Schoolville: Chapter Nine
“Lowered expectations…”
–Jingle from “Mad T.V.”
Chapter Nine
“MR. KYLE! ARE YOU LISTENING?” I snapped my attention back to Mrs. Getty.
She moved into my personal space as she made her point.
“These student signatures on the first day class role are important! It’s how we establish our census for state funding. We have to prove that we have five thousand students, or we don’t get all of the funding that we are projected to get! Money to buy chalk and erasers! Money for those desks you wanted. Do you understand?”
Hmmm, gee. Seems kind of difficult, but I’ll manfully struggle through this until I get it. I thought to myself. Chalk for boards that I can’t write on, and desks from the nineteen fifties. Oh, OK! Now I remember… I’m at Wilson High, district football champions for the last three years in a row. Dr. Nedermeyer’s face came to mind. I knew where the money would go.
“These signatures are our proof that we have as many students enrolled as we say we do!” Her rant continued.
“Oh, OK. Gotcha.” I nodded vacantly.
“They can drop out tomorrow for all we care, but today is census day. Today is the day that counts!” She smiled, evidently feeling quite clever with that bit of sarcasm, not realizing that she had just invalidated her rant of the several previous faculty meetings about how these very same kids couldn’t drop out, because the state Board of Education was upset about that very thing. However, now that she had rolled the problem down onto the teachers, she had already forgotten about it, and pointing this out would be unappreciated by Mrs. Getty, even if she actually took the time to listen.
She was looking at me, obviously expecting some sort of reply. “Oh, OK. Thanks for making that clear. I won’t let you down!” I smartly replied.
I tried to sound like I had in the army when dealing with a moron who outranked me. It was called the‘YESSIR YESSIR THREE BAGS FULL’ approach. And by golly, it worked, because she smiled and backed off.
I felt nothing but disgust for her. My disappointment over the last few days still chapped my ass. I wondered if she knew that the year hadn’t even started yet, and I was already looking for a new job. And, if she was lucky, that would be the least of it. But, I would’ve been surprised if she was that perceptive.
“Do you realize that it is your first day as a teacher, Mr. Kyle? Your contract officially started an hour ago. You’re being paid.” Sara said with a weevily smile.
B.D. was aghast. “You don’t get paid for the shit of the last four days?”
“Nope, that wasn’t in the contract.” I shook my head in disbelief along with B.D.
“But how could you have been ready to teach without that room being in order?”
“Who knows? But that’s the contract?” I replied to B.D.
“What about all of these mandatory faculty meetings? Don’t they have to pay you for that?”
“Oh no! That’s just expected of me as a teacher.”
“It isn’t right.” B.D. replied.
“Well, it’s all in that contract we signed but can’t get a copy of.” I replied back.
B.D. stared at Sara. I wasn’t shocked to hear him say; “…and now you want something from us… Hmmm bitch? Well, let’s see. Maybe you’ll get it and maybe you won’t.”
I thought it sounded funny. Aloud, I replied to Sara Getty, “Gotcha.”
I smiled at her, and she smiled back. She clearly thought that I was too stupid to figure it out, and I saw no reason to enlighten her.
“Now remember this, it’s important!” Sara’s crypt-keeper head started talking again.
“Gotcha.” I replied as I tried to look as vacuous as possible.
“You’re learning. Mr. Kyle, I think that you’re finally learning!” This was the first time that she ever genuinely smiled at me. Not the sneering evil smile of the last few days, but a real smile. As I thought about it, I realized that I had never seen her smile before.
Maybe Sara thought that I was returning her smile, I’m not certain, but she definitely brightened further.
“Got it now?”
“Gotcha.” I reassured her for the sixth time.
The kids don’t count for shit after today; I thought to myself as I smiled at her; but we get to keep our overcrowded classrooms that smell like toilets. And, at least, Niedermeyer will get a raise and you’ll shut the hell up.
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I replied to Sara. “Well Mrs. Getty; I guess that I had better go get this census done, hadn’t I?”
She positively beamed at me.
Leaving the library, I walked up the stairwell, already packed with students who were slowly shuffling upward. Their expressionless faces and blank, glassy eyes weren’t promising. They were clearly expecting the worst. A few notice me, and I smiled at them.
“Good morning.” They looked away without a word. They weren’t having anything to do with me. It didn’t take much to figure out why either. They weren’t stupid. They were in for another royal screw-job of a year, and most of them had figured it out. They weren’t there to succeed; they were there because they had to be. Like Sergeant White had aptly pointed out; they couldn’t win, they couldn’t break even, and they couldn’t quit the game. What was there to smile about?
