Only the Faces Change - A High School Odyssey

By Herb Williams

Only the Faces Change is a humorous, poignant story of teachers, both good and bad, of students searching for truth In education and in their personal lives, and of failed bureaucratic attempts to Improve education.

Herb Williams encourages students to speak for themselves through discussions and notes (Dear Herbies), from a coffee can; satirizes directives from principals, counselors, attendance supervisors and parents; values contributions from colleagues (From the Campus Inn); Incorporates the latest rumors from one who knows them all (The Ear with an Attitude); and integrates satirical columns from his newspaper days (Fiction and Fact from the Almanac).

His message is clear: We cannot spend, legislate, or test our way to educational excellence. Without concerned parents, enthusiastic students, and teachers who have a love for the game, share innovation, empathy and rapport with their charges, only the faces will change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312669451

Book preview

Only the Faces Change - A High School Odyssey

Only the Faces Change -

A High School Odyssey

by

Herb Williams

Copyright © 2014 by Herb D. Williams

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in review, without permission in writing from the author/publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-312-66945-1

DEDICATION and ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To all dedicated teachers, both past and present, who have a love for the game, and share innovation, empathy, and rapport with their charges—and to all students who are fortunate enough to experience those teachers.

Many thanks to my editor, Becky Arrants, my writing consultant, Bruce McAllister, my colleagues from the watering holes, former students who shared their experiences, my good friend and esteemed humanities partner, and to the ear with an attitude.

DISCLAIMERS

Names of characters in this book have been eliminated to protect the innocent as well as the guilty. Certain physical characteristics and other descriptive details have been changed. Some of the events and characters are composites of individual events or persons.

The views and opinions expressed From the Campus Inn, From the Lounge, From the Ear with an Attitude, and from other colleagues do not necessarily reflect the views of the author.

Spelling and grammar mistakes found in notes, letters, excuses, and other responses from parents and students have been purposefully left uncorrected.

Introduction

After thirty-two years of successfully teaching English in a large metropolitan high school, and eight years teaching part-time at two community colleges, I have decided to add my voice to education challenges through a humorous/satirical memoir— a compilation of enlightened experiences with students, curricula, fellow colleagues, trickle-down education requirements, proficiency exams, loads of paperwork, demeaning non-teaching chores, and repetitious—often absurd—reports, directives, and memos, including humorous absence excuses:

Please excuse John, he had a bad head egg;

Please excuse Sandra, she has been sick and under the doctor;

Please excuse my daughter for not being in class all last week, for she had to baby-sit for a little while.

From a suggestion box (actually, a small coffee can) I collected hundreds of questions and comments—revelations of students’ lives outside of school—written by anonymous and synonymous individuals. I read the notes and responded in class one day each week. I answered most questions with humorous practicality, but some I deferred to higher authorities because they were beyond my willingness to jeopardize my position and credential.

Many of the notes appear under the headings, Dear Herbie, Dear Herb, Dear H, and Dear Herbert when the students in question wanted to tweak me (they knew I hated my full first name). The messages ran the gamut from the simple to the complex and to the disturbing:

About last week, I think I’d rather have an ‘A’ instead of an ‘F’ and I don’t feel guilty because I messed around with your grading book;

I have a problem that I am a novice to. I lost my girlfriend a while ago and you helped get her back. Thanks, but I met another lady, I mean, she’s 23 years old and says she really does care a lot about me. I’m a sophomore and very confused. What do you think about Ms. 23? Could she actually care?

And,

My boyfriend and I want to have sex but I’m not sure because I’m kind of scared about getting pregnant. Is there some way I could get the pill for I won’t have to worry about this?

I also include juicy gossip, titled From the Ear with an Attitude:

Our principal always asks what you need, then tells his secretary to order it later…maybe;

When he was notified of a large monetary inheritance, a less than dedicated science instructor bailed out of teaching—in the middle of third period. He never came back;

In  addition, I provide illuminating Facts from the Faculty Lounge:

One teacher, who is also a captain in the army reserve, makes former students salute her when they meet off-campus;

The librarian sent out a list of great books that cannot be found in the library; and

The founder of the procrastinators’ club on campus never attends the meetings.

To provide more depth and humor in lessons, I randomly slipped in a few abridged articles from my journalistic experience as a satirical newspaper columnist: Fiction and Fact from My Almanac with titles such as, On Being a Lefty in a Right-Handed World; Why We Love Fruit; and ‘N Serch of Literusee.

In order to give credence to my understanding of the more disengaged students, I offer a glimpse into my own high school experiences….

