The Bud Hawthorne Revue, Volume 1: A Music Teacher's Lament

By Bud Hawthorne

These are the essays of music teacher, Bud Hawthorne, following his resignation from public school teaching. In this short memoir of stories, critiques, and correspondences, Bud struggles with his thoughts through the course of one last year teaching, and the resignation itself. Divided on his decision to leave the classroom, he finds that the culture in these schools he has been working for is not only oppressive to the occupation of teaching, but especially remiss with regard to the subject of elementary school music. Giving himself an all too free range of expression, there are moments fit for a documentary about the art of classroom music instruction, and ramblings toward the darker side of influences such as Hunter S. Thompson and William S. Burroughs. He pulls no punches, political or personal, while giving readers a closer look inside the education system than he himself was comfortable facing, thereby ruthlessly blowing doors off of offices, both local and statewide. While the reader will find that Mr. Hawthorne is an outspoken advocate for children, by no means is this a book meant to come anywhere near readers less than 18 years of age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bud Hawthorne
• Release date: Oct 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310152153

Bud Hawthorne

Bud Hawthorne is a misanthropic former school teacher. He crawls around the internet looking for ghostwriting work, and pretends this will pay his bills until it doesn't. He also plays jazz bass at clubs, and promotes himself irregularly, on a website url of his own name.As an author, he enjoys writing music and film critiques, as well as short fiction for Seven Eleven Stories. Recently, Seven Eleven Stories agreed to edit and help prepare for distribution his collection of essays entitled, "The Bud Hawthorne Revue--Volume 1: A Music Teacher's Lament," for distribution right here on Smashwords.

Book preview

The Bud Hawthorne Revue

Volume 1: A Music Teacher’s Lament

All Rights Reserved

© 2015, Bud Hawthorne

Dedication

This book is dedicated to all teachers who are still out there fighting—for the kids.

Contents

I. Intro

Editor’s Remarks

Fragments of Resignation

Divided You Say?

Young Improvisations: A Bitter Music Teacher’s Salvation

Correspondence 1

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451

Correspondence 2

An Abel Ferrara Overview

Correspondence 3

Excerpts of From the Shadows, by Barnaby Hazen

II. A Sidenote

Fourth Grade Lunch Duty Surprise

Correspondence 4

Questionable Disciplinary Tactics

The German Argentinian

The Church Parking Lot

The Licensure Rejection Contention

The Assessment Test Blues

Macintosh-Mania

And At the Bottom it Reads

III. Afterward

I’m Finally Used to it—but don’t Fucking do it to Kids

"Children are fascinated by the ordinary

and can spend timeless moments

watching sunlight play with dust.

Their restlessness they learn from you.

It is you who are thinking of there

when you are here.

It is you who thinks of then

instead of now."

- William Martin

from The Parents Tao Te Ching

I fight evil with evil.

-Tricky

I. Intro

You have been showing up as a music teacher to classroom work for years, at first thinking it couldn’t possibly be for you, then wondering if maybe it could; then getting fired and rehired in the course of a summer, due to state cuts and an unfathomable bunch of office yahoos panicking at the idea of getting fired themselves, so cutting the jobs of teachers who aren’t office-neighbors. Roughly forty positions in the tiny town of ----, all teachers working directly with kids, yet not one position was cut from the office away from all campuses. It’s still so puzzling, like a hideous, gelatinous maze of illogical policy, so that whether you’re in the classroom walking kids back to their homerooms, or at home, or on the much celebrated summer vacation many teachers try to enjoy as a temporary oasis, you can’t quite look away from it—it’s impossible.

You type, you cut, you paste, and are soon possessed of an outspoken abandon too familiar to your late at night, isolated persona.

Thus begins the Bud Hawthorne Revue.

Editor’s Remarks

When I was first approached about a manuscript by a fellow music teacher, also on the edge of quitting his job, I was intrigued, but busy managing my own project. I was also impressed by another common thread between our stories—we had both been fired for budget cuts, then rehired over the summer, after working our first year. Mr. Hawthorne’s respectful query (now injected into the text, along with a few other letters between us) was the beginning of a lengthy roller coaster of correspondences, for which I am neither entirely ungrateful, nor by any means free from regret at my own participation.

As the human mind will want to place expectations on any coincidence, so did I unfortunately place much in the way of assumptions regarding the compatibilities of our aesthetics. Considering how very similar were our experiences, and how well received were his short stories by the Seven Eleven Stories staff, I cannot persecute myself too severely for having had high hopes at the smoothness of process in agreeing to edit and publish a report from his teaching experiences.

The most recurring matter of topic, through emails and then parcels (he did at the time of switching to written letters admit to me that he thought his character was unfit for any form of written communication that didn’t allow him the time it took to drive to a dispatch and reconsider what he was sending) was his habitual use of a word (habitual enough to act as a synonymous replacement for the word administrator by the end of the manuscript)—a combination of two words, rarely merged together, so by no means of his own invention—cuntyfuck.

I was drawn by the passion of his message, about the marginalization of arts in education, and other things that he found faulty during a few years working in the field. However, I openly took issue with this word in particular, at first seriously, and then, I must confess, in a kind of cruel act of jest against his resolve to overuse it.

Perhaps if we hyphenated it… I suggested, and at this point in the exchange there was a blurry line between irony and sincerity. He wrote back: Hyphenating the word ‘cuntyfuck’ would be like adding color to a classic film.

Our correspondence became more and more difficult to decipher. There were times when I thought perhaps he was having me on, despite the forcefulness of his language. I received a strange note around 3am Western Standard Time that left me to wonder if in fact he was simply a reporter, speaking on behalf of an actual educator who was in fear of losing his job, or facing legal repercussions.

It’s funny, I thought at the time—funny that upon putting his first manuscript together, he immediately happened upon possibly the only independent in the country who might consider publishing this rancorous piece; and funny that he was so quick to arrive at the conclusion that I was attempting to pull back on his message by way of censorship and dilution, though I