Watch Out For Them Skeeter Bushes Or They'll Git Che

By Del Hansen

Teaching and swimming pools have a lot in common. Sometimes you ease into the cold water and tinkle a toe before getting your head wet. Other times, a burly friend picks you up and hurls you into the deep end to sink or swim. The author of "Watch Out Fer Them Skeeter Bushes Or They Will Git Che" began his teaching career the second way, and takes the reader through an amazing array of adventures in his classrooms and offices. Almost four million minutes of interactions with young people and staff during his long career yields plenty of humorous, poignant, soul-searching, and ridiculous moments. This book is an escapist, entertaining set of stories appealing to both teachers and non-educators. Every recollection is based on a true set of events, as head-scratching as some may appear. What is a skeeter bush anyway? That question is eventually answered, but not until the author completes his journey from flailing in the deep end of public education to safely climbing out of the pool.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667832296

Book preview

cover.jpg

Copyright 2022

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN 978-1-66783-228-9 (softcover)

ISBN 978-1-66783-229-6 (eBook)

Table of Contents

Part 1—Ascending the Stage

Part 2—The Stage Is Set—Preschool

Part 3—A Pioneer Spirit

Part 4—The Stage Is Set: Elementary School and the Cavalry

Part 5—The Stage Is Set: The Bleak Midwinter of Junior High

Part 6—The Stage Is Set: High School Cometh

Part 7—The Walk

Part 8—The Stage Is Set: College and Fate

Part 9—The Triumvirate and the Baby Teacher

Part 10—The Snarf

Part 11—The Prayer

Part 12—The Chest Thump

Part 13—Float Indestructible

Part 14—Curmudgeons and Doughnuts

Part 15—The Bong and Barney Fife’s Gun

Part 16—The Molasses Sprint

Part 17—Where’s the Oil Can?

Part 18—The Mason-Dixon Line

Part 19—The Violin

Part 20—The Line Leads to the Pigeon Poop

Part 21—Of Bunnies and Trench Coats

Part 22—The Three P’s of Great Teaching

Part 23—The Fickle and Frigid Finger of Fate

Part 24—Key Crisis

Part 25—Bombs Over Las Cruces

Part 26—Lift a Glass to Mozart

Part 27—The Hidden Effect

Part 28—You’re Fired!

Part 29—The Knockout Punch

Part 30—A and B Lunch

Part 31—The Red Light

Part 32—The Evaluation Game

Part 33—Of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Stravinsky

Part 34—The Tsunami

Part 35—Hawking Radiation and Hors d’oeuvres

Part 36—The White Coats

Part 37—The Survey

Part 38—Eleven Pretty Good Rules for Teaching Stuff

Part 39—Watch Out Fer Them Skeeter Bushes or They’ll Git Che

Part 40—Bows on an Empty Stage

Part One

Ascending the Stage

Several years ago a friend suggested that I write my autobiography. You have so many interesting experiences and tell funny stories, so why don’t you write a book about your life? she said. I found myself simultaneously flattered and frustrated. Like a pugnacious four-year-old encouraged to eat his Brussels sprouts, I answered, No, I don’t want to and you can’t make me.

I’m old. I don’t have to do what others want me to do. Case closed. There were things that I’d rather not relive and certainly not tell total strangers.

However, the more I thought about it, the more the idea intrigued me. Finally, after some serious consideration, I decided to not write an autobiography per se, but instead piece together a disjoint series of memories, events, and vignettes tracing my life through the simultaneously shark-infested waters and gloriously triumphant adventures of the teaching profession.

I have no pretensions about being a great writer. I leave that accolade to the Amy Tans, Garrison Keillors, Toni Morrisons, and Rudolfo Anayas of the modern era. What I do have are a number of stories and experiences which reflect a life immersed, drowned really, in education.

I speak in my own voice. I write the way I talk to my friends and students. If I come across as quirky, it is because I am quirky. I can’t change that and don’t intend to. My writing style will probably cause grammarians to hurl themselves off tall buildings. The simile police will undoubtedly place my photo and name on wanted posters in post offices. Oh well, it will be nice to be remembered for something.