My introduction to high school education began (on days that I attended classes) at Bell High School located in Bell, California near Atlantic Boulevard. Every day when I crossed that boulevard, I faced the decision of either going to school or hitchhiking to Long Beach Pike or Belmont Shores. If the weather was sunny, the beach reached out to me. Fortunately, I wore my bathing suit under my jeans and sometimes I brought along a towel. This activity not only freed me from the drudgery of going to school but threatened to eliminate that chore altogether. I wrote my own absence excuses—and got away with it until the vice principal asked my mom to come in.

My mother, an innocent soul, could not lie. She said she did not write any of the thirty or more notes. I was then invited (told) to leave Bell High School, and faced attending a reform school or some other place of higher learning. Luckily, we moved to Ismay, (at one time called Joe) Montana instead.

I stayed with an uncle after my mom and her new husband moved on, and I attended high school in Ismay for about three months on a regular basis—it was too far from the beach. Shortly after a heavy snowfall, the weather dropped to 60° below zero. I told my uncle that when it’s 60° above in Southern California, I’m cold; at 60° below it was time to put me on a Greyhound bus home.

Upon my return from Montana, I took up residence in Huntington Park, California and was accepted into the high school there. My attendance improved somewhat, especially after getting swats for ditching class and other objectionable behavior. My school records were unaccounted for from the school in Ismay, so consequently I had to repeat the 10th grade for the third time: Once at Bell High School, once at Ismay School, and lastly at Huntington Park High School.

Everything went along pretty well until summer vacation. I traveled (hitchhiked) to my villa (a cheap hotel), in the wine country near Fresno, California. There, I landed a prestigious job in a peach cannery, sorting cans to be filled. Later, because of a labor dispute, I left for Redding, California where I found work in a sawmill. When the mill burned down, I returned to Huntington Park, but by then, it was well into the semester—so I had to repeat the 11th grade.

Since I had to work for a living, my attendance wasn’t all that great—nor was my attitude toward learning. After more swats for ditching school and smoking on campus, my attitude was finally adjusted. I signed a contract stating that I would stay out of trouble and come to school on a regular basis. I finished up my course work and graduated from Huntington Park High School when I was nineteen years old.

After serving two years in the Marine Corps, I decided to take advantage of the educational part of the G.I. Bill. I enrolled at Los Angeles Community College as an experiment. My high school records were dismal; my GPA equaled a D with wings. I’m sure that many teachers passed me because they felt sorry for me; others gave me a smattering of F’s and a few C’s. Hardly indicative of my capabilities. I spent two years at LACC, and changed my major three times. My first major was architecture, but I didn’t have enough money to go to USC or Cal. Berkeley; next was civil engineering, but I never could figure out the slide rule or trigonometry. Finally, desperate for some guidance, I took an aptitude test and the results astounded me: I was good at reading and writing, which were not my best subjects in high school.

After graduating, armed with an English major and social studies minor, I matriculated into California State College at Los Angeles, where I not only received my Bachelor’s Degree but my Master’s as well, along with a credential to teach at the secondary school level.

So, nine years after graduating high school, I was hired to teach high school English. It was the only career I wanted for over thirty years. In fact, I retired only because the school board made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

In the Beginning There Was Darkness

On September 2, 1958, the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) was signed into law to provide funding to all levels of United States educational institutions. This Act was influenced by the Soviet launch of the satellite Sputnik on October 4, 1957, which suggested the capability to launch offensive missiles at the United States, and contributed to the fear that schools in the USSR were superior to American schools.

The educational establishment immediately upped the graduation requirements at colleges and high schools throughout the country. It was a grandiose idea, but no one bothered to evaluate the adolescent point of view of the new regulations.

Teenagers in the late 1950s were emerging as a force to be reckoned with. Their population had increased immensely, which made it possible for them to establish more independence and freedom. The Generation Gap ensued as teens’ dress, beliefs, pastimes, social values, and speech patterns differed from their parent’s, and it seemed that teens had more interest in rock and roll music than in education.

As more science and math courses were added to the high school curriculum, my life as an English teacher, while seemingly less important, began with a student-teaching assignment at a Los Angeles inner city high school. I stepped into a tenth-grade classroom that was an exact replica of the one I had left nine years earlier. Except for the regimented rows of seat-desks (right out of elementary school), attached to wooden runners screwed to the floor, everything else was the same. Many of the aged desks displayed the desperate marks of bored students—deep scratches or carved initials worn deeper by years of anguish. The blackboard was so old it was gray from the thousands of applications of chalk and the inability of dust caked erasers to thoroughly eliminate the writings; some of which remained imbedded in the board. The musty smells of old wood, aged books, and accumulated paper permeated the room. It seemed as if the windows had never been opened for fresh air—only an occasional whiff of aftershave or cologne allayed the odors.

