One of the raptors ratted me out, and Grendel called me to his office to sizzle me in his hot seat. He yelled at me for going against Sauron’s orders. He moved closer until I could smell the dead flesh of vulchers and cigarettes on his breath. He demanded that I admit guilt. I suspected the motive was grade inflation.
I stared at his jugular wondering how fast it would take to tear it out with my teeth. Like Beowulf, I wanted to destroy the monster. To my dismay, as my PTSD was getting ready to launch, the VP, who was there to witness this interrogation, stepped forward and stopped us.
I think she saw the hunger in my eyes.
After school, she came into the teacher’s lounge, as I was getting ready to leave campus. We were alone. She looked around with a tense expression and made sure the hall leading to the staff lounge was empty.
Then she leaned closer and whispered. “You were right.” And she quit a few weeks later to accept a position in another school district abandoning us to the beast.
Damn! Talk about the rats leaving the ship. Soon, teachers started clambering down the ropes to escape.
What the workers left behind caused my sinuses to run a hundred mile marathons accompanied by a bombarment of sneezing.
I went to the VA doctor and he prescribed medications that didn’t work.
As the days passed, the sneezing went volcanic—like Mt. Saint Helena blowing its top.
One time, I sneezed so hard, I blew the 3M mask off my face—so much for a mask that’s supposed to protect you from every gas and WMD plague Islamic terrorists can brew.
Upstairs or outside, I was fine. However in my home office, I was a goner.
“Blam, blam, balm,” my nose exploded like rapid shots from a fifty-caliber submachine gun.
I could have opened windows, but it’s been raining for weeks. The sky has been overcast. The air breezy and cold.
Then the sun came out and I let the outside in and the sneezing stopped—I’m crossed my fingers and knocked on wood. I’m afraid to close the windows, but night will come and with it lower temperatures. I feared that whatever industrial poisons haunting my once tranquil office space might return.
As I update this post months later, I’m happy to report that the sneezing ended that day.
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.
I could have moved, but I didn’t want to disconnect all the cables and cart the computer equipment to another room for a few days—something (I soon discovered) would have been impossible without checking into a hotel.
If the school district where I worked for three decades would have let me, I would have rented a space in a nearby strip mall and taught my students away from the sick buildings.
But back in my home office, even with a noise suppresser over my ears, muted sounds intruded and the last place I wanted to be was in that chair writing about China, the Vietnam War or writing about being a teacher in the tortured American public schools.
I stuck with it for several days as my suppressed anger fueled by PTSD started to simmer and fume.
It was a relief when the workers finished. I thought I was going to have the tranquility back where the only noise would be the click of the keys as my warmed hands flew across the keyboard meeting my Blogging goals.
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.
When I left the office to find a moment of peace, I covered the computer and printers with a bed sheet. The noise reminded me of combat but worse, because I was nineteen and then twenty when I was in Vietnam—noise did not bother me as it does now.
Concrete dust floated through the air and my sinuses and lungs rebelled, so I put on a 3M mask with two pink HEPA filters attached.
The last time I wore a mask like this was when I was teaching.
I searched the garage and found a noise suppresser to slip over my ears and it helped mute the pounding and drilling.
I looked like an explorer on Mars or a survivor of trench warfare struggling to write while the frigid air froze my fingers.
The crew had arrived to bolster the foundation against future earthquakes that might never arrive. Even if a hard tumbler did visit, I doubt that all that work would hold our sixty-year old hillside house together. It still might slide down the hill into the middle of the street blocking traffic.
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.
It’s difficult to teach or write when I’m gasping for air and exploding my sinus.
When I was still teaching (1975 – 2005) there were years when walking into the empty classroom in the morning made me sick—and no, I wasn’t allergic to my students.
Then I retired from teaching (but not from life), and I have been free of wheezy lungs and sinus infections that always arrived with the start of each school year when I worked in those old buildings at the high school where I taught. Have you heard ofsick building syndrome?
I lived it.
This new, peaceful world changed when workers came with power tools and mud-caked boots.
I should have fled, but I stayed at my computer as a stupid, stubborn, former United States Marine would.
My office has three doors. One that leads to to rest of the house and one that opens to the outside.
