by Ralph Maltese | Apr 22, 2018 | Uncategorized
Jackie
Part 2
(After Jackie played her song with the inappropriate language, I tried to turn the debacle into a teachable moment by relating the difference between cuteness and cleverness using the tale of Uncle Harry, Joey, and Joey pummeling Uncle Harry’s toe with a hammer at Thanksgiving Dinner.)
“There is a huge difference between being cute and being clever. People who want to be cute want to draw attention to themselves. Their actions are saying, ‘Look at me!!!! Look at me!!!! Look at me!!!!’ They are craving attention.”
I saw a number of students shift uneasily in their seats. Jackie sat with her arms crossed in front of her.
“Being clever means making people think about something old in a new way…..like Caleb did yesterday when Caleb made the connection between Donne and rolling your eyes when you say something sarcastic.”
All of you are adults. You are NOT babies. You get points in the adult world for being clever. Leave cuteness to the babies.”
They were silent. Hey, it was the best teachable moment I could conjure up. When the bell rang, they marched out in silence, except for Jackie who bulled and elbowed her way to be the first to leave.
In the spring of that school year, I noticed that Jackie was absent two days in a row. The reason why became apparent on the third day of her absence. In my mailbox was a Progress Report for Jackie. When students were suspended or had a parents’ conference, each teacher was required to fill out a Progress Report noting grades and behavior. This was used at the readmission meetings. Teaching five level three classes meant I would fill out many many Progress Reports. Jackie was failing my class and her language was increasingly filled with profanity.
I completed the Progress Report and decided to hand it in personally to Rae Levin, Jackie’s guidance counselor.
“So why did Jackie get suspended?” I handed Rae the Progress Report.
Rae was from Atlanta and still retained a southern accent. She began to read the Progress Report. “She got in a fight with another girl on the bus loading platform.”
“What over?”
“Boyfriend I think. Jackie saw this other girl talking to a boy that Jackie liked.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“How is the other girl?”
“Okay. But Jackie shut out her lights. She was taken to the hospital and released the same day, bless her heart.”
“Who is the other girl?”
“Diane Jenkins.”
Diane was in my seventh period class.
“I didn’t get a progress report for Diane. Did she get suspended?”
“Nope. Witnesses say she didn’t throw a punch. She was more or less a victim.”
“Rae, another question?”
“Sure.”
“What’s with the yellow raincoat? Last week it was seventy five degrees in my room and she is wearing that heavy yellow raincoat on top of a sweatshirt.”
Rae pulled her chair closer to the desk implying something confidential was about to be shared. I moved my chair closer to the desk.
Rae folded her hands in front of her on the desk. “You’re a man. You might not understand. Jackie is very very very ashamed of her figure. She wears the yellow raincoat every day to cover it up.”
I felt my soul sink. “Damn.”
Rae nodded.
“Can I make some changes to that Progress Report?”
The next day, before Period 7 began, I pulled Diane aside. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, Mr. M. I’m fine.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. I was face to face with Jackie waiting for the bus, and we’re going at it, ya know, me yelling at her, her yelling at me. Then I turned away and started to walk away when I thought of something else to yell at her.”
“Uh huh.”
“That’s all I remember. I turned to yell at her and all I saw was yellow and then nothing.”
“You’re okay now, though?”
“Yeah. I’m good.”
The next day Jackie returned to school.
Period 3 went as usual. We struggled through Robert Burns. “To a Mouse.”
When the bell rang Jackie hung behind and waited for the room to empty out.
“Glad to have you back, Jackie.”
She put her hands in her yellow rain jacket. “Thanks for the good things you wrote in the report.” I could tell that this was a really hard thing for her to do.
“Just told the truth. By the way, here is the essay you wrote before you got suspended.”
She looked it over, flashed surprise at the B-, and read my comments. I made the usual criticisms of spelling and paragraph structure and errors in punctuation, but I purposely included phrases like “beautifully written” when a nice segment of prose appeared.
Jackie passed my class, honestly, as did Caleb.
Six years later I was still assigned five classes of level 3 students. I asked my department chairperson if I could be assigned a higher level group if only to develop some other teaching skills. Truth was, I feared burning out. Years of teaching students hostile to learning was taking its toll. But sometimes success is a death knell. I worked well with level 3 students and school is about placing people in pre-ordained niches, including teachers.