I arrived, second period, between the passing and tardy bells. Oddly quiet, students entered the room. There was no small talk and no playful poking or pushing; just the sounds of shuffling books, bodies, and feet as students reached their seats. Once down, they sat passively as if in anticipation of punishment if they uttered a sound or moved an inch.

I approached the teacher who sat behind a dilapidated desk. She looked like an old schoolmarm. Her hair was pulled back into a bun, and she wore a simple solid color dress and low-heeled shoes, which appeared comfortable but were far from fashionable. She looked as if she had been in the classroom too long—far beyond the day when she should have retired. Her attitude was nailed down like the seats.

I introduced myself, Hi, I’m Herb Williams, your new student teacher, working on my first assignment as such.

Hello, she said. She slowly looked up, without a smile or an extension of her hand or a welcome to my world.

What would you like me to do?

Just observe today. We can talk after this period. There is a fifteen minute morning break before the next class.

Miss Drearsy’s teaching methods were typical of the hard line English teachers of my high school days; big on discipline and order and not much else. Although this was the third day of the fall semester, she reviewed a list of classroom requirements written on one side of the blackboard (a list so imbedded it could never be erased; unchanged for over thirty years). It was a compilation of the usual—no eating or chewing gum; no talking; no hall pass except for emergencies; no late homework—and a few I didn’t expect: Address me as Miss Drearsy, and do not leave your seat for any reason.

Then she distributed the reading assignment curse of all students, the required novel. In this case it was A Tale of Two Cities or as the students called it, A Sale of Two Titties.

She said, Do not write in these books, just fill out the book cards and pass them up. If the book is marked up or lost you will be fined.

Drearsy assigned a short reading in class, but didn’t ask the students to look over the worn-out copies to report any previous marks. They, on the other hand, could not have cared less about either the book or the fine.

After the reading period, she didn’t offer any explanation of what the students read or solicit any questions from them, she simply moved on to other segments of the class period: vocabulary and spelling (no words from the book, however); and a taste of grammar thrown in to keep the students honest.

I began to dread my student-teaching assignment and my meeting with Drearsy. She was pleasant enough, but wanted to make sure that I concentrated on class control and not on subject interest or teaching methods. To make sure I couldn’t wander away from the path of righteousness, she required concise lesson plans that allocated learning into ten to fifteen minute segments of grammar, reading, spelling, and vocabulary. A copy of this outline was to be turned in to her at the beginning of the forty-five to fifty minute period.

I walked away from the meeting wondering how I was going to find the time to research and write such detailed weekly plans. I was carrying fifteen semester credits toward my BA. My English major required copious amounts of reading and study, and I had to work part time to help pay for college and to survive.

I would have preferred to just make up a rough outline, something I could do in about fifteen minutes, and take it catch-as-catch-can, into the classroom, or as some call it, operating from the seat of my pants. But I knew Miss Drearsy would not give up on her request for concise lesson plans, including detailed strategies for teaching grammar the old fashioned way by definition and diagram. Both ineffective methods had left me cold when I was in high school and should have been put to rest decades earlier.

Reluctantly, I gave it my best shot, and produced the onerous documents:

A TYPICAL LESSON PLAN

1–15 MINUTES

Reading

: A Tale of Two Cities, Chapter 1

Explanations

: Opening Passage, It was the best of times, it was the worst of times….

The use of irony.

Questions

: On the situation in France and England in 1775. If time, compare our own colonial situation.

16–30 MINUTES

Spelling

: Explain the differences between U.S. and English spelling used in A Tale of Two Cities. Examples: honor/honour; favored/favoured.

Vocabulary

: Look up words taken from Chapter 1: Examples: epoch, incredulity, preserve, revelations, prophetic, sublime, tumbrils, atheistical, traitorous, potentate.

Students

: List the words and definitions in their notebooks; study them for a quiz.

31–45 MINUTES

Grammar

: Nouns

Explanation by Definition

: A person, place, or thing.

Sentences

: Written on the blackboard

Short Quiz

: To identify nouns in sentences.

These restrictive plans worked well for Drearsy (there was seldom time for discussions, questions, or any other extraneous noise), but I hated the absolute control over my creative urges. As we progressed in A Tale of Two Cities, I began to think of her as Madame Defarge, a central character in the novel.

She could tell that I was chafing at the bit and ready to break out of harness. Every once in a while, I would deviate from the framework, which reaped dirty looks from her. But the students rose like the living from the dead during those periods of my deviant behavior, and they began to look forward to my visits. It was, I’m sure, a welcomed relief from Madame Defarge’s oppressive methods: She diagramed sentences into complicated messes; compiled lists of spelling words, each to be written ten times; incessantly conducted depressing drills on punctuation and grammar; and tested students every Friday. A couple of times, the kids got some respite when she showed ancient films, such as Silas Marner. But she presented no film or tape of A Tale of Two Cities, which would have helped the students understand the complicated plot—and maybe figure out why practically everyone was named Jacques.