They all carried very heavy book packs up the stairs, bending over as they trudged up to the English wing.
B.D. piped up. “Don’t they remind you of the drawings of the slaves building the great pyramids?”
At least the slaves had the pyramids to gaze upon at the end of the day. What will these poor kids have at the end of today? I couldn’t help but wonder.
“Probably a fat dooby.” B.D. snickered.
“Shut up!” Horton frostily demanded.
Entering my room, the desks were almost full. The head custodian had delivered them yesterday. They were exactly the kind that I had seen as a kid when I watched old movies about public school, like “The Blackboard Jungle”. They were always in the movies when I was in high school: the old wooden desks. The new plastic ones with gum all over the bottoms had gone to the teachers with seniority. The wooden ones with gum all over the bottoms were all that was left, except that about eight of them were very old plastic desks, so wobbly that no one wanted to have them in their classroom anymore. I had put the newer desks on the front row, thinking that I would reward the kids who sat up front with the newer desks. However, in my absence, the kids had already moved them to the back row and were shoving one another in an attempt to get as far from the front of the class as possible.
When I entered, even this liveliness was replaced by sullen apathy. In an effort to remain as anonymous as possible, the rest of the students who were still standing, silently slunk into the closest desk available, avoided eye contact by laying their heads on their desks, and pretended to sleep.
“They certainly seem to have this place figured out, don’t they?” B.D. laughed.
I could feel the hopelessness painfully settling in. I could feel it in the pit of my stomach.
It seemed clear that these students were expecting me to be just like the other English teachers in the department. They weren’t stupid.
In one of those surreal, out-of-body experiences, I suddenly could see myself in 3 years acting just like all of the other teachers in the English department if I stayed at Wilson High. It was a revolting thought.
“Yet another reason to take the first train out of this place.” B.D. commented.
“First Mrs. Getty, now them… Nobody expects success except me. Did I miss something during my teacher training?”
“What do you think?” B.D. replied.
Looking around my room, nearly all of the students had their heads down on the desk. Students were still drifting in. Not knowing what else to do, I let them sleep. Naturally, there were 30 desks, and 33 students. “That explains the sofa,” B.D. smirked.
In a school where procedures were considered holy, even if rarely followed, it didn’t surprise me that they couldn’t manage to get the class counts right either. I invited the three extra students to sit at my planning table and desk, while I sat on my stool at the overhead projector. I simply couldn’t imagine what act of God it would take to get three more desks out of the custodians, or how long that might take.
B.D. shrugged. “Yeah, and can you imagine what the desks would look like, or what century they might be from? Maybe from the set of ‘Little House on the Prairie’?” Waiting for the tardy bell to ring, I watched the last four or five students lay their heads down to sleep. Their hopelessness overwhelmed me. It was so thick, I felt as though I were being smothered under a moldy blanket of hopelessness right along with them.
Just follow your breath; in through the nose, out through the mouth. Just follow your breath. I coached myself into relaxing.
When the tardy bell finally did ring, only a few students stirred, but they soon lay back down to nap. It was 7:15 A.M, and I had them for an hour and a half, and I only had two things to do that day. The first thing that I had to do was get that all-important census role taken.
“That’ll take 15 minutes.”
The second thing was to reset their expectations of me.
“My, we are ambitious aren’t we? That could take all year.” It was B.D. again.
“Not if I can help it! I didn’t come here to fail. I don’t intend to start now!” I answered back.
“Well, Ok! I’m with you! What are you going to do, get up and run out?” B.D. flung back.
“Oh grow up!” Horton snapped; through being patient with B.D.
I had spent the major part of the previous summer writing elaborate lesson plans for the school year, as I had been taught during student teaching. All of those plans went right out that proverbial window which I didn’t have. These plans were not appropriate now that I had become acquainted with the real Wilson High. They were much too elaborate. Perhaps I could use one when someone from administration came to observe and evaluate me. Otherwise, they were pure fantasy.
The first thing that I had to do before anything else, was to make it clear to the students that they didn’t know me, and had no right to presume otherwise. I felt angry that many of my students were silently communicating to me that they assumed I was a loser too. That is why their heads were on their desks.
B.D. looked over. “Well, you can’t blame them, but what are you going to do?”
“Well…” I shrugged. “I suppose I’ll start teaching them what I think they need to know.”
Glancing around, all of the kids were asleep, except for one or two and they had their chins on the backs of their hands. I let them sleep.