Then there is the door that opens to the space under the second story.
Once under the house, that crew drilled into the foundation, pounded, cut and tracked dirt from room to room—always in my office.
I had trouble concentrating. I suffered memory loss. Plastic tarps covered most of the furniture, and I couldn’t find things.
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.
It was in the 1980s, when we were told to throw out the grammar books and stop teaching from them. I blame this on the self esteem movement—a blunder equal to the invasion of Iraq or the Vietnam War or Anzio in World War II or Richard Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate cover-up or John F. Kennedy allowing the Bay of Pigs Invasion that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis or Ronald Reagan and the Iran-Contra Affair or Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
“Throw out the books”, they said—and Hitler lit his match. But on the sly, we defied Sauron and Grendel. Most English teachers hid sets of Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition.
Every Friday, thirty minutes before class let out, I took out Warriner’s and went over the lesson for homework that weekend. It was always short and on Monday, the answers were posted on the board so the kids could check their work during roll before turning it in.
I thought I was being clever and had no idea that a storm was brewing.
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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TheWhole Language approach to teaching English was another magic bullet in public education that misfired. California’s educational system suffered horribly from this blunder. The theory was that the more a child reads on their own, the more the child learns.
However, children watch – on average – several hours of TV daily, and more than forty percent are latch-key children. Most of these soda-drinking sugar heads would not read even with a loaded gun to their heads. But for the Whole Language program to work, the children had to read at last thirty minutes every night on their own.
Grendel’s boss was Sauron from Mordor (Grendel and Sauron are anonymous names that represent real administrators). This latest magic bullet—The Whole Language approach to teaching English—probably came from him since most magic bullets for public education come from micro-managers like him. You’ll hear more about Sauron in a few other posts. He even appears in my memoir as Mr. Insert.
Anyway, Grendel ordered the English teachers to stop teaching grammar, mechanics, vocabulary and spelling, and this led to some of us teaching stealth grammar until Grendel recruited students as spies to catch us.
Sauron lived up to the nom de plume I’ve given him. Anyone that worked in Rowland Unified School District at that time probably knows who I’m talking about. He may even have had a Palantir, one of the seeing stones from The Lord of the Rings, to keep an eye on his administrators and teachers making sure they were doing things the way he wanted. During my thirty years of teaching in that school district, I often heard from staff that nothing was done without Sauron’s approval. The principals probably had to ask permission to visit a bathroom.
Now here’s the thing—teachers are blamed for every alleged failure in public education, and many of these so-called failures are manufactured. They are based on lies and fraud. For instance, teachers are lazy, teachers are incompetent and so one. But how could the failure of Whole Language be blamed on the teachers? Teachers protested. They knew it wouldn’t work. They knew that teachers had to keep teaching grammar. A decade later, Whole Language was quietly dropped, and teachers were told to start teaching grammar again but most of the textbooks had been recycled against the common sense and warnings of teachers–who are seldom if ever listened to by those at the top who know it all.
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
Honorable Mention in Biography/Autobiography at 2014 Southern California Book Festival
His third book is Crazy 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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At the end of the school year, the principal asked why half the kids I was teaching were failing. Easy answer. They didn’t work. Half the boys were hyperactive. James was either spinning like a top or picking fights. Hardly any of the kids did homework. Most the boys failed miserably and everyone was below reading level except a few of the girls.
I suspect that the word hyperactive is one of those words that political correctness disapproves of. Calling a kid hyperactive was replaced with ADHD, because it doesn’t sound as negative. Boosting self-esteem means changing words even if they mean the same thing. I never did agree with the self-esteem movement.
The principal said a fifty-percent fail rate was unacceptable. I refused to lower my standards so kids that hadn’t worked would be given passing grades. The principal wrote in my annual evaluation that he was not recommending me for a full-time position, because I hadn’t learned to be a team member.
USO Show, Chu Lai, Vietnam - 1966
I wouldn’t see Marshall Kahan for several years. The next time we met, I would be teaching at Alvarado Intermediate with Grendel as the principal. Marshall had transferred from Romier looking for a school without razor wire and bullet holes in the doors.
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.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 