Whoever called first at five in the morning—that’s where I went.
I taught in Arcadia, Monrovia, San Dimas, Rowland and a few other school districts I’ve forgotten. Most of the time, I worked in Rowland Unified in La Puente, where I interned the previous year.
When teachers knew they were going to be out, they requested me in advance and my calendar quickly filled up.
After the Winter Break, I was called to sub at Romier Elementary for a fifth grade class.
Watch the video and discover what it is like from another substitute teacher more than thirty years later.
The teacher had a heart attack and was in the hospital. Two weeks later, the principal offered me a long-term position for the rest of the year. The regular teacher had died.
I thought I knew the reason. Was I going to be the next victim for these diabolical ten year olds?
I named them the class from Dante’s Inferno, and I worried that this would end in another Oscar or worse—I’d lose my teacher’s credential and might end in jail for murder and mayhem.
His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.
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The biggest part of the day supervisor’s job was to drive a flatbed electric cart around the school starting at 6:00 AM and paint out fresh, overnight graffiti.
Then Bookie’s Dream loaded the empty trashcans to place them where kids congregated at lunch.
However, spitting out gum, getting rid of empty soda bottles and greasy bags of French fries was too much of an effort for most of our students to put in trash cans, so the school was usually littered.
In Japan, the students clean the classrooms and the schools.
Back in my classroom after school, I wore out the knees in my blue jeans crawling around the classroom floor scraping gum off that crap-colored carpet.
Mr. D, who supervised after school detentions and Saturday schools, attempted solving the litter problem by taking the high students that earned detentions and make them clean the campus instead of sitting around watching a clock.
One of the kids complained to his or her mommy or daddy, who complained to the district office. The district office then called the principal.
The result–Mr. D. was told to stop making the students serving detention to work as if they were custodians. It was considered cruel and unusual punishment. Discover Wyoming Park Students Expelled for Vandalism.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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I knew where Bookie’s Dream slept. He had a pillow and a blanket stored in a cupboard in the teacher’s lounge next to my classroom. I was tempted to buy some lice and fleas and infest the couch, but teachers sat there too.
I complained about Bookie’s Dream to one of the VPs, but the situation continued for months until Bookie’s Dream was promoted to day-supervisor over custodians that worked.
The boss got tired of my complaints, so the problem was solved by promoting the slacker.
As much as I wanted to sabotage Bookie’s Deam, I didn’t. Maybe I should have bought some coyote urine and sprayed it on his pillow.
It was a tempting thought.
You should have seen the hallways and sidewalks–a minefield of goo. The district eventually bought a steam-cleaning machine to blast the outside walking surfaces clean of gum. Did you know that Vandalism Costs Tax Payers Money?
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
I couldn’t stand teaching on a field of gooey, carpeted dirt. After a few weeks, the place started to look like fallout from a nuclear blast. I wanted Old Faithful back.
When I asked Old Faithful for a few cans of the spray that removed gum by freezing it, he told me he missed the free goodies.
As he handed me a half-dozen cans, he said, “Don’t let the spray touch your fingers. You’ll get frostbite. Try wearing protective gloves.”
Do you know how much gum 200 students can leave stuck in a classroom carpet?
Great! I earned combat pay in Vietnam for being shot at. I wondered if I should put in a request for hazardous-duty pay.
For the next few weeks, I crawled around scraping gum off the carpet. I also bought a vacuum and used it daily.
I now had two jobs—teacher and custodian while Bookie’s Dream was paid to sleep and place bets.
Some readers might wonder why I let the kids chew gum. Easy answer—I didn’t have x-ray vision and most kids make sure they weren’t chewing when I was looking. Lucky for them too.
If I had superman’s talents, I would have sizzled a few along with Bookie’s Dream.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Custodians are guys that clean classrooms and schools. They come in two models—those that do a great job and those that check in then as soon as the boss is gone, read a book, sleep, or call a bookie to place bets on long shots at the track.
Lucky for teachers, the second model is in the minority and should be recalled. Over the years, I had both.
When I became the high school journalism advisor in the early 90s and started working fourteen hour days, my night custodian, Old Faithful (although I was older), did a great job. As a reward, the student editors often left him food: candy, cookies, cake and pizza slices.
Old Faithful used to say we were making him fat and his girlfriend didn’t like that.
How they keep schools clean in Japan.
Then Old Faithful was replaced by Bookie’s Dream, who only emptied the classroom trashcan and the floor slowly grew a crop of dirt. The carpet was brown, so Bookie’s Dream thought it wouldn’t be noticed.
However, the chewing gum ratted him out.
Even though the school district had a rule against chewing gum, that didn’t stop the students from chewing it. Discover one example of the cost of graffiti.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
My next move was to pick Oscar up and carry him to the office.
He fought all the way.
It was like trying to hold onto a live fifty-thousand volt wire. Like a giant anaconda, Oscar twisted, turned, and slugged me in the torso. He knocked my glasses off.
When we reached the office, I called his mother.