As my sixth year of teaching Henry Bouquet High School’s most inexperienced students drew to a close, the birth of our first child neared. One day in mid-June Polley experienced contractions; we made a phone call to our obstetrician who advised us to go to the hospital. We were in the hospital parking lot when Polley began to stamp her feet. “I’m not going in there. The contractions stopped.” We later learned that Braxton-Hicks contractions were common.
“We’re here. Let’s just go in and check it out.”
“No!!! I am so embarrassed.” Polley did not open her car door.
“Embarrassed?! Honey, what are the chances we see anyone we know in the hospital?”
My mind was rolling the film of Polley stomping her foot. “I will be so embarrassed!” when I heard a splash upstream and to our right. Mike heard it as well. “Well, at least there is one trout in this creek.”
Then another splash, this one closer to us, and then another practically in front of us. We leaned down closer to the water to see what insects were inspiring trout to rise to the surface. Mike was the first, as always, to identify the hatch. “Quill Gordons. I think they are Quill Gordons.”
That made sense. Quill Gordons were an early spring insect. I reached into my vest for my dry fly box, looked up and down the rows of hackled flies and found the Quill Gordons. When I looked up and began to tie on the fly, the stream we thought was devoid of trout was boiling with life, trout inhaling the insects, wings upright, that now were like a flotilla of tiny sailboats riding the current downstream. My blood pressure shot up a hundred points. With anxiety-inhibited fingers, I tied on the fly and made a cast upstream. Mike was doing the same a few yards downstream. I watched my fly float down toward me, one imitation Quill Gordon amongst thousands of naturals. My eyes searched for my fly. A trout rose, and I lifted my graphite rod to hook him. I felt no resistance. My fly came up into the air and bounced off my waders. My eyes were mistakenly following a natural!!! I made another cast, trout were splashing all around me, and my eyes sought my fly, a sailboat coasting along with a fleet. A trout rose to inhale a fly but I did not lift the rod because I thought the fly the trout took was a natural. Then I felt resistance! Again, I was following the wrong sailboat! This trout hooked himself. I landed and immediately released the fourteen inch brownie.
Hatches do not last long, perhaps twenty to thirty minutes, but Mike and I had a great time in that short period. We laughed afterwards at how many fish we missed for various reasons.
It was one of those pleasant surprises. A stream I swore earlier was troutless became a caldron of hungry, feasting creatures.
When Polley and I entered the emergency room of the hospital, an aide immediately pushed a wheelchair underneath my wife who was still shaking her head. “I am so embarrassed.”
“Why? Look, we’ll just check everything out. Okay? Look, nobody we know.” I made a sweeping gesture with my arm, and just as the arm stopped, we heard, “Mr. Maltese!!!!!!”
It was one of my students from that year. Then another student from that year appeared and approached. Then, as the aide wheeled Polley to an examination room, one of her former students spotted her. And then another. Polley shot me a look. I knew that look. “What!? Do half our students volunteer here?”
I simply shrugged.
In the examination room we waited for someone to tell us what we already suspected. Braxton-Hicks. False labor. I was reading an article posted on the bulletin board, “Dietary Habits That Will Make You Healthy” when the curtain suddenly parted and a mass of white filled the room. “Hey, Mr. Maltese!”
It was Jackie. She had on a white uniform with a pink ribbon in her lapel.
“I heard from Marie that you were here. How you doing?”
My shocked Ralph Kramden came out of my mouth….all babbling, but through the blather I was able to make introductions.
“So Jackie, how are you doing?”
“Just fine. I went to school and I’m a nurse’s assistant. I bet you’re surprised.”
“No, not at all.” I lied. “Do you like it?”
“Yes. Very much. I like helping people. I am going to enter another program so I can work in pediatrics. I like working with kids.” “That’s great.”
We had a nice chat. Years later Jackie’s son Jonathan showed up in my class. Nice kid. I heard from Jonathan’s counselor that Jackie had demanded he be placed in my class.
Nature is full of surprises.
by Ralph Maltese | Apr 8, 2018 | Uncategorized
Jackie
Part I
One of the many things I like about flyfishing is that, often, there are surprises. And most are pleasant. This coming from a flyfisherman who has inadvertently sat in several streams and endured not-so-pleasant surprises. It was late afternoon, and Mike and I had already made fifty or so casts apiece into the Church Pool on Resica Falls Creek. The rain had stopped, and the sun was dodging between puffy light gray clouds. Tired of fruitlessly flailing line, we took a break and sat down on a fallen oak along the bank.
“See a rise?” Mike shifted the weight on his vest as he settled into the log.