I am an immensely fortunate fellow. My educational journeys have taken me to some amazing places, but none more exciting and unpredictable than my own classrooms and offices. I haven’t seen it all, but I’ve seen enough to write in a way which might make actual teachers identify with my predicaments and even non-teaching laypersons relate to many of the stories.

My tales aren’t in chronological order and don’t need to be. Some are humorous and others more serious. Most are pretty close to factually correct, but I must admit there might be a few inaccuracies. I’m an antique and my ability to remember details diminishes even as my neurons die screaming in the night. At least that is my story and I am sticking to it.

You will discover that I can be a little preachy. That quality hasn’t changed much since elementary school. I tend to think I know more than I actually do, so you will have to forgive that imperfection. However, thanks to my anatomy and upbringing, my heart is in the right place.

My reminiscences are all pre-pandemic, so they reflect a totally different aspect of education. However, my sympathy goes out to those parents, students, and teachers who had to weather such a difficult time in our lives. I can only pray they can return to some semblance of normality, but the specter of a radically altered educational landscape looms ominously in the future.

I hope you enjoy what I have written. However, I might suggest that you not read my stories as revelations of an inner soul laid bare, but more like the slow unwrapping of a pound of deli baloney. If you tamp down your expectations, we should be just fine.

Finally, if life has taught us anything, it should have at least warned us to watch out for them skeeter bushes or they’ll surely git che. That they will.

Part Two

The Stage Is Set—Preschool

We are often defined by certain stages in our lives. I have five which preceded my teaching career and one as I rode into the sunset. I begin my journey with several glimpses into my life before assuming the daunting responsibilities of educating America’s finest.

Like Davy Crockett, I was born on a mountaintop but not in Tennessee. Instead, it was on Chipmunk Avenue at 9,000 feet elevation in Cloudcroft, New Mexico. When I was two, my parents relocated to the campus of New Mexico A&M where my father pursued his degree.

They soon discovered that finding a place to live was not easy. The school had grown rapidly in post-war America and classrooms quickly filled with young men and women seeking an education under the G.I. Bill. We finally managed to rent a trailer near the academic buildings in so-called campus housing, as it was delicately called. Chicken coops with running water would have been more accurate. I really didn’t mind. I rode my tricycle up and down side streets without fear of being kidnapped or run over by people texting. It was a different world back then.

It’s interesting how you sometimes remember the most insignificant details of your young life. For instance, I had several well-worn trike routes but was expressly forbidden to venture into the main campus. However, if I persisted, one of my parents sometimes walked me over to Foster Hall, built in 1930 in the Spanish colonial style and accented by a beautiful arched sand-toned bas-relief figures. Toddling into the entrance, I would immediately gaze back at my parent and point to the brilliant red apples in a sweeping fresco painted by Santa Fean Olive Rush. It seems those old buildings had a flair for artistry which even youngsters like me could appreciate.

I also recall that there were no stores near our little trailer, so my mother and I passed the time waiting for a bus into town by sitting on the concrete rim of the moss-choked fountain near the old library. I was always captivated by the goldfish swimming in the murky water, although most likely they were Japanese koi.

I once asked my mother if one of them might be my goldfish which had mysteriously disappeared, the kind you can win if you toss a beanbag through the gaping mouth of a cardboard clown. She said she didn’t think so, but I held out hope that my goldfish was somewhere in that fountain.

I so clearly remember the day when I won Mr. Corndog, the fish, at a traveling carnival. We had stopped at one of the sideshows and my father reached in his pocket and handed the barker a token. The tired-looking fellow, who had the patience of Job putting up with morons all day and now had another one on his hands--me, set three beanbags in front of his latest victim.

I was smart enough to realize I wasn’t pitcher Warren Spahn and probably had a better chance of deciphering a message sent by Navajo Code Talkers than throwing an object through that small hole. My father knew it; the carnival barker knew it; and the audience of five behind me knew it, but I wasn’t so sure. I was taught to never give up, so against all odds I just rared back and threw the bag with all the gusto a three year-old could muster.