On the way back to class, I was fortunate enough to find my glasses undamaged. Later, the principal told me that I shouldn’t have touched Oscar, and that I wasn’t ready to teach full time.
As I was finishing this post, I remembered reading the trauma of joblessness in a Blog about Education and Class. The author wrote, ” I’ve read and heard little about how school are helping children to understand what is happening to their parents, how they’re trying to articulate for children the reasons for becoming educated in uncertain times, how they are teaching children to be deeply proud of struggling parents.”
When are most Americans going to wake up and realize that the schools have been so burdened with “powerless parenting” that teachers can’t do the job of teaching reading, writing and arithmetic?
Instead, teachers spend far too much time dealing with the Oscars of the world.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Since I had been in the class as a student teacher since September, I thought Oscar might listen to me. I knelt on one knee at eye level and calmly asked him to stop. He did not make eye contact as he marked another page.
I asked him to hand me the book he was systematically destroying page by page.
Oscar was on a behavior modification contract. When he lost control, he was supposed to leave the classroom and walk home.
The teacher was to call the mother and let her know Oscar was on his way. When Oscar reached home, he was to be isolated in his room until he calmed down. Once calm, he could return to school.
I reached for the thirty-five dollar textbook. He yanked it out of my reach, and his face bloated with anger. “That’s my book,” he said. “Don’t touch it.”
I asked him to come to the office with me. He refused. I went to the phone and called, but the principal was not available.
What I did next was the reason why the principal did not recommend me for a full-time position in the district the next school year.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
After my nine-month internship in a fifth grade classroom, I was not offered a contract to teach full time and had to substitute teach for the next two years.
A ten-year old called Oscar (not his real name) was the reason. It was May 1976, and Ms. Stepp was gone. Instead, a sub was in the room. I was the student teacher. Oscar had an anger problem. He could blow with the force of an unexpected five-hundred pound, roadside bomb.
On that particular day, for no reason, Oscar started to use a thick-black marker to draw Xs across the pages in the history textbook used for Yorbita’s fifth grade. As he finished marking a page, he tore it out and tossed it on the floor.
Another teacher’s experience.
The substitute teacher said to stop. Oscar ignored her. Oscar kept marking the large, thick X and tearing the pages out. The students sitting near him knew he was capable of flying into a rage and attacking them so they started to slide their desks away until he was an isolated island.
As I finished this post, I thought of Where are the Parents, a post I wrote at iLook China.net.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
This poem was inspired by a teenager who never did homework and often distracted the other students while he avoided doing the class work—he was a want-to-be comedian, who seldom made it through class without being sent to the office. Most teachers eventually struggle with one or more adult children like him, because they are biological adults. They are only children because the law says so.
There was no warning.
“What’s it like to have sex with an Elephant?” the adolescent asked.
He didn’t even raise his hand.
That’s what the want-to-be elephant fornicator said In an English class with thirty-four silent, stunned expressions.
His face was pale and bloated, Old and mindless But very much in charge of chaos.
What’s a teacher to do While teaching the use of commas? The solution Was an hour’s work Writing the referral followed By after school phone calls Sherlock style to find the illusive mother, Who said, “My son has no problems With his other teachers So what are you doing wrong? He said you’re mean to him!”
When I called the want-to-be elephant fornicator’s Other teachers and read the comments In the permanent file, The truth reveled itself Like a colorful, crazy Picasso painting.
The want-to-be elephant fornicator was in trouble in every class.
The mother lied, the fabricating caregiver who rocked his cradle.
Since I was so mean to the this teenager Administration moved the want-to-be elephant fornicator To another class where he terrorized that teacher While basking in the laughter of his peers
With this want-to-be ‘elephant fornicator’ It was a game Called musical classrooms.
It wouldn’t surprise me if One day he hosted the Tonight Show or was elected to Congress.
If I could have found an elephant for this loony Kafkaesque comedian, I would have. He must be thirty now, and I wonder what he has done with his life. Is he in prison for shooting up an elementary school, or is he the CEO of a billion dollar corporation funding the war against America’s public schools, or is he homeless?
Does it matter?
In today’s corporate war against the democratic, transparent, non-profit public schools in the United States—a country with the highest childhood poverty rate in the developed world—there are children just like this boy taking those annual standardized tests that are being used across the country to rank-and-fire teachers and close public schools so the corporate reformers can open opaque, for-profit, not-democratic, corporate Charters often riddled with fraud and mostly worse or equal to the public schools they are replacing.
In addition, consider this: The Washington Post reported,Major charter researcher causes stir with comments about market-based school reform. And from Business Insider, 4 Reasons Finland’s Schools are Better:
Finnish students only take one standardized test during their entire primary and secondary schooling (k-12), and it’s not a mandatory test used to rank teachers and close public schools.
More time for play. Finnish students spend 2.8 hours a week on homework. This contrasts noticeably from the 6.1 hours American students spend per week—that is if the American students are doing the homework. For instance, many of the children I taught for thirty years in the poverty-plagued public schools where I worked seldom if ever did the homework that was assigned. Too many also didn’t do much classwork. But today, the corporate reformers would blame me for what those children, like the boy in my poem, refused to do.