Madame Defarge had no interest in teaching A Tale of Two Cites—ironic, when you think about it. She left that up to me. As the semester progressed, I spent more and more class time with the novel than with the contents of grammar books so old they were falling apart; word usage and phraseology that wasn’t related to the novel, and spelling and vocabulary exercises that did little good. The dictionaries, a mixture of hardbound and paperback editions, were limited in number. Many students had to share and, of course, some just wrote down what their partners wrote, and never looked up the words individually.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times….It was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness…. Students began to show interest in A Tale of Two Cities, especially after I explained why everyone outside of the main characters was called Jacques, and I drew pictures on the gray board of scenes such as the courtroom, the battlements, and the guillotine to help them understand (see) what was going on. Questions from the students always occurred after each sketch and my explanation thereof, especially about the guillotine. I was only too happy to give them the gory details: How they changed the shape of the blade from a straight edge to a slanted one so it would slice better, and why some of the aristocracy were placed under it, face up. We even got around to what the French Revolution was all about.

With so much illustrating and discussion going on, the fifteen minute segmented schedule was shot to pieces. I was having too much fun working outside of the box and so were the kids.

Defarge was furious. She sat at the back of the room writing down everything that was going on (I think she even tried to copy my drawings) and scribbling disparaging notes on her copies of my lesson plans. She was, indeed, like Madame Defarge, who knitted while others toiled to bring about change or lost their heads. I realized that I was in the same untenable position as both the proletariat and the aristocracy in A Tale of Two Cities—I could not bring about a change in her attitude or way of doing things, and my head was going to roll.

While I continued preparing lesson plans, I no longer cared how carefully I designed the assigned slots and assignments. Our relationship became more and more strained because what Defarge wanted, and what I gave her were two different things. Finally, toward the end of my assignment, she had enough of my rebellion and told me to stay over for a conference.

After I sat down in the room, she said, You will never be a teacher.

Why not? I asked.

You’re not disciplined enough. Your lesson plans are inadequate, you don’t stick to them, you allow too much freedom and talk in class, and your methods of dealing with subject matter are haphazard and unorthodox.

Maybe so, but I’m getting a great response from the students. They seem to like the way I teach.

"Well, that just means you lack control, and with so much time spent on A Tale of Two Cities, you slight all of the other tenth grade English requirements."

I’m sorry, but I just can’t teach if I have to watch the clock and try to get every requirement in during one class period. The lesson plans you want from me are too regimented and have lost their relevance.

Needless to say, Defarge wasn’t happy with that response. She refused to talk to me after our conference and I refused to acknowledge that she was in class—I quit providing her with lesson plans. Fortunately, only a couple of weeks were left in the semester.

I was sure she was going to provide a blistering report in an attempt to ruin my chances of becoming a teacher, so I got in touch with my college advisor, who had been a pillar of support and encouragement throughout my frustrating experience with Schoolmarm.

My advisor met me in the school conference room. He asked, What’s the problem, now?

I said, Jesus, the old bitch is trying to keep me from teaching!

"Calm down, she can’t do it. Regardless of her opinion it’s not her decision to make. Her report will simply be filed in my office. I will evaluate it, throw out all of the opinions, and look for ideas that might be helpful to you.

Good luck with that.

Well, don’t let it get you down. Go ahead and register for your second student teaching assignment and the corresponding education class.

Will you still be my advisor?

No, the professor teaching the class will.

Thanks for all your understanding and help.

You’re welcome. Just hang in there.

We stood up and shook hands. He had allayed my fears, there was nothing more to talk about, but I was sorry to see him go.

Up to this point, his education class was the only one that was worth a damn. All the other courses were a waste of time. They concentrated too much on various theories of teaching rather than on how to put those theories into practice. In one class the emphasis was on what kind of principal (i.e., benevolent dictator; guru, mediator, door mat, commander) we might encounter, but little advice on how to deal with each type.

Perhaps, the most worthless of the required education classes, was the one unit course that was designed to teach us how to use film projectors (three types), reel to reel tape recorders, and overhead and opaque projectors.

At registration, I ran into an old friend and fellow teacher trainee. After we exchanged small talk, I asked, Who’s your adviser?

He said, Dr. Sparks. Who’s yours?

Dr. Ellis.

The professor who walks around with his head up his ass, seldom pays any attention to anyone or anything, and wears a bow tie with a three piece suit that looks like it’s from the thirties?

That’s him.

Well, I had him last semester, and he doesn’t know shit about teaching.

My colleague’s words rang true during my first class session with Dr. Ellis. He droned on about his personal life, former