.” B.D. commented.
“Does it?” I shrugged. “Why don’t they say that? Why is this ambiguous? I assume that ‘preferential seating’ means ‘whatever the student prefers to sit’.”
“No stupid, it means ‘wherever you prefer her to sit’.”
“Well, since I’m gonna do that with all of my students anyway. Why would they write this for her?”
B.D. thought for a minute. “Hmmm. Ok, maybe you aren’t too stupid…”
My eyes wandered back to the list. I was to give Donita extra praise, set limits for her, and allow her frequent bathroom breaks due to the medication she was on. I glanced again at the mod she had for working in groups. The next student was King Davis.
King was an emotionally disturbed student. He was assigned to the same class as Donita, but his only mod was that he was to be given a ‘quiet learning environment free of distractions’ with strict limits for behavior.
“How are you going to allow Donita to work in groups, or roam that tiny little room and give King a quiet learning environment free of distractions?”
I shrugged. “Shit if I know.” I counted the number of special ed. students assigned to me. Out of my 170 students, 47 were special education students. Their mods were attached. I closed the list of mods. “I can’t comply with these instructions.”
“You have to! If a student fails, and they find out you didn’t comply with every mod, you could lose your job.” Horton had returned.
“Or worse, the school district could get sued!” B.D. laughed at Horton.
The solution to my problem was a no-brainer. “None of them will fail, B.D. I’ll see to that.”
“Just like all these other teachers do?” Horton asked.
“Yep! I guess so. What choice do I have? Anyway, it’s time to wash mold off my walls.” The meeting was ending. B.D. and I rose to go continue our teaching preparations with a bucket and sponge.