College is free. In Finland, not only are bachelor degree programs completely free of tuition fees, so are master and doctoral programs. This contrasts greatly with the US, where the average student loan debt now approaches $30,000, and the total student debt is more than $1 Trillion. Who profits from this?
In Finland, public school teachers are treated like professors at universities, and they teach fewer hours during the day than US teachers, with more time devoted to lesson planning. They also get paid slightly more in Finland. The average teacher in the US makes about $41,000 a year, compared to $43,000 in Finland. And while teachers in the US make less money than many other countries, the OECD found that they work the longest hours of all.
You see, corporate education reform in the United States is all about making money—PROFIT comes first—and has nothing to do with improving education or dealing with children who think out loud in a classroom about having sex with elephants, and this explains why the Chicago Tribune reported Expulsion rate higher at charter schools. In fact, those expulsion rates are more than TWELVE times higher than the public schools.
Where do you think those children go when they are kicked out of a profit-motivated corporate charter school—to prison or back to a public school or maybe both? After all, the United States has the largest prison population in the world and even Communist China, with more than four times the population, is in a distant second place. The U.S. has almost 700 people locked up for every 100,000 compared to 119 per 100,000 in China—that the U.S. media constantly reminds us is a totalitarian state that limits the freedom of its people, without mentioning that China isn’t throwing that many of its people in prison compared to the United States. – Prison Studies.org
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
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Study after study show that the “average” American parent talks to his or her child less than five minutes a day and that 80% of parents never attend a parent-teacher conferences during the thirteen years his or her child is in school.
The “No Child Left Behind Act” became law in 2001 and it was ignorance personified since nowhere in the Act were parents or students held responsible for anything.
Two presidents have pandered to the popular myth that bad teachers are the reason so many of America’s children are not learning what they should in school. George W. Bush was the first president and then there is Obama.
I’m writing this as a protest about Obama’s words concerning underperforming schools that should fire teachers. When schools do not perform, politicians have always looked for scapegoats and teachers make good targets.
Yes, there are poor teachers but no more than any profession. Most are hard working and dedicated. I should know. I taught for thirty years and my weeks were often one hundred hours of work, because I often worked at home correcting papers or planning lessons.
This reaction to fire teachers when students do not learn is wrong. Why not punish the students and the parents instead?
When I was a child and educators said I would never learn to read or write due to severe dyslexia, my mother taught me to read at home. Both of my parents were avid readers, and my parents were my role models—not my teachers.
Studies and statistics show that the “average” American child spends about 10 hours a day either having fun watching TV or playing video games or social networking on Facebook or sending endless text messages with a mobile phone.
The high school I taught at in Southern California for many years has a low state ranking and was one of those underperforming schools and still is five years after I retired.
One year, there was a story in the news about the school’s scores going down and one of my students with a failing grade mentioned this in class, which caused others to laugh with looks on their faces that said it was a teacher’s fault.
I said, “Walnut Valley High School has a state ranking that is a nine out of ten and our school is a three. If we swapped students from Nogales to Walnut and did not move the teachers, that ranking would go with the students and Nogales would have a nine and Walnut a three.
“The score comes from the students—not the teachers. You started kindergarten in a different school. After seven years, you went to an Intermediate school. By the time you walked through my classroom door, you had been in school ten years and probably had fifty different teachers.”
They stopped laughing.
At the time, half the students I taught were failing my classes. The reason they were failing is that they didn’t read at home, do the homework or study for tests. I should know. I’m the one who recorded all those zeroes in the grade book.
I’m the one that called or attempted to call parents to get them involved.Then when students fail, Washington D.C. blames and punishes teachers.
Associated Content said in 2006, “Every day, as many as 77 percent of American youth are labeled by special definition: Latchkey Kids.”
In the US, a latchkey kid is one that leaves school in the afternoon to go to an empty house because the parent or parents are working. If no parent is home, who is guiding the child?
It didn’t help that I made more phone calls to parents than any other teacher on campus.
It didn’t help that I stayed in my classroom at lunch and at least an hour after school to help kids who wanted extra help, but none of my English students ever took advantage of that help and we couldn’t make them.
However, I was there year after year. Every day I reminded my students that I would be there. There was a sign posted on the wall as a reminder, and it was placed near the door where no one could miss it.
At lunch and after school, I often sat in an empty classroom but I didn’t waste my time. I used that time to correct the student work that had been turned in.
By the time I left teaching after thirty years, less than five percent of my students were doing the homework and it didn’t matter how many phone calls I made to parents.
It was obvious that most of the kids I taught did not have the types of parents I had. Many of the parents of my students didn’t speak English and were illiterate, so books were not important and children learn from their parents’ lack of interest.
It is obvious that President Obama’s mother and grandparents were great role models that made a big difference in his education. Why can’t he see that?
That fact that Obama is as blind as Bush was, is because it was probably a teacher’s fault.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 