Tuesday, November 15

Periods two, three and five were still watching the video for ‘A Man Called Horse’.

I love it when there is a video that goes with a novel or short story my students have read and studied in class. After the film, there would be an essay to write. For novels or plays, students wrote an essay after every chapter or act but there was only one essay for each short story. Each essay focused on a different topic connecting the real world and the theme of the story.

Fourth period, the class from hell, on the other hand, was doing an extra assignment: an essay followed by an oral presentation on proper classroom behavior and why gaining an education was valuable. Note taking was required during the oral presentations. I’d done some research and used that information to give a lecture where the students had to take more notes to help them with the essay. The students were writing the rough draft of the essay today.

I’m sure that some ‘shrink’ or ‘educational experts (like the people that claimed I was retarded when I was seven years old and would never learn to read)’ would say that such an activity supported negative attitudes and behaviors about school. I knew a navy vet from that time I attended Citrus Community College where I started after Vietnam and the Marines. I remember this debate he had with himself at lunch in the student union. I was at the same table along with a few other vets. We sort of stuck together as the antiwar movement grew. Nixon was president by then.

“I should shave off this beard,” I heard him say. “But I’m ugly without the beard and no one will recognize me. When I look in a mirror, I’ll see a weak-minded person with a small chin. On the other hand, if I shave off the beard, I demonstrate that the beard is not a crutch that I wear to look older and mature so girls will want to be with me.”

Every psyche major I’ve known over the years had a few loose screws inside his head. It is my opinion that most, if not all, psyche majors go into the field because they have problems to solve and those problems are not of the math variety—they are mental in nature. And we go to these people to fix our problems?

Anyone that grew up in China during Mao’s time has plenty of reasons to seek psychological help. But none of the Chinese I know would consider seeing a shrink for the hardships that came with life during that time. To the Chinese, suffering is part of life. You do your best to survive and when the suffering ends, you move on instead of letting past tragedies and hardships ruin what time is left. Over a billion people suffered. Imagine the money to be made through therapy if the Chinese thought as many Americans do? In my opinion, this type of therapy is an unnecessary luxury.

My wife was born in Shanghai and lived through the Cultural Revolution. When she was growing up, she was a victim of the Red Guard and became one to survive. She memorized Mao’s Little Red Book because quoting from Mao saved her and her younger siblings from being beaten. Eventually, as an adolescent, my wife ended up in a labor camp where she suffered intestinal problems and a back injury in addition to seeing friends put to death for having natural desires. If you want to know the rest of the story, read her memoir, ‘Red Azalea’. It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year more than a decade ago and is still in print.

My wife has never seen a shrink to help her cope with the horrors she experienced. One example being the neighbor that decided he wanted her family’s house and used an ax to chop the front door and move in. If her family hadn’t moved, the ax would have been used on them. That was made clear.

Since more than thirty million died brutal deaths under Mao’s leadership, Americans must think everyone in China is traumatized since they don’t have access to counseling. The opposite is true. I’ve been to China several times and people do not live damaged lives. They work hard, love to eat, have family values that put most Americans to shame and, amazing as it sounds, they smile and laugh without the help of counseling even when they earn less money in a year than an American on welfare spends in a week, which brings me to the purpose of this rant.

At the risk of sounding crass, I’m going to be frank. After all, I did fight in one of America’s bush wars in Vietnam surrounded by death and the threat of it. No one counseled me when I returned home. I was left to stew in my own juices. I survived.

* * * *

Another Nogales student was shot dead over the weekend. Several of my students knew him and wanted to talk about it. Since Americans grow up in a touchy, must-feel-good environment where self-esteem seems more important than a good work ethic, as if everything that happened could damage you if you didn’t talk about it, I went along. I set aside class time and encouraged my English students to write letters expressing their feelings about this recent killing and submit them to me before the end of the day. I said I’d give the letters to Scroll’s Editor-in-Chief for possible publication.

By sixth period journalism, three letters had been turned in. An interesting fact since the majority of the students wanted to talk about the killing and expressed interest in writing letters. Could it be that this most recent killing was used as an excuse to get out of some class work?

I handed the three letters to Jia without reading them. I told her what I had said. “Read them and see if any are fit to run as letters-to-the-editor on the opinion page,” I said.

A few minutes later, Jia was back. “I don’t think any of these are appropriate, Mr. Lofthouse,” she said. “One is almost a love letter. The other two don’t say anything about the student shot.”

I took the letters and read them. Jia was right. “What about that girl in chorus that was killed in the car accident?” I asked. “Are you still considering dedicating the paper to her?”

“I didn’t know her,” Jia replied, “but some of the staff did. I’m not comfortable with the idea of dedicating an issue of the paper to her.”

“I agree,” I said. “I talked to Ms. Penrose yesterday. She pointed out that if we dedicated the paper for one student that died during the school year, it will be expected that the paper will do it for everyone that dies. What about asking the English teachers to talk to their students about writing letters when there is a death? If a letter comes in that expressed what others feel, as long as the letter is well written, you will have something to run in letters-to-the-editor.”

