Why Do We Have to Learn This Crap?: Twenty-Five Days in the Life of a Basic-Math Teacher

By Steve Western

Why don’t more American adolescents scale the mathematical bell curve and reach…average? The answers lie in “Why Do We Have to Learn This Crap?”: Twenty-Five Days in the Life of a Basic-Math Teacher. Wayne Muncie teaches the Basic Math classes at Sunset Bay High School. He enjoys his students—most of them, anyway—and the challenge—usually—of educating them. His students share their experiences and interests with him, which—despite his assessment anxiety, the stress of managing his classroom and his end of the freshman hall, and a harrowing three-month stint as a driver-education instructor—keeps him young. Wayne doesn’t hunt or fish or attend church, so he is something of an oddity in Sunset Bay, a conservative Oregon city that once had thriving fishing and timber industries. He reads, observes, and takes walks with his wife and dog. He doesn’t consider himself exceptional, but the depth of his outer and inner worlds, and the humor that pervades both, are revealed when he is simultaneously talking and listening—that is, writing in his diary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9781467548229

Book preview

It's the last day of spring break. John Dewey—or maybe it was Floyd Jenkins, the sage of the faculty lounge when I began teaching at Sunset Bay High School the Tuesday after Labor Day in 1990, seventeen and a half years ago—said that spring break was one of the five reasons for becoming a teacher. The other four were Christmas vacation, June, July, and August. People who work fifty weeks a year don't think that's funny. Teachers have too much time off, they say. Step into my classroom, I say, and attempt to entertain adolescents. Six fifty-minute shows a day. A thousand shows a year. Not even Mr. Las Vegas, the tireless Wayne Newton, can do that.

I had hoped it would rain all break so I would have an excuse not to weed and edge at home. Rain did fall during much of the week, but this morning is clear, so, while my wife's at church, I've been outside with a dandelion digger and shovel, trying to reclaim our yard. It's pointless. I'll have to do the same thing next spring, and every spring after that. I should pave the yard and paint it green.

I carry a five-gallon bucket of unwanted yard in each hand to an empty lot a block from our house. The buckets are heavy, but they balance each other. If I had just one to carry I would be listing like a ship. Carrying two buckets keeps me on an even keel, though my arms, I swear, are a foot longer and my hands extend past my knees. I watch for pedestrians and cars. When I see one I look straight ahead and act nonchalant, as though I were on a stroll. I cross two streets, set my buckets down, turn one upside down, then the other. I've learned from my cleverer students that you should always be prepared with an explanation should you get caught, so here's mine: I'm making topsoil.

The two guys who left Sunset Bay's Fred Meyer yesterday afternoon with the determination of passengers trying to make a connecting flight were not very clever. They dropped a bulging black duffle bag into the trunk of an old Accord, then kept walking. I certainly wasn't going to confront them. Yet I felt I should do something. Evil, after all, prospers—and prices go up—when good people do nothing. So I drove by the Accord and my wife wrote down its license plate number. When we got home I called the store. Thanks, the woman who answered the phone said, but we've already caught them. It was a poorly planned heist. If I had done it—I wouldn't have because I wouldn't risk looking sheepishly at my students and peers from the front page of the Sunset Bay Sentinel—I would have involved three vehicles so the stolen merchandise could be moved like a pea in a shell game.

I phone my parents. They live in Denver, which is about 900 miles as the crow flies from Sunset Bay, or almost 1400 miles if the crow follows state highways and interstates. I lived in Denver off and on throughout my twenties, but I knew I would never become all I could be as long as I lived in my parents' basement. It's 3:37 here, 4:37 there. I'm more of a listener than a talker—a man of few words, my mother has often said—so my call so close to their dinner hour gives me an excuse to excuse them. My mother answers, then shouts It's Wayne! to my father, who picks up their other phone after shouting back that he's not deaf. I've made a mental list of four topics so I'll have something to bring to the conversation. My mother broaches one of my topics, my father another. Which leaves me with two, one of which I can't remember. So I start on the one I do remember before it's poached. But we soon exhaust it. It's almost five your time, I say. I'd better let you go. They thank me for calling and I say I'll talk to them soon. When I do, in four or five weeks, I'll have a list of ten topics, and make sure they're written down.