The first try shot out perpendicular to the proposed trajectory landing somewhere in the dirt just missing an old man in a wheelchair. That brought gasps from the onlookers. My next attempt almost nailed the worker in the neck, despite the fact that he had given me wide berth standing about five feet to the left of the target. His quick reflexes probably saved his life. I was down to my last try.

The crowd had grown to eleven just to see what I might hit next. One of my friends had recently told me sticking your tongue out in the corner of your mouth increased accuracy, so I did, closed my eyes, and threw my best split-fingered fastball toward the clown who continued to mock me with his hideous grin. The bag went through the hole like a bullet train entering a tunnel.

My father said, Well I’ll be... and mumbled some words he learned in the navy that I did not yet understand. The barker slapped his forehead and reluctantly reached for the prizes. The crowd gave me a standing ovation. It is true they were already standing, but their reaction was genuine.

The prizes consisted of a lame looking badge that said I Hit the Hole, a rather emaciated looking stuffed platypus, and a goldfish, dorsal fin up for the time being, floating in a small plastic bag of water. My father said, Take the stuffed animal and let’s go. The people behind me began chanting, Fish, fish, fish. Even at three, I yearned to play to an audience, so turning to face the spectators I announced, I think I’ll take the fish. That satisfied the crowd but not my father. He knew the average lifespan of a goldfish floating in a bag of water won at a carnival was one day at best.

Dad was wrong. It lasted two days. When I awoke on that third morning, I looked in the small bowl that had been his home and asked where my fish went. My mother said it swam away. That worked for me at the moment, not realizing its actual final route was down the toilet and into the college sewer system.

The fish story I remembered. However, I didn’t remember tripping and clunking my face on the corner of the coffee table and my hysterical parents rushing me to the emergency room with my eyebrow bleeding like a cherry Kool Aide piñata whacked with a bat. Evidently my frontal lobe had not yet fully developed because the blood and screaming did not imprint, but I will go to my deathbed recalling Mr. Corndog, the goldfish.

Back then the college sat on the outskirts of Las Cruces and those highly anticipated bus rides on the way to the downtown Safeway grocery store took us past green irrigated cotton fields and former college president Hiram Hadley’s beautiful two-story parmesan-toned brick home. During those cheap nickel excursions, my eyes and brain functioned on sensory overload as new adventures lurked around every corner. I suppose that was one of the advantages of being a kid before video games and social media smothered our sense of wonder.

My family eventually moved from the campus ghetto to a small cinder block house in the town proper off Espina Road, all the while thinking the upgrade meant we now lived at Tara from Gone with the Wind. Most of the time I played alone in the small yard because the nearest neighbor was two hundred yards away and completely obscured by mammoth-sized mesquite bushes. The road in front of the house was narrow, rutted, and the soft sand washed out with each rain, so one really had to want to see us to drive down that path.

I occasionally visited my paternal grandparents in Alamogordo an hour and a half to the northeast. Although I always enjoyed my stay, probably the most exciting moment occurred on the way back to Las Cruces.

My beloved aunt borrowed my grandfather’s for official use only sheriff’s car for the trip and let me ride shotgun. Just a reminder that this was in the summer in the Chihuahuan Desert in daylight hours with no air-conditioning except for the windows rolled down. I didn’t mind. It was the ultimate adrenaline rush just to ride in the front seat of an actual cop car, let alone on a seventy-mile trip. I wished that my friends, real and imagined, could see me now.

After crossing the White Sands Proving Grounds, we approached the dreaded incline to Organ Pass, a six-mile two-lane road where traffic slowed to a crawl behind lumbering big rig trucks. In a stroke of genius, my aunt turned to me and said, Watch this, but you can never tell—promise? I promised with a Cub Scout’s two-fingered oath and would have on a stack of Bibles had they been available.

