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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There is a reason why half the teachersin America leave the classroom within three to five years and never return to education.
In fact, I don’t blame them.
Even now, almost five years after leaving the classroom, I can honestly say that I’d rather be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan to fight in a real shooting war than go back into a classroom.
And I know what war is like. I served in the United States Marines and fought in Vietnam in 1966.
My path to becoming a teacher started while I was earning a BA in journalism during the early 1970s, at California State University, Fresno. A grade school teacher and her husband lived in a first-floor apartment in the same building. We became friends
One night during dinner, she asked if I wanted to come to her classroom and read a story to her students. I agreed, but I had no story so I quickly wrote one called The Wind is my Friend.
Reading to her third graders went well, and she asked if I had ever considered becoming a teacher. She said I worked well with kids. That stuck in my mind. The seed had been planted.
I went on to graduate from Fresno State in 1973, and moved back to Los Angeles. Although I interviewed for jobs with newspapers and magazines, the pay was too low. I wouldn’t have earned enough to pay the rent on the apartment my wife and I lived in, so with help from my father-in-law, I found a job in industry.
However, the seed sprouted and in 1975, I quit a job with Pacific Motor Trucking to return to school at Cal Poly Pomona where I earned a multiple-subject life credential.
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 first year, I interned full time in a fifth-grade class at Yorbita Elementary in Rowland Unified School District in La Puente, California.
I had a great master teacher, who is retired now. Her name was Adele Stepp, and I became friends with her husband Mario.
At the time, he was the art teacher at Giano Intermediate, where I started teaching full time in 1978. Maybe making friends with Mario and Adele were two of the reasons I stayed in education the next thirty years.
See a Middle School Art Teacher in Action
Foresight is a great blessing. I don’t have it. If I did, I might have left the classroom instead of sticking with it and teaching more than six-thousand students.
Many classrooms in America are like war zones. I know of one teacher who lasted three hours before he quit. He taught his first three classes and stormed into the principal’s office at lunch, tossed the keys on the desk and said, “I will not teach children who will not give me the respect I deserve.”
I heard that he returned to the private school where he’d been working before accepting the job at Nogales High School for higher pay. Most private school teachers are not paid well.
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 