Tonight is the last performance of The Sound of Music at the Quayside Theatre. My wife has wanted to see this play since it opened three weeks ago. I would like to see it, too, if we didn't have to leave our house. The problem with a live performance is that you can't rewind it if you missed something or hit the pause button if you need to use the restroom. The problem with a live performance at the Quayside Theatre is that the building is almost a hundred years old, so its chairs are narrow, which I don't mind because I'm fairly narrow myself, but I do mind that the legroom is so limited that the person sitting behind me can't cross one leg over the other without kicking my chair, or me. But my wife wants to see the play, and I can't put it off any longer. The middle seats in the theatre are filled—it must be ten degrees warmer in the midst of all those bodies—so we sit on the aisle. The lights dim, the pit orchestra plays the overture, and the curtains open. The set is quite professional. And so, surprisingly, is the acting. The actors are all local. A county judge in his late fifties plays Captain von Trapp. A sixteen-year-old Sunset Bay High School junior plays Maria. She has a wonderful voice and an amazing presence. The judge romancing this young girl is creepy, creepier even than Woody Allen in Manhattan. I wonder, given his questionable judgment, how many defendants have appeared before him and been slapped on the wrist when they should have been slapped in jail. The songs, as I feared, are stuck in my head. I drive home hearing Do-Re-Mi, brush my teeth to Climb Ev'ry Mountain, change into my pajamas and get into bed to Edelweiss, and, after kissing my wife, I hear myself say:

"So long, farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, adieu,

Adieu, adieu, to yieu and yieu and yieu."

I wish I had one more day off. If I had had the last fifteen years off, I would probably still wish I had one more day off. It could be midnight, it's so dark out, but it's 5:30 a.m. I read somewhere that America runs because its people get up and go to work. I want to do my part, though I could use another hour and a half of sleep, so I get up and go to work. Before my first-period Basic Math class, which starts at 8:00, I stand by the door to my classroom—it's in the library building; students call it the freshman hall—and greet my students. They look like they've been rousted out of bed and driven to a holding pen. I suppose they have. They've survived middle school and some have completed ninth grade, so their prognosis for graduation is good. They sit at their desks, resigned. They'll make good employees. The country will continue to run. Hair will be cut, meals will be cooked and served, carpet and linoleum laid, tires rotated, engines tuned, trucks driven, machine guns fired. Just don't ask them to do too much math.

We've tacitly agreed to one worksheet per day. Sometimes I try to slip them two, but they'll have none of it. So after class I pick up the second worksheets off their desks and off the floor and, if they don't have footprints on them, hand them out the next day. The students will then dutifully complete them. I have a tacit agreement, too, with the principal. I'll teach the four Basic Math classes—called Bonehead Math by the old-timers in the faculty lounge when I was student teaching—and two Pre-Algebra classes if my Basic Math classes are no larger than twenty students, my Pre-Algebra classes are no larger than thirty, and if he won't point, or give me the finger, when my sophomores, the only high-school class the state assesses, don't pass the math assessment. In most school districts the new teachers get stuck with the lower-level math classes. Their enthusiasm, predictably, wanes and they calculate how long they'll stick around—in the district and teaching—if they're stuck with students who carve I HATE MATH on their desks. But I like these kids. Most of them, anyway. One of my best traits is that I can find something to like in just about everyone. I could have talked to Hitler about dogs, to Stalin, after his latest purge, about the difficulty of finding good help. However, if either had been my seatmate on a plane and got up to use the restroom, I would have moved to another seat.

The Friday before spring break we—my Basic Math classes—concluded the unit on fractions with a test. I would like to think my students were so looking forward to spring break that they were too distracted to give my carefully constructed test their full attention. I might have thought that when I was in my first year of teaching, but I'm fifty-one now, having had several starts and stops and starts again in my teaching career, so I don't reach for excuses anymore to explain my disappointments in the classroom. I keep a few handy, though, should I have to explain myself to an administrator or a taxpayer disappointed in me. I considered reviewing fractions today, but I don't have the heart to put the students through that again. So first period we begin the unit on polygons. In this unit we learn interesting, and confusing, facts. For example, a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle isn't necessarily a square, and a rhombus can be both and neither. Polygons take up a lot of space on a worksheet, so today's assignment has problems on the front and back. If anyone balks, I'm prepared to argue that a worksheet, by definition, is one sheet of paper, which is what I've handed out. The schoolhouse lawyers go to work—on the assignment, not on me—and so do the less litigious students, so the defense can rest.

