This morning I woke up, sleepily turned on the t.v. to see aircraft carriers headed towards Libya with an anonymous official stating that this doesn't necessarily mean there will be U.S. military intervention. But isn't this how so many of our wars since Vietnam have begun? It was speculated what might happen if one of our jets from this aircraft carrier were shot down by Gadhafi. We can only imagine from past such scenarios about what might happen. A child takes a gun to school to show-off. How high are the chances that somebody's going to accidentally get killed there?
This country is nearing economic devastation. The opposition forces in Benghazi, Libya's second largest city, have stated that they are against foreign military intervention. So why are we doing this? Why are we considering arming random opposition forces? Why did Hillary Clinton just state that the U.S. is "ready to offer ANY kind of assistance that ANYONE wishes to have from the U.S.", regarding Libya? Of course it's horrible that Gadhafi is gunning down his own people. Of course we oppose such actions but why do we need to go into a foreign country, particularly a Middle Eastern country AGAIN with the true possibility if not probability that something will happen, which could be nearly anything, to get us back once again into another war, just when we are supposedly pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan? Why do we continue to respond in this same way? Isn't there anyone in our government that can create a NEW U.S.A. that figures out other means for successful intervention than endless war? Apparently that wouldn't be our leader whom we had such high hopes for.
I wrote previously about how I had stopped to visit Elk Falls, Kansas on my way by train from San Francisco to Philadelphia, and being tired and having an invitation, I had decided to stay in Elk Falls to rest and write my dissertation. I had been asked if I would like to housesit a mobile home that was for sale to keep it nice and appealing for prospective buyers and I had agreed and moved in to the trailer with just an air bed and a desk and a lot of National Geographic maps. I also had my notes and source books to begin working on my dissertation. The title had been approved, which was, "A Morphological Description of the Harappan Script", which means I was going to analyze every sign in every context in which it appeared. In other words, with a sourcebook that listed every inscription written in the Indus Valley script that had been found, with over 800 pages of lists of undeciphered words, I was going to analyze the behavior of every sign in every word and give the results, which would be a list of spelling rules. A good example of what I mean is if I said to you, assuming you are a native speaker of English, "There is a word 'djekra'. Just guessing, would you say that that is a word in English?" I doubt there is a native English speaker out there who would say yes. You would say no. Why? Well, one reason is because English doesn't have any words that begin with "dj", unless they are borrowed from some other language. That, therefore, would be a spelling rule in English: No word begins with 'dj', or, D+J is not a permissible initial consonant cluster. This can be done with an undeciphered script because it is simple observation though a lot of it, a LOT of it. But one by one these observations can be noted and the end result is a grammar of an undeciphered script, which is a stepping stone toward a decipherment.
Other than this on-going obsession, I was pretty happy to settle for at least a while in such a tiny town. There was no traffic to speak of, no pollution at all: no water pollution, air pollution, no trash in the streets or gutters or empty lots, no billboards, no non-natural noise. There were great wild animals (twice I saw a mountain lion just crossing the road lackadaisically) and a plethora of beautiful singing birds. The town was hilly, not flat, with lots of trees and vegetation, a nice river running right through town complete with a waterfall, a historical iron bridge running across it. The operative word is scenic. And quiet. And laid-back. People mostly were farmers, some ranchers, some drove long distances to Wichita or somewhere else for work. There was no crime to speak of except the guy that kept siphoning gas tanks in the middle of the night. I could walk down to the local cafe and sit there all day over my dissertation and cups of coffee without anyone caring since it was never crowded. I could take long walks in the safe, beautiful countryside, sit in a lawn chair at night under the extraordinary spectacle of actually zillions of stars like it's supposed to be in the night sky. I could swim in the river and under the waterfall and only fear the large catfish and pointy-billed gar rather than pollution. I could walk down to the pottery or quilt shop to see their latest creations. People would say hello, albeit a little suspiciously, their cards a little close to their chests, but it was all right, not threatening or anything. Altogether, it was so relaxing there and I thought I could really turn out a solid dissertation under these conditions.
Then I stayed longer. That was the mistake. Some places are great to visit but are not good to stay to live in, as the saying goes. The mobile home sold and I was about to leave when the redhead's husband, the gentle man I have told you about, asked me if I'd like to rent their old house for $100/month and stay. It was a tiny cottage with just a bit of an L-shaped back room that could be used for a bedroom. It had a small living room with a nice wood floor and a little adjoining kitchen. The trouble was that it was completely packed with whatever they had left behind when they moved next door and with boxes of storage from various periods in their lives. It was also completely filthy and desperately needed painting, the whole house. At first, having lived in many fixer-uppers I said no, no way. Then the redhead said that they had lived in this little house for thirty years, how they had raised their kids there and were never going to move from Elk Falls. They loved their new house next door and it was part of the same piece of property so they were never going to sell it, they were never going to move. She said if I'd clean it all up and paint it all, I could live there for as long as I liked, it would be all mine and for only $100/month. I took the bait and started working. It took eight hours a day for two weeks just to get all the stuff out of there and cleaned. It took a couple of weeks more to paint it, including painting the outside. Once it was done, though, I was glad I had chosen to stay and settled in. Someone suggested that I apply for a substitute teacher's license to teach at a K-12 school in the next town, which I did. I started subbing there and was quickly asked if I'd rather take a job as a para (teacher's assistant) in the Special Ed Department. It didn't pay as well as subbing but it was full-time so the end result was certainly going to be higher pay and at a regular amount that I could budget. Without any background at all in Special Ed by my own education or experience, I accepted the job. I was given a desk in the highly funded Special Ed Department and told to teach several subjects to 1-8 students with special needs. I thought, hey, I'm creative, I'm smart, it doesn't bother me that these children are a bit odd, as I would say I definitely also fit in that category. In fact, since I was given carte blanche to teach them as I saw fit, I thought of it as highly preferable to being straight-jacketed into typical public school, mediocre, rigid, antiquated teaching practices in the regular classroom (not that I have an opinion about it). I took it on with gusto.
The first period I taught one boy English composition. He was somewhat retarded and it was expected that he would work the farm with his dad and was just passing through school for no particular reason except the law until he was sixteen. However, he told me right away, for a reason I will never know, that he wanted to write a play. Having been a playwright in New York, I said if he wanted to write a play then he would have to do it as it is really done, with acts, scenes, character lists, etc. He agreed. He decided that he wanted to write a murder mystery and the killer and victim would be people there in the Special Ed Department. That was fine, if not amusing. Every day I would sit with him as he wrote his play, his face in full concentration, determined. He would start to write. Immediately he would ask something like, "How do you spell 'the'?" I would reply, "t-h-e." Then he would say, "How do you spell 'man'?" I would reply, "m-a-n." He would ask me how to spell every single word all hour long as he wrote every single day and every single day he would ask me how to spell many of the same words. But I thought, hey, why not? What matters is his determination to write a play and I'm sitting here getting paid. Why shouldn't I tell him how to spell the words? So I was happy with that. And lo and behold if after several weeks he finished a three-act play that wasn't bad at all being a high school kid's work. And as soon as he had finished he said he wanted to write another one. I was so impressed that I wrote a letter to his parents and said once he graduates and becomes a farmer, how about hiring him a secretary and buying him a tape recorder because this boy really wants to write and lots of professional writers record their work and have a secretary to transcribe it. I don't know what happened, if they heeded my suggestion or not. Actually, I really hope they did. He loved writing plays.
One class, the biggest one I had, was U.S. History. Eight kids, all with mild to severe learning disabilities, two retarded. I was told just to teach them any way I wanted to and it didn't really matter since they couldn't learn anyway (really). I thought, well, uh-huh, we'll see about that. They were in the part of the book (which was the regular class history book) that taught the period of history that included the Revolutionary War. Right away I could see that they weren't able to retain information but only for sure in terms of the typical way that information is taught and assuming that they could not take in information in any unusual way since they couldn't take it in the "normal" way. Considering I've never been a fan of normal anyway, I decided to do an experiment. What they especially couldn't do was listen for very long, follow a rational line of argument and remember it. So I looked around for something else to try. The school library had a few shelves of videotapes, some that were Hollywood movies and some that were Nova, National Geographic and other PBS programs. There weren't a lot of choices on the Revolutionary War but one was The Patriot with Mel Gibson. Now, of course, "normally" no teacher including me would teach the Revolutionary War with the movie The Patriot since, do I even need to say this, it's rather historically inaccurate. At least presenting accurate dialogue between real historical characters is not its strong point. However, it does have a strong point, and holding a B.A. in Cinema Production from the University of Southern California, I am well aware of what that strong point is. It amuses me often, in fact, when people complain that a movie like that isn't historically accurate as that is not the goal or purpose of any Hollywood movie. The goal and purpose of a Hollywood movie about a "real" dramatic event is to show the emotional truth of it, how it felt to be there experiencing that particular event and to relay those feelings vividly to the audience so that the audience feels them vividly, too. The Patriot is successful at that. You feel how terrible it would be to see a young son shot by an enemy in front of your eyes, you feel how it would feel to suddenly want to join forces and fight the enemy. So, having no rules to follow, I showed my class the film. There are, actually, a few "facts" about the Revolutionary War in the film; at least the costumes were accurate, the settings, the props. It was about a war that had happened and had generalized characters that reasonably fit within what was a possible scenario. And the important thing was that every one of my eight kids was glued to the screen without a peep or barely a blink the entire two hours of the film. That was interesting. At the end I asked them to describe the film to me and enthusiastically they told me the whole story, the names of the characters, their relationship to each other, how they felt and what had happened in detail. In other words, they retained it all and they did it by remembering it through their hearts not their heads because the film had done what it had intended to do. It had fired them up. And once fired up, they could retain the information it gave.
So I tried something a little more close to teaching history. I checked out of the library a several part series by PBS on Napoleon. For the ordinary student I would guess it could well have been deadly dull as it dragged along, several long episodes with a male voice-over that droned on and on, slide shows and drawings and bad reenactments of Napoleon and his forces over the entirety of his campaigns and life. But my kids acted exactly the way they had with The Patriot. They were silent, focused, in fact rapt with attention for each and every episode. It happened that a few days after I had showed them the entire series, I was sitting in the cafeteria at the teachers' table when a teacher sitting next to me asked me sarcastically why I bothered to attempt to teach learning disabled kids since they couldn't learn anything. One of my girls was nearby. She could not retain that 1 + 1 = 2 (literally) that another para so patiently taught her every single day. I called her over. I asked her to tell me why Napoleon lost his Russian campaign. She replied happily that it was because he was afraid he had lost his luck because he had left Josephine and because of that, he didn't begin the battle at dawn as he usually did but at 11 a.m., nervously waiting for assistance, which didn't show up. That actually is one of the reasons Napoleon lost the Russian campaign and I dare any of the history teachers in that school to get an answer that perceptive out of any of their "normal" students. The girl who gave that answer was able to imprint the information via experiencing the information in the form of drama, in other words, emotion. It's as good a route as any and what's the point of "patiently" telling her that 1 + 1 = 2 over and over when she could not access it to her memory that way? It would be like writing it out on a slip of paper and showing it to the bottom of a "normal" student's foot every single day. I'm not trying to be mean regarding those special needs children. I'm saying that from my experience they were not the ones who were dense.
Similarly, one day the superintendent of schools sat down at the teachers' table in the cafeteria with us. He turned to me and said, "So what's so great about New York City?" in a derisive tone. The town where the school was had few paved streets, one beat-up grocery store and a dilapidated series of buildings down the only downtown street. All the teachers there turned to me half-smiling to see what I would reply, if anything. I looked at him scathingly and replied something like, "What's so great about New York City? The greatest man has achieved in art, theatre, engineering, business, landscape design and architecture, to name just a few off the top of my head." Although I felt really good about saying that, I probably didn't win a lot of brownie points with him. I mean, I'm assuming.
The head of the Special Ed Department and my boss was a woman proud of her looks. She would come in late every day, then preen and put on make-up and fix up her hair in front of her full-length mirror then sit down at her desk, hang around for a short time impatiently, tell the boy whose desk was right up against hers for punishment such things like if he didn't keep reading silently (he was learning disabled and had a hard time concentrating without help) she was going to tear off his head and stuff it down his neck. Then she'd make an excuse to leave, be seen driving her Mercedes-Benz around town, maybe go home for awhile, bring her little dog back, then go to lunch, then hang around a bit, then leave again and so on. Every single day. She did basically no work, maybe a few reports here and there that were certainly fiction as she had no idea what the paras were doing to help the kids in there. Needless-to-say, it was difficult for me to entirely disguise my disgust. The boy with his desk right up to hers wasn't a bad kid. What she hated about him was that he really really really wanted to be a fireman. He talked about being a fireman every chance he could. His dad and uncle and everyone else in his family I think were firemen. He had wanted to be a firemen all his life and knew everything there was to know about it. He was seventeen and couldn't wait to graduate just so he could become a fireman. I thought he was so lucky to know exactly who he was and what he wanted to do. How many kids and adults, for that matter, do? But she could not stand hearing him talk about it all the time. So she insulted and berated him continually.