I shook my head. Despite the rain, the water was relatively clear. Neither of us saw any trout. “Are you sure they are in here?”
Mike nodded. “They should be. Every year I come here they are in this pool.”
The Church Pool on Resica was called the Church Pool because the boy scouts often camped here, and they erected a small wooden structure for Sunday worship. But there were no scouts this day. Just Mike and I and the lovely spring woods, light green saplings on the opposite bank and behind us, and a pool in front of us that apparently held no trout.
Mike and I sat there in silence, enjoying the woods and the stream and, as often happens when one is silent in the woods, surprises occur. Mike lightly touched my left arm. I looked where he was looking. A mink sporting a dark, glisteningly reddish-brown coat, worked its way along the opposite bank, occasionally dipping into the water and then back up on the bank. If the mink was here, fish would also be here.
We watched the mink until it realized we were there, and then it scampered up the bank and disappeared behind a pine tree.
Still the stream looked devoid of any life.
My third period that year was full of life. They burst into my classroom, jabbering and jostling as if to get the best seats at a rock concert. I was no rock concert and the seats were assigned. Period 3 was my favorite level three class of the five level threes I taught that year. A level 3 student was supposedly assigned to a level 3 class because they had level 3 reading ability, whatever the hell that meant. I asked repeatedly to see the written criteria for level 3 (and level 2 and level 1 for that matter), and was repeatedly told there were no written descriptions of levels, but former teachers and counselors decided on the grouping. Later in my career, when I had achieved some gravitas and attempted to eliminate tracking, I asked teachers and administrators if they would mind being paid on a pay scale labeled level 1, level 2, level 3, level 3 being the lowest salary. Invariably someone in the audience would ask, “What are the requirements for those levels?” My response would be a shrug. “It is kind of fuzzy. Wherever your superiors feel you belong.” Much consternation and huffing and puffing, but I made my point.
And the problem was compounded by the fact that Henry Bouquet High School wanted it both ways. The policy makers wanted tracking, arguing that level 3’s were the lowest on the totem pole because they had “reading difficulties,” which they did, but the curriculum for every student, including level 3’s was still classical and high brow. Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Willa Cather, Chaucer, Hardy, Dreiser. Henry Bouquet School District wanted the community to believe that all students were reading and studying the dead old white men….and white women.
This included my Period 3 class of 11th graders, most of whom, I learned in the first week of school, were reading on the third grade level…..some were lower. So we struggled. We read Macbeth aloud with our fingers dragging across the page, the words dripping from the mouths slowly like a slowly leaking faucet.
“Life…..is…..life is…but……a…….walk—-ing……walking…..shad…..dow…….”
“Mr. M., I don’t know what I just read.” Caleb was a very short, thin young man who was the worst reader, and thus needed the most practice. But listening to him read was an agonizing enterprise. Even his classmates, who were only slightly better readers, mentally dropped out when Caleb read. They studied the water splotches that marred the acoustical ceiling tile or read the bulletin board for the thousandth time.
Caleb was always seen in the company of Jackie. If Caleb was small in frame and skinny, Jackie was his feminine counterpart—exceptionally large in frame, and it could easily be imagined that she daily ate Caleb’s weight in food. Every day Jackie wore the same fading-yellow raincoat with several missing brown buttons. Every day, rain or shine. And Jackie’s entrance was always a sweeping motion. As she negotiated her way down a row of desks, her billowing yellow raincoat with missing brown buttons swept pencils, papers, books and the occasional eye as it cycloned the path to her desk……a Tasmanian devil in slow motion.
Caleb and Jackie were friends. Nothing more than that, no appearances of romantic involvement, no wooing eyes or fingertip touching. Probably because of her size, Jackie seemed to be his protectorate, beaconing the warning that if anyone touched her diminutive friend she would break the miscreant’s head.
I had to teach the Metaphysical Poets. John Donne’s poetry was a curriculum requirement. I sifted through the selections of Donne’s work that were included in the textbook. “Bait” is a short poem. None of my students would like it, and once the general theme was realized, there was not much else to explore.
“Meditation #17” had the famous line, “No man is an island, entire unto itself.” This had promise. We could explore our separateness and our connectedness, and if I used Simon and Garfunkel’s song, “I Am a Rock,” we could also explore the rhetorical device of irony.
The next day, as a class, we read and discussed Donne’s essay, and, in one of those delightful rarities in a level 3 class, engaged in a productive conversation. Then, again, this was period 3, my best class that year.
“So, Mr. M., he saying that we all together?”
“What do you think he is saying?”
Caleb raised his hand, and I nodded.
“I think he be saying that somehow we all in this together. I means, we all live and we all die.”
“That’s sick.” This was a positive comment back then.
“Yes, I think Caleb is onto something here.”
Caleb was about to elaborate, but Jackie, who sat in the row next to Caleb, looked down at him and interrupted. “What you know? That’s bogus.”
“Go ahead, Jackie, tell us why you think Donne is wrong.” She often yelled out things, using non sequitors, but she rarely participated.
Jackie used both her big hands to pull her fading-yellow raincoat closed around her.
“I knows plenty of people that don’t want to be together with me…..and I certainly don’t wants to be together with them.”
“I understand. That is valid.”
And so the period went. With ten minutes to go before the bell rang, I plugged in the record player that I had borrowed from the school library and played “I Am a Rock.’
I actually, upon request from Caleb, played it twice. Students went to the blackboard and wrote their arguments for and against Donne.
Caleb looked down, his chin in his hand. “So irony is say one thing but mean the opposite? It’s like when you roll your eyes and say you’re sorry but you’re really not?” I said they were my favorite class.
“Caleb, I think you got it.” He smiled and the bell rang. Jackie said in her booming voice. “Hey, Mr. M., can I bring in a song tomorrow that is like what you played?”
“Sure, Jackie. Bring it in.”
I had to call the library and see if I could hang on to the record player for another day. My other classes that day were not so cooperative.
The next day Period 3 jammed and jostled their way through the classroom door as usual. Jackie filled the door frame as she filed in and swept her way down to her desk while carrying a record album.
I took attendance and remembered Jackie’s request. “Okay, people, yesterday we discussed Donne, his famous phrase, ‘No man is an island,’ and the idea that we are all connected…..or, as Jackie postulated, we are NOT connected. Jackie, you said you have a song that illustrates that point of view….the opposite of that Simon and Garfunkel song we played yesterday?”
“Uh huh. Can I play it?”
“Sure. I already setup the phonograph for you.”
Jackie, and, for some reason, Caleb walked to the front of the room. Jackie put the record on the player as Caleb stood next to her—the difference in size was hard not to notice.
As the record started, Jackie started to smile slyly and Caleb’s eyes grew wide. The song began.
“I WANT TO GET YOU IN MY QUEENIE, FUCK YOU ALL DAY, FUCK YOU ALL NIGHT, FUCK YOU TO MY HEART’S DELIGHT.”
So that was it. They just wanted to play a song for shock effect. Jackie was swooning and gyrating to the music and Caleb was laughing into his cupped hands. I made my way from the back of the room and lifted the needle off the record. Jackie reached out to stop me. “No. Let me finish my song.”
I fended off her attempt to keep it going. “Not funny. Caleb. I am very disappointed in you.”
Caleb looked down at his work boots and actually seemed contrite, but Jackie was incessant.
“We listened to your whole song. I wanna hear mine.”
“Sit down. Your song is not relevant to our conversation yesterday.”
“I don’t see why. You can’t get any more connected than fucking.”
“Sit down.”
They both took their seats.
A teacher’s truth is that one often has to think and work hard to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear……on the fly.
The class was dead silent. They were wondering what I was going to do. I was wondering what I was going to do. I disconnected the record player and closed it up ready to return it to the library. I did all this in slow motion, buying time to think.
“I want you all to think about a big family dinner….maybe Thanksgiving. Uncle Harry is there. Uncle Harry is about eighty years old, and he is sitting at the Thanksgiving table, dinner napkin wrapped around his neck. All your family is there…including your two year old cousin Joey. Joey is crawling around the floor under the Thanksgiving table with his toy hammer in his hand. Got the picture?”
I searched the faces in the room. They got the picture.
“So suddenly Uncle Harry jumps out from the table, his napkin falls off, and he begins hopping around the dining room. Someone yells, ‘Joey just hit Uncle Harry’s toe with the hammer!!!!!’ Everyone starts laughing. Everyone starts saying, ‘Oh, how cute….little Joey hit Uncle Harry on the foot with his toy hammer. How cute!’
Now, fast forward thirteen years. Your cousin Joey is fifteen, Uncle Harry is ninety-three. Joey does the same thing. He slams Uncle Harry on the foot with a hammer. How many people at the table think that is cute? What is the difference?”
I did not want a reply. I wanted them to think. (to be continued)