I overhear, because I'm eavesdropping, a student in my sixth-period Pre-Algebra class tell another student that in her English class earlier today the substitute teacher passed out a test covering three short stories, one of which the class never read. Testing students on a story they never read is unjust, and giving them a test on the first day back to school after spring break is even more unjust, so they refused to take it. I'll bet the substitute teacher, if he had known he would be facing a sit-down strike, wouldn't have answered his phone this morning.

We have a fire drill five minutes before the end of school. We have one five minutes before the end of school on the last school day of every month. It's a state law (one fire drill per month, not a fire drill five minutes before the end of school on the last school day of the month). The students walk to the football stadium. They might not be so orderly if the fire alarm sounded at any other time on any other day.

I'm a teacher who likes to walk around the classroom, my presence prodding the reluctant to work, or at least making them feel guilty for not working. All that walking and prodding and making feel-guilty is tiring, so I drive straight home after school and change into my T-shirt from my alma mater, UNC—I was a Bear from Northern Colorado, not a Tar Heel from North Carolina—and my flannel bottoms—the top I tore into pieces when the elbows gave out, and used to buff my Ranger pickup after I waxed it last summer. I walk to the entrance hall and let our ten-month-old tan-and-white Chiweenie out of her pen. She's been pounding on the top of it with her forepaws since she heard me open the door from the garage. It's true that dogs love unconditionally and, when one of them is in heat, often uninhibitedly. We had our dog spayed, so we'll never have to witness that. After nine hours of multitasking, I can't concentrate long enough to read, and yard work can always wait, so I sit on the living-room carpet and play with the dog. The first game is tug of war with whichever toy she hasn't yet ripped open to get at the stuffing inside. Her victims lie in a box on the shelf in the entrance hall's closet and await re-rehabilitation. Their faces, missing eyes, noses, and ears, have more stitches than a baseball. She pulls with clenched teeth on a loop of a cloth toy that is a cube with a loop attached to each side, I pull on another, and then I let it drop. She drops her end; she wants me to pick up the toy and throw it across the room, into the kitchen. Which I do. A couple dozen times. It's almost as tedious as playing Candy Land with a two-year-old.

My wife arrives home from work. She and the dog greet one another and play, so I'm free to look at the mail she set on the kitchen table when she came home for lunch. I open the envelope from AARP and remove a membership application. Seen from behind, admittedly, I look like I'm wearing a flesh-colored yarmulke. My vision is no longer correctable to 20/20, even if my contact lenses wore contact lenses. And I'm beginning to understand what older people mean when they talk about their aches and pains. But AARP will have to wait until I retire and need discounts to supplement my pension, investments, and savings. The second envelope is from my mother. It contains a note and a paper. In the note she states that my father and she found the paper, which I had ripped from a Big Chief tablet and has, in my handwriting, subjects and my scores from the Stanford Achievement Test I took in third grade, when they went through boxes in the storage beneath the staircase in their basement. If the envelope had arrived last Saturday, I would have had a fifth topic when I spoke to my parents, assuming I had remembered it. They would have introduced the topic, I assume, if they had remembered it. Anyway, the cursive loops have since disappeared. I now print in leaning sticks. I never received higher than a C in penmanship. I would give myself a D for my penmanship now, and I'm an easy grader. If I weren't an easy grader, the recidivism rate in my classes would approach that of the U.S. penal system. Mrs. Graham, my third-grade teacher, praised Andy, a chubby boy in the class who wore the same jeans and plaid shirt every day, for his penmanship. His script was nice, but I thought unnecessarily small. It didn't seem that much better than mine. She may have been aware of difficulties he was having at home and wanted to say something positive to him, or maybe he was a slow learner and she sought to build him up. My teaching career has certainly been filled with white lies. When students struggling to get through high school tell me they're going to be veterinarians or lawyers, I smile, tell them to work hard, and leave it to someone else to explain to them why college freshmen aren't called thirteenth-graders. Anyway, for some reason I had written down the Stanford Achievement Test subjects and my scores. Today they would be on a printout that included percentiles, grade equivalents, and probably a graph or two. My scores were average. If I were on the bell curve, the clapper would have been overhead. It probably still is. I'm not smart enough to design a rocket sled, but not dumb enough to ride one. I smile when I read Mrs. Graham's note—in her perfect penmanship—at the bottom of the paper: Wayne rushes through his work. I don't smile, though, when my students rush through their work.

We eat, I wash the dishes, we take the dog for a walk, watch an hour of television, and it's time for bed. Where did the evening go? When I was in junior high, my mother told me that time goes faster as you get older. I hoped she was right because nothing moved slower than the hands on a classroom clock. I've got clock-watchers in every one of my classes. Time would go faster, I've told them, if they completed two worksheets per day, but no one has taken the bait.