One day during a planning period when the kids always just came in and hung around as they liked the room, which was large with cabinets and tables and a sink and stove, kind of like a home away from home somewhat, a girl rushed in and told one of the boys that his best friend, a girl, was in the girls' bathroom sobbing and wouldn't stop and wouldn't come out. She said he had to come and get her, that they thought she would come out if he asked her to. So he went and got her and brought her to our room. There was a lot of noise in the hallway while this was going on; in fact, the school was in an uproar. The girl from the bathroom told us that she had just been in one of the history classes. She said that her male teacher was very mean to the athletic girls, she being one of them, calling them names if they got something wrong, things like that. She said the reason was that they would not have sex with him like the ditzy, girly girls would. She said she had raised her hand to answer a question and had gotten the answer wrong and he had laid into her (bad pun; I apologize) saying how stupid she was. She had gotten so upset that she had stood up and screamed an accusation that he was having sex with some of the high school girls. Everyone in the class heard it as did the entire classroom next door as the doors to both classrooms were open. He had run at her, she had jumped from her desk and run out of the room. He had pursued her down the hall screaming at her until she escaped by running into the girls' bathroom. For the next several hours, nobody was in the normal classrooms. There was a lot of yelling, there were demands by the principal that a long list of people come one by one into his office and those that did came out and told everyone what was happening, including coming into our room and telling us. The boy who had gotten his friend out of the girls' bathroom and his best friend were especially perturbed, to say the least. They couldn't stop talking about it. When they went out I asked the other para if she thought the accusations against that male teacher were true. She said she was sure they were because the year before when her own daughter had been his student she had asked her if it were true and her daughter had said yes. It seems this had been going on under their noses for at least three years, not much longer than the time that teacher had first arrived. Then I asked my delightful boss if she thought the accusations were true. She said yes, she thought they were, too. I forget her reasons but I remember they were convincing. I went back to my desk and sat down, stunned, flabbergasted. The two boys came back into our room and after they had talked to the other para about it until she was tired, came over to tell me again about it. And here's where I made a terrible mistake. In my defense, I had never been around kids in my life before. I don't have any children, neither does my only sibling, my brother. I've never known anyone who had children. I've only picked up a baby twice and both times it was to very nervously request that someone take it back as I knew it would be bad if I dropped it.
I had given my history class a term paper assignment, since even though the powers that be thought it was ludicrous, they expected me to test and assign my students the same set of things as the regular kids. I had decided, since none of them could write well at all, to assign them family trees. They all lived with or had extended families nearby, every generation, in fact, and I thought, since one's own history is in fact history, it would be nice if they learned how to chart their family trees. It would be fun and useful, too, as writing a term paper on some subject would not be. One of the boys I lent my miniature tape recorder since he said he was going to go visit his grandmother and wanted to tape whatever she told him about their families. I had cancelled the assignment, however, after two of my students came to me and said they didn't know how to put their father on their family tree. I had said ok and shown them how. Then they said they didn't know how to put their brother on their family tree. I said ok and showed them that. Then they said they were confused so I asked why. They said it was because they didn't know how to put their father or their brother on their family tree. Oh, I said, buying time, trying to figure it out. Hesitatingly, I asked again, "Why?" They said because their father was their brother. It took me the rest of the day to figure that one out, which I don't want to go into here. That other boy in my class still had my tape recorder but I let him keep it for awhile because he still wanted to tape what his grandmother said.
But then that day of the pandemonium happened. And the two boys came up to my desk to tell me again all about it. One of them was the one with my tape recorder but that wasn't in my mind. I just couldn't believe that a lot of people had known that this teacher was having sex with his students and they hadn't done anything about it. There were a lot of kids in the room, not just our kids. I asked them if they knew why nobody had done anything about it. One of them said it was because the teacher in question was "new blood". What she meant was that there is so much interbreeding in Elk County, being the poorest county in Kansas with only a total population of 3000 people, that there are more and more kids being born all the time with birth defects and retardation. They said a lot of the mothers were hoping that teacher might accidentally make one of their daughters pregnant and have to marry her and since he was from out of the county, the child would not be damaged. In other words, he had "new blood". Take that one in for a second like I did hearing that that day. Because, in hearing that, I just went off. I said how wrong it was in no uncertain terms. I said the teacher ought to be caught admitting it. Unfortunately, the two boys in front of my desk were listening. Apparently later on that day they tried to get him to confess, having my running tape recorder hidden in their coat or something. They were caught doing this by the now incredibly vocally irate (guilty, hello) teacher, who turned them into the principal where the two boys told him that I had given them the tape recorder and told them to catch him confessing. Needless-to-say, I was fired and actually, rightfully so, since I was so stupid I shot my mouth off to high school boys who very angrily wanted to protect their sisters and girl cousins and friends from this fiend. I without complaint packed up my desk and gratefully went home unemployed, so glad to be out of that cesspool of a school. Obviously, I'm not very good at complying with the powers that be.
I heard what happened after I left but it was in the form of the favorite sport, gossip, so I can't say whether it was true or not. Suffice to say that that teacher left the school under less than prosecuting conditions.
