I took a step away from James’s father and moved behind the desk. While keeping an eye on him, I started looking for objects I could use as a weapon.
Lloyd Lofthouse at least ten feet underground in the comm bunker (Chu Lai, Vietnam - 1966).
The reading specialist appeared along with Marshall. They’d heard the yelling. After stopping the father’s tirade, the reading specialist explained that I was not responsible for assigning the book to James.
The specialist then took James’s father to his office. There was no apology for the outburst and the insults. I had discovered where James’s anger came from. He’d inherited or learned it from his explosive father.
I wondered where the father had been for most of the semester. I’d called the house a number of times and left messages. He had not attended parent conferences. In fact, I contacted all the parents when homework wasn’t turned in. I spent hours on the phone running into dead-ends and hearing empty promises from lousy parents.
In 1976-77, Romier elementary had razor wire on the roofs to keep vandals off. On Mondays, it was common to find fresh bullet holes in the doors. Once, we arrived to find the doorknobs had been beaten off. On another Monday, we couldn’t park our cars in the parking lot because all the lights had been shot out, and the lot was littered with shards of glass.
First Tank Battalion, First Marine Division, Chu Lai, Vietnam
That year, I made a friend with another teacher. The union rep for the school was Marshal Kahan. Soon after I was hired as a long-term sub, he came to the classroom and offered support and advice. During our conversation, I learned he was also a former United States Marine.
We stayed friends for thirty years and hiked the San Gabriel Mountains together for more than a decade before Marshall was diagnosed with leukemia. He died eight years after the diagnoses. I still miss the loss of his friendship.
The other incident is when James’s father came to shout at me, because his son’s reading score had not improved. I was alone the afternoon the father walked in unexpectedly. He cursed and accused me of being incompetent. He threw the reading book on the floor and said I’d put his son in a book that was too difficult. I shifted my body stance so one side faced him. I’d been taught hand-to-hand combat in the Marines and fought in Vietnam. If he was going to attack, I wanted to be ready.
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 first bully that attacked me was at a Catholic grade school during recess. For no reason, the fire-plug shaped, freckle-faced, red haired six-year old decided to hit me in the face and knock me down. Then he was getting ready to kick me when a hero stepped forward looking like a young, light haired six-year old Tom Cruise and stopped him. I haven’t forgotten the hero’s first name. It was James. I’ve liked anyone named James ever since.
The next incident was in fifth grade. I had a coin of some kind my grandmother gave me that was dated from the 19th century. I brought it to school to show to friends, and the bully saw it and wanted it. When I refused to hand it over, he started to move forward to take it from me.
I closed my eyes and morphed into a windmill with flying fists. I’d already read a comic book about Cervantes‘Don Quixote, and I was the windmill but the bully was no Don Quixote.The bully walked into my fist, and I regret that didn’t see it give him a bloody nose. He left me alone after that, and I kept the coin.
I don’t have respect for bullies (“bullies are kids who have tremendous low self-esteem”). That’s probably one of the reasons why I joined the Marines after high school—so I would be tougher and more dangerous. Most bullies are cowards and won’t fight if they think you will stand up to them. Bullies also tend to be organized like a pack of wolves (no insult to wolves, but that is a fact). There are two types of bullies: the physical kind and the verbal kind, who enjoy belittling kids that don’t appear capable of defending themselves. Some bullies fit both descriptions.
Then there is the pack of what appeared to be normal kids who will ostracize an individual who doesn’t fit into an acceptable social group. When I was teaching, I usually stood up for the outcast too.
I was a victim of bullies in grade school and ostracized by the social butterflies in high school. As a teacher, every year, at least one mouthy bully, usually a member of a local street gang, Puente 13, would ask, “What would you do if we jumped you, Mr. Lofthouse?
Kids that bully or ostracize others that do not fit the social norm remind of a flock of chickens that will peck the runt of the flock to death.
I know how important education is to the Chinese. I’ve been to China many times.
When Chinese mothers gather, they usually don’t talk of American Idol, fashion or the latest Hollywood gossip.
Chinese mothers talk about their children and how they are doing in school and recommend the best schools.
Most Chinese parents start saving for college when the child is still in the womb. The sacrifice the average Chinese parent makes for their children’s future education is mind-boggling.
My wife is Chinese and our daughter came home and did homework without the TV on. She earned straight “A’s” since third grade and graduated with a 4.65 GPA due to the AP and honors classes she took.
If she had not earned those grades … her mother would figuratively break her legs.
Anyway, back to Grendel.
After that staff meeting with Grendel, he left the room followed by a cloud of tobacco smoke.
The rest of the teaching staff sat stunned.
Soon, we were on our way home to correct papers and plan the next day’s lesson.
For the rest of that school year, true to his word, Grendel stayed behind closed doors—most of the time—while the teachers struggled to provide a liberal education.
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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Grendel was right about too many of the parents—at least some that I met while teaching at Alvarado. They were a brutally bizarre bunch from another world. They must have been Republicans.
I’ve heard the parents around Alvarado have changed since the 80s. The Chinese moved in and the wasps with the stingers fled.
Anyone who knows Asian cultures like India, China, South Korea, the Philippians and Japan, knows that the parents tend to respect and support teachers and most of the kids are great to work with. We can thank Confucius for that.
Most Asian-American students pay attention, read, ask questions, seek help and turn in homework.
They even study for tests. None of the usual excuses such as “my dad used my book report for toilet paper and flushed it and now he’s in South America on business”.
Asian students also earn high scores on standardized tests no matter who teaches them.
Those facts are ignored by neo-conservatives and Christian Evangelicals who want a voucher system to replace the public schools so waspish parents can control what their children learn like all good Nazis—no more liberal education.
If vouchers arrive, education will be a form of tunnel vision.
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.
There are many ways to measure the success or failure of public education in the United States, and one way is to compare functional Illiteracy in the United States to similar English speaking countries and Mexico, because culture plays an important role in children’s attitude toward education and literacy.
It’s arguable that the four MOST similar countries/cultures in the world, when compared to the United States, are Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, because they share an Anglo Saxon heritage, culture, and the same language. In addition, almost 80% of the U.S. population is white alone (in 2013, 77.7% were white), and the more than 13% who are African American, who have been in the U.S. for several generations, due to slavery, are no longer linked to an African cultural heritage. If you doubt that, consider that 78% of African Americans are Protestants and 5% are Catholics and—forced—immigration from Africa stopped and/or slowed drastically after the Civil War in 1865. What this means is that African Americans with roots that reach back 150 years or more are culturally American. If interested in this topic, I suggest you read a study out of Yale: African vs. African-American: a shared complexion does not guarantee racial solidarity
The United Nations defines illiteracy as the inability to read and write a simple sentence in any language, and it’s arguable that English is one of the most difficult languages to learn—if not the most difficult—if it is your second language. To understand this, I suggest you read 10 Reasons Why English is a Hard Language
Huan Japes, deputy chief executive of English UK, a trade body for language colleges, says a rule of thumb is 360 hours—120 hours for each of three stages—to get to the standard the government expects benefit claimants to reach. …
Dr Elaine Boyd, head of English language at Trinity College London, says, “If someone is really highly motivated, they can learn really quickly. It’s common for children under the age of 11 to be very immersed and be fluent in about six months.” …
Philida Schellekens, a language consultant, says that when she researched English language learning in Australia a decade ago the figure of 1,765 hours was used. That could mean four years of classes. It signifies the standard needed to do a clerical job in an office.
InEnglish Spelling Confuses Everyone, Professor Julius Nyikos, a linguistics expert born and raised in Hungary, learned numerous languages in his elementary school, high school, and university training. He came to the US in 1949 and, after a few years of studying English, was able to continue his profession as a linguist that he began in Europe. He spent many years as a professor at Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania studying the languages of the world. In his scholarly article for the 1987 Linguistics Association of Canada and the United States Forum, titled “A Linguistic Perspective of Functional Illiteracy,” he made the statement, “It would be both ludicrous and tragic if it took lawsuits to jolt us into the realization that neither the teachers, nor the schools should be faulted as much as our orthography [spelling], which is incomparably more intricate than that of any other language (emphasis added). If English is not the absolute worst alphabetic spelling in the world, it is certainly among the most illogical, inconsistent, and confusing. This is due to the developmental history of the present.”
Literacy is the ability to read and write. In modern context, the word means reading and writing in a level adequate for written communication and generally a level that enables one to successfully function at certain levels of a society.
The standards of what level constitutes “literacy” vary between societies.
In the United States alone, one in seven persons (i.e., over 40 million people) can barely read a job offer or utility bill, which arguably makes them functionally illiterate in a developed country such as the US.
In 2003 the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), conducted by the US Department of Education, found that fourteen percent of American adults scored at this “below basic” level in prose literacy. More than half of these persons did not have a high-school diploma or GED. Thirty-nine percent of persons at this level were Hispanic; twenty percent were Black; and thirty-seven percent were White.
Now, to compare the five countries listed in the post to the United States.
First – Mexico: The OECD reports that 7.2 years is the average years of schooling of adults in Mexico.
Second – Canada: In 2012, Indicators of Well-being in Canada reported that 22% of adult Canadians had less than a high school education in addition to 16.5% reading at Level 1 or Below Level 1. Canada has five literacy levels. Canada’s Below Level 1 and Level 1 are equal to Below Basic in the United States. 83.9% of Canadians read at levels 2, 3, and 4/5. If Canada measures literacy the same as the United Kingdom, then 48.5% are ranked at Level 2 and below and are functionally illiterate.
Third – United Kingdom: The Telegraph reported that one in five Brits is functionally illiterate—that’s 20% that read below level 2, the common definition of functional illiteracy, and the OECD reports that the UK is ranked 22nd for literacy and 21st for numeracy out of 24 countries. BBC.com
Fourth – Australia: Uses the same five level literacy skill level rating system as the UK and Canada, and in 2006, almost 46.4% of adults read at Level 2 or below and were functionally illiterate. abs.gov.au
Fifth – New Zealand: The distribution of literacy skills within the New Zealand population is similar to that of Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. Analysis of New Zealand Data from the International Adult Literacy Survey reports that 45% of adult New Zealanders were in Levels 1 and 2 for prose literacy.EducationCounts.govt.nz 5731 andEducationCounts.govt.nz 5495
Sixth – United States: 14% or 30 million were ranked below basic on the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), and 49% of adults who ranked below basic had less than/some high school but did not graduate from high school or earn a GED/high school equivalency. The United States has four literacy levels compared to five for the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. 87 percent of American’s read at basic or above. 65 percent read Intermediate and above. As reported by the OECD, one in six adults (16.6%) in the United States scored below level 2, in literacy. nces.ed.gov
In Conclusion, in case you are wondering why I included Mexico in this comparison, the PEW Research Hispanic Trends Project reports that “The number of Hispanic students in the U.S. public schools nearly doubled from 1990 to 2006, accounting for 60% of the total growth in public school enrollments over that period. There are now approximately 10-million Hispanic students in the nation’s public kindergartens and its elementary and high schools; they make up about one-in-five public school students in the United States. Most if not all of these students come from the poorest population in Mexico, and they bring with them the same attitudes toward education that they held before they came to the United States.
Ranking functional literacy in English speaking countries and Mexico
1st Place: In the United Kingdom, 80% read at Level 3 or above.
What explains the UK having such a low functional illiteracy rate? The Guardian.com reports that the “UK publishes more books per capita than any other country.” Does this translate into the UK being a more literate society? If this is the reason, it might be a cultural difference between the other major English speaking countries with similar cultural heritages.
2nd Place: In the United States, 65% read Intermediate Level or above.
3rd Place: In New Zealand, 55% of adults read at level 3 or above
4th Place: In Australia, 53.6% of adults read at level 3 or above
5th Place: In Canada, 51.5% of adults read at level 3 or above
6th Place: In Mexico, 64% of adults do not have a high school degree or its equivalent, and the The World Bank estimates that in 2012, 52.3-percent of Mexicans lived in poverty in their home country compared to 15-percent of the U.S. population who live in poverty—and 25.6% or about 12 million are Hispanic, and 35-percent or 6 million of the 16 million children who live in poverty in the U.S. were also Hispanic. In fact, over half of Mexican youth at age 15 are functionally illiterate and cannot solve simple equations or explain basic scientific phenomenon. WorldFund.org
In addition, theNew York Times reports that many of these children from Latin America are boys between ages 15 and 17 when they arrive in the United States, and they come from some of the poorest regions in those countries. Do you think these children arrived in the U.S. functionally literate in their own language?
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book isCrazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir.“Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
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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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.
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.
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 