The clock radio, as it does every workday morning, wakes us with music. I had an alarm clock when I was in college, but the heart can be jolted only so many times before it gives out. That's why firemen can retire before most people. I could get up at 6:00, which is when my wife gets up, but the extra half-hour gives me time to make my lunch, eat my breakfast, read, and enjoy my coffee. I could make my lunch the night before, forgo eating, reading, and coffee, and get up at 7:30. But I would have to be a quick-change artist and shave with a razor that has a blade as wide as a squeegee's.

This morning's excitement at school is the suspension and possible expulsion of Aaron, one of my Basic Math students, for bringing a pocketknife to school. No one would have known he had the knife if he hadn't used it in his English class to sharpen his pencil. He's a harmless boy, but No means no when it comes to weapons in schools. I have several boys like Aaron in my classes. They're bright enough to be in Algebra I, but they won't do their work, so the counselors move them down and down until they can't move down anymore. Then they—these boys—complain to me, when I complain to them that they're not completing assignments, that they're not challenged. I've known adult Aarons. To listen to them you would think they were professors, but they have holes in their T-shirts instead of elbow patches on tweed jackets, and their captive audience is the other people in line for a block of government cheese.

I use fourth period—my prep period—and much of my lunch hour, which is really two-thirds of an hour, to grade papers, record grades, and photocopy worksheets and tests. A student aide, if I had one, could copy for me. I had an aide last term, but copy jobs, no matter how large or small, took her the same amount of time: all period. Work, like a gas, can expand or compress to fit into a defined space. My workload every year is not exactly the same, but I always finish it at 3:30 p.m. on the last day. In the copy room adjoining the library, I see two pairs of scissors on a shelf. Each has blades that dwarf a pocketknife's. If someone really wanted to do damage, that someone could go into the cafeteria's kitchen or a home economics room and select a blade not much smaller than a machete's. I expect I'll see Aaron back in class in a few days. He'll have learned his lesson. Next time he'll keep his knife where it belongs, in his pocket.

Teachers' gradebooks are online. Students and their parents, using passwords, can access them. They can't see other students' grades. No student has ever disputed my recordkeeping. One parent has called me. She asked if it were true that I had lost seventeen of her daughter's assignments. I said no. She said that's what she thought. Janice teaches Algebra II and Trigonometry and chairs the math department. Her students and their parents won't leave her alone. If she makes an error in recording a grade, she'll soon hear about it. If grades aren't recorded promptly, parents complain to the principal that they can't get timely feedback. So her job is as trying as mine. In fact—her students who earn Fs often blame her; mine who fail don't begrudge me; and her students who get Ds, unlike mine who barely pass, are rarely grateful—it may be worse.

I usually eat lunch at my desk as I work. If I have time, like today, I read Eugene's newspaper, The Register-Guard. Each teacher receives a copy, gratis, each morning in his box in the mailroom. The publisher intends that teachers will make their copies available to students and that students will get in the newspaper-reading habit and subscribe when they're adults. The immediate effect is that teachers who were subscribers no longer are.

I stated in my syllabi that I'm available to tutor students before and after school and during lunch, but I'm rarely availed upon, and never during lunch. Janice doesn't have this problem (if you consider eating lunch in peace or with adults a problem). She assigns homework every day, even on Fridays. I don't assign my students homework because most of them wouldn't do it if I did, which would put them between a rock—a D-—and a hard place—an F. They think one worksheet per day, completed in class, is fair. A teacher has to meet students halfway, which is why, on the first day of school, I tell my classes that I expect them to complete two worksheets per day. They grumble, so I say, All right, one worksheet per day. Then I hand out that day's worksheet, a pretest. They sigh, an audible expression of their forbearance, as though I were a toddler or ninety years old, and go to work. The gasbags on the editorial page wouldn't approve of my compromise. They would accuse me of setting the bar too low, but they don't know what they're talking about when they talk about education. I could have started the bidding at ten worksheets per day, and we still would have arrived at one. George Will should spend a year in a public-school classroom, preferably in an inner city. If he did, he would either be humbled or teachers like me would be out of excuses.

I read in the paper that the Clintons have made $109 million since 2000. Bill makes up to $450,000 per speech, which is about what I make in nine years. I could see paying a philosopher like Jesus