 Elmhurst Middle School, where dreams go to die... -Alex Farr (Provisionally titled, based upon my own anecdotal experiences. A more rigorous statistical examination is pending...) I'd just come off a three week long 'long term' substitute job, but it had felt like three months. Two of the five classes were more of an exercise in over-educated baby sitting than teaching, and I'm no fan of the disciplinarian aspect of babysitting 35 kids at a time. On the other hand, the class of 25 (average) was a delight. An opportunity to... teach. If I'd had a full teacher salary to compensate for the time and hassle of developing a lesson plan, grading homework, doing grades... with classes like that, it might be tolerable. Rewarding even. So I jumped back into the mix. I took an assignment at Elmhurst Middle School. I think it was an English class. Theoretically at least. It was supposed to be a nice break from all the math I'd been teaching, and a nice break from the homework and grades that I was dealing with for free... for a school system that liked to retroactively pro-rate my pay when I worked on half days, if I left the campus too early- but which never paid extra for working longer. A school system that never actually got my name right on my paychecks. I'd worked a couple of days at Elmhurst before. It's a middle school in deep East Oakland, around 98th and Birch, like the ones you see in the movies about the "ghetto". There were fences, adult security... in fact, the last time I'd worked there there'd even been a 'caution: police line do not cross' tape across the street blocking off access to a crime scene, complete with loaded stretcher being lifted into an ambulance, on the 98th & Plymouth end of the school. The kids were rough, and most of the regular teachers didn't talk to the substitutes. Maybe they were too shell-shocked? Sure, the last time I'd been teaching here, a fight had broken out in the class. Sobrante Park pride rubbing a Richmond n***** the wrong way... Sure, the in-class phone didn't do anything when I lifted it, and no one tells the substitutes what to dial to get security, or whatever. Sure, if I wade into a middle schooler fight I'm liable to be sued by one parent, the other... or all of them separately. Sure... but I wasn't going to have to check any homework or do any grades. So I show up, and I get my form signed, and I go into the room to check what the teacher has in mind for the class. 'Read ... in the workbook, and answer the questions. Then do other homework. Don't let any of the kids have access to any of the materials on the bookshelf.' is pretty much the extent of the lesson plan. Seems simple enough. Make 'em read, and keep them away from the magazines on the bookshelf. So the classes show up, I take the roll, stroll around the room a bit... of course no one has any questions. It's either too simple, or too hard to know where to even begin, for the kids. Of course, I'm just a substitute... and no kid in a school like that wants to admit any sort of weakness to a stranger... and not knowing something, if it is something worth knowing, is weakness. Eventually, the last class I'm scheduled to teach rolls around. Blah blah blah, I'm going through my over-educated babysitter motions. About half way into the class, I look up and notice that there are some students sitting at desks that weren't occupied when I took roll... occupied by a couple of girls that I remember walking the halls just before I started taking roll. "Uhh, are you in this class?" I ask, not sure that I really care, but for form sake nonetheless. "Yeah I'm __, and she's __." answered one of the girls, with a big grin. So I went back to the roll sheet, which I realized no one had come around to collect. Sure enough, there the names were. Marked absent, of course. They'd already missed half the class... and they obviously weren't trying to even make up an excuse... and the other teachers I'd talked to during the long term assignment often talked about locking their doors and closing them once class started, just to be sure they didn't have to deal with constant disruptions... and these two had just wandered off for half the class time... so, in a move to try to make students think twice before fucking with all the substitutes that would come after me- I decided to let the absence stand. "Well, you've already missed half the class, and I've already marked you both absent... so you might as well just go ahead and leave again." I told them. "Ohh no, you can't do that!" the voices rose quickly, "We're here. We're not absent. You can't mark us absent. We were just tardy!" Now I had an audience. I just smiled, and thought it over. "Tardy is only for up to fifteen minutes. More than fifteen minutes is an absence." I explained. I'm not sure if that was true... but I'd heard it somewhere. Close enough for me, especially for students who'd gotten up and taken a stroll for half the class time. "Ohh no it isn't. We're here. How you gonna mark us absent if we're here?" "You weren't here when I took roll. You were wandering the halls. You wandered for half the class. That's not a tardy... that's an absence." "Ohh no. We're here." "That's right, we're here. You hafta mark us here." chimed in the quieter friend. I was a little shocked by the vehemence. I'd really thought that they'd've just shrugged and left. The class had been rather pleasant while they were gone... I really had no desire to have them stay. No one else in the class seemed particularly concerned that they stay... just curious to see how this was going to play out, really. It occurred to me that, if it was this big of a deal to them, then I really ought to stick by my decision. If they got burned, they might actually stop trying to pull shit like walking out for half the class time. So I just shrugged. "No, I don't havta do anything. You were absent, I marked you absent, and I'm going to leave you marked absent. If you've got a problem with that, go to the office and explain it to them." To my surprise, they gathered their things, and did just that... marched down to the office. I felt a little bit brilliant. I might not be able to figure out how to make the phone work, but I'd managed to arrange things so that the office would have to deal with students walking out of class anyway. It took less than 10 minutes... before the girls walked back in. "They say you gotta mark us tardy." they were both smiling. I just nodded sarcastically... and then the phone rang. Apparently they did work. "Yes, Mr. Farr. Please mark the students tardy..." I thought about the stupidity of the decision. I thought about telling the vice principal that he had to be fucking kidding. I thought about the implications for any semblance of class discipline. I thought about running the 15 minute theory by him. And then it occurred to me that school funding is based upon student attendance (at least so I'd heard), and this school needed every dollar it could get to stay afloat... so any words I might utter would be a waste of breath. "Right. I'll do that." So I hung up the phone, smiled resignedly back at the grinning students who'd proved their point, marked them tardy, and sat down. I was now officially a warm body, present solely due to insurance strictures that wouldn't allow the school to have so many children without someone to watch over them, lest they hurt themselves. The students talked about what had happened, or about other things, amongst themselves... quietly, at first... but louder and louder as time went by. Students got up and moved closer to their friends. One of the girls strutted over to the bookshelf, picked a magazine, and brought it back to her desk. She grinned at me as she sat down. It wasn't a bad idea. I got up and picked a magazine too. I stayed home and drank in celebration of the absurdity of it all the next day. The day after that, I was back in the cab yard, picking up some keys. The Rethinking- substitute stories You gotta be shitting me Alex... |