My mind raced out of control as I anticipated what might happen. She calmly flipped on the single domed red light on the roof, cranked up a howling air-raid siren right out of the old police movies of the forties and fifties, and pushed the accelerator to the floor. The specially equipped 312 engine responded.

We shot up Highway 70 parting traffic like Moses commanding the Red Sea, lines of cars and trucks obediently pulling to the side of the road to give us the right-of-way. I suspect she violated ten or eleven national and state laws in the process, but I just grinned like a blonde Cheshire cat and briefly lived out every kid’s secret fantasy. It was all I could do not to stick my head out the window and wag my tail like our dog Tootsie.

We made record time. Later, down the other side of the pass, we drove up to the house and my mother said, Lordy, you two sure got back quick! My aunt and I sheepishly looked at each other, she giving me a wink and I nodding back. The secret was good for decades—well, until this reading.

In this stage of my life, I didn’t have a care. Our house wasn’t palatial and our family car just barely sufficed as transportation, but I was a happy kid. I didn’t know about the polio epidemic sweeping the nation. It was about this time that I began spending summers with my maternal grandmother in the mountains to shelter me from exposure. My trips to the high country with my Mamaw continued even after the little Sabin sugar cube virtually eliminated the danger. Come to think of it, during this stage of my life these quiet summers may have more accurately defined me.

Part Three

A Pioneer Spirit

I so clearly remember the wind. It blew incessantly. As I played with my toys or read from the basket of books on the floor by the daybed, I could hear the telephone wires singing and screen door banging against its frame all day long. A patient soul could try to get used to it, but the dry wind was always with you in Pinon.

Though the spelling of the New Mexico state tree and pine nut is piñon, the folks of this small town spelled it Pinon and some pronounced it pin-ee-own. Others did pronounce it piñon like one would in northern New Mexico. However, I had never heard it called anything but pin-ee-own so that is what I called it too.

My childhood memories of summers spent with my maternal grandmother have stuck with me over the years. At the time, she was a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in a forgotten corner of a forgotten part of the forty-eight. Her little house, provided by the local district through the labor of local ranchers, sat just to the east of the school building. It was bare bones. Her air conditioning system was an electric fan and a cross breeze while the amenities consisted of running water and a butane heater.

She was too isolated to even receive a decent television signal from one of the three networks, so a bulky AM radio perched on the end table and books checked out from the Artesia Public Library provided our entertainment. Most importantly, my visits gave me the chance to fantasize about going to work in that old schoolhouse next to my grandmother’s teacherage.

Teaching is in my DNA. I am convinced of that. A great uncle on my father’s side of the family taught Lyndon Baines Johnson in central Texas and my first cousin once removed was a teacher of physics and department head in one of the top school systems in the country. Even my mother taught in a Montessori-driven kindergarten. However, possibly the finest teacher of all was my maternal grandmother. I must admit that I am biased, but anyone who knew her admired her pioneer spirit and indomitable attitude.

My grandmother’s career began and ended in small rural schools having none of the advantages of larger and wealthier districts. It didn’t matter to her. Without fanfare, she educated legions of students in the most challenging conditions imaginable. She never taught in a new building. She never enjoyed new equipment. She was her own janitor and maintenance department and for a while, she could not even call on a colleague or an administrator for guidance or advice. My grandmother was it and her students were none the worse for their experience.

As a fresh-faced twenty-year-old holding a newly issued certificate from a teacher college, she began teaching in a tiny building on the caprock in east-central New Mexico. Her little schools rested in obscure places hardly big enough to land on a map, such as Pinon, Bonita, Weed, Wheatland, and Avis. Some of those communities don’t even exist today, shriveled up and returned to the earth like old felled trees. Her career stretched for forty-five hard years, much of it deep in sheep and cattle country astraddle the eastern foothills of the Sacramento Mountains. That’s where I spent some of my summers.

We often talked about her work as a teacher while I played and she sewed clothes on her Singer treadle machine. I’m not sure she even considered it a job. I think it was more of an extension of herself.

Her duties required her to be teacher, janitor, principal, and