I held up the letters Jia had rejected. “In the meantime, I’ll return these with suggestions for improvements. I may even throw in an example of a good-letter-to-the-editor from the Los Angeles Times—give these students a chance to do it over right.”

The last reporter left at four-thirty. I’d been on campus for almost ten hours.

Wednesday, November 16

There were two memos in my staff mailbox when I arrived on campus: one from a parent and one from a vice principal. I sat down at a phone and called the parent first.

“I saw my daughter’s report card,” the mother said. “She’s getting a failing grade in English. I’ve seen her doing work for your class.” Her tone of voice was a clear challenge and accusation that I was not giving her daughter credit that she deserved.

“You may see her working, but she isn’t doing much,” I replied. “As a matter of fact, I can see from my grade book that most of her assignments are incomplete. Debbie has a grade average of twenty-six percent.”

“Debbie says your class is like being in college. I’ve seen the vocabulary she has to work with. It looks like college work to me. I don’t even know some of those words. That’s asking a lot of your kids.”

Sigh! I wondered how this kid could claim we were doing college work since she had never been to college. I would have placed a bet that no one in Debbie’s house even read the newspaper. A television was probably on most the time.

“The work in my class is not college level,” I said. “I teach ninth grade, college prep English four period a day. I use ninth grade, high school textbooks bought by the school district. All the teachers use them. The students at Nogales and the other two high schools in the district read novels and plays approved for ninth grade students in California. That vocabulary comes from that ninth grade textbook.”

“I’m glad I talked to you,” the mother said. “Debbie is grounded until she gets her grade up.”

“For Debbie to get her grade up, she has to do every assignment for the rest of the semester. That includes class work and homework. A twenty-six percent average is low. It will take a lot of work completed correctly and turned in on time to get her grade up to a sixty percent average.”

“What grade will that be?”

“A ‘D’ minus. There isn’t much more she can achieve at this late date.”

After I hung up, I looked at the note from the vice principal. Attached to the memo was a copy of the school board regulation about distributing fliers on a school campus in Rowland Unified. I read it on the way to my classroom.

The school day went swift. My English students watched the last of ‘A Man Called Horse’ —except for fourth period where oral presentations about proper behavior and the value of an education continued.

I talked to Jia and let her know I was going to be off campus the next day. A substitute would be in the room. I let her read my instructions to the substitute that clearly said that during journalism, Jia was in charge and the only thing the substitute had to do was take roll.

At home, I worked a few hours on this month’s issue of ‘Scroll Connections’, the question and answer sheet that went out each month to teachers before Scroll was distributed. Any teacher that wanted to use the school paper and ‘Scroll Connections’ in lieu of a regular assignment was free to do so with blessings from the school’s administration as long as it was done during the last class on Friday.

Thursday, November 17

Before anyone thinks I’m going fishing or to the beach, I wasn’t getting the day off. I had a workshop to attend to improve my teaching skills.

I woke up thinking of the two students that had died recently. Before I left home, I called Ms. Penrose. As advisor for the yearbook, she had a phone in her classroom as I did. I asked her to pass a message to Jia and to consider running obituaries for the two students like regular papers did. “Tell Jia, any reporter that writes an obituary will earn credit as if it is a regular assigned piece for the paper. They can consider it like extra credit.”

The workshop I was attending was at the Shiloh Hilltop Inn in Pomona. Dr. Roger Taylor, the speaker, was dynamic. His ideas to get kids hooked on learning through the use of movies and songs tied to thematic literature and social studies units sounded great. However, I couldn’t see myself expending the energy he did for us. For one thing, he was paid three thousand dollars for this workshop and his class was a room full of college educated teachers—not a bunch of illiterate or semi-illiterate gangsters that preferred shooting at each other. He mentioned that he taught a class each Saturday near his home. The kids he worked with were all volunteers with goals to go to college.

I left the workshop early wondering how I could adapt some of Dr. Taylor’s methods to fit the environment I worked in. I drove to Nogales and made it before sixth period ended.

When I walked into the journalism class, the substitute was sitting at my desk. I told her she was free to go. She handed me her notes regarding disruptions in my English classes. I put the notes aside to deal with in the morning.

“Jia,” I said. “Did Ms. Penrose talk to you?”

“She did,” Jia replied. “I talked to the editors. Two of my editors want to write the obituary for the girl that died in the car accident. I assigned the second obituary to a reporter that knew the boy. I’m already redesigning the layouts for both by cutting inches off the opinion pieces.”

I was off campus by five.

Friday, November 18

I woke up at three AM with a solution for the school newspaper’s problem with Santarufo, the assistant superintendent. I was elated and couldn’t get back to sleep. The school board’s policy concerning fliers only mentioned fliers and the dictionary clearly described fliers as ‘a piece of paper advertising something, which is given to people in the street, sent in the mail, etc.’

What went into a newspaper was clearly not a flier. I got out of bed and went to the word processor to make changes in the letter I was writing about the inserts not being fliers. I quoted the exact language and date of the school board policy and compared that language with the dictionary definition of an insert: ‘a printed page that is put inside a newspaper or magazine in order to advertise something.’

The first thing I did when I reached my classroom several hours later, was to read the substitute’s notes and write referrals for students that disrupted the class while I was gone. I made phone calls to their parents too. Some of the kids would be going to BIC.

The bell rang for my first class. The first student through the door said, “Mr. Lofthouse, that substitute was really nice. Next time you are gone, can we have her back?”

That didn’t sound good. I subbed for two years before I had my first full time teaching contract. One thing I learned during those two years was that when kids like a sub, that usually means the sub was too easy on them and let them do what they wanted. I doubt if much teaching took place in my English classes on Thursday.

As soon as fourth period let out and lunch arrived, I hurried to the restroom next door and ran into Mr. Alley. “How were your kids today?” he asked.

“I wrote ten referrals during my last two classes.”

“It’s the wind,” he said. “The Santa Anas are blowing. It gets them higher than a kite every time. When it rains, the same thing happens.”

Alley was right. The Santa Anas were blowing and in the twenty years I’d been a teacher, the kids were always hyper on windy days.

Mr. Murphy beat me at chess again.

Most of the journalism students were not in class after lunch. I had an idea where they were—studying for the Academic Decathlon competition that was going to take place in El Monte tomorrow, Saturday.

The scheduled meeting with Jennifer’s mother was after school in Sheila Dart’s office. I wondered if she were going to show up. I’d lost count how many times it had happened already. It didn’t matter, I reviewed Jennifer’s grades anyway and printed them out to take with me

To my surprise, Jennifer and her mother were there when I walked into the vice principal’s office. The mother had four of her daughter’s assignments in hand. She didn’t waste time either to launch her assault. “I do not understand why my daughter can’t earn credit for this work that she did,” the mother said. “I looked it over and it’s a very high quality. I watched her work for hours on these assignments. She should be passing English and not failing it.”

Ms. Dart took the assignments and read my notes written in red ink. The directions for the assignments were there too. After a moment, Ms. Dart looked up and said, “It’s easy to see that Jennifer didn’t follow the directions for these assignments. That’s why she didn’t earn credit for them.” She went into an explanation pointing out the difference between the work and the directions.

While Ms. Dart talked, I studied the printouts of Jennifer’s grades. I had gone over this printout earlier in the day to get ready for the meeting in case the mother showed. I’d highlighted the number of zeros in pink and the low grades in orange. There was a lot of pink for work I’d never seen.

“May I show you something?” I said, and spread out the printout of Jennifer’s grades on Dart’s desk. I pointed out the zeros. “You mentioned that you had four assignments where Jennifer didn’t earn credit. She isn’t failing because of those four assignments. She’s failing because of the five that she didn’t turn in and low grades for incomplete assignments.”

“I didn’t understand those assignments,” Jennifer said. “Those were hard. You didn’t help me. Every time I asked, you were too busy.”

“Jennifer, you always ask for help when I’m taking roll or teaching a lesson. I’ve said several times that when I’m busy, students must see me at the end of class or come in at lunch to get help. You never stayed after class. However, I do remember you getting mad every time I refused to stop teaching or taking roll when you wanted me to help you.”

“What Mr. Lofthouse is saying is correct,” Ms. Dart said. “Students have to wait for a teacher to be ready to help. Jennifer needs to be patient and seek help after class. If she stays a few minutes after class, I’m sure Mr. Lofthouse will write her a pass to her next class so she will not be marked tardy.”

“I write late passes for students the stay after to ask questions,” I said. “Unfortunately, only a few take advantage of my offer to help.” I pointed at some notes I’d written in the margin of Jennifer’s grade report. “Three weeks ago, Jennifer’s average was twenty-seven percent. Now it is forty-four. She has also earned A’s and B’s on the last four assignments. If Jennifer keeps working like this, she should be passing by the end of the semester.”

I made it home by a quarter to seven. There was a hike tomorrow scheduled to leave campus at eight-thirty in the morning.

Saturday, November 20

Three of us drove. Mr. Murphy and a twenty-year-old cousin to one of the students were the other two drivers. There were thirteen kids. We drove in a caravan into the San Gabriel Mountains above Pasadena. The parking lot was at an elevation of six thousand feet. The hike meandered along a narrow trail dropping into a canyon with a stream and a cascading waterfall.

When we stopped for lunch, Mr. Murphy and I played a game of chess. I actually won a game. While we played, some of the kids wondered off among the trees.

On the way back to the cars, I smelled cigarette smoke on one of the students. “Was that cigarette worth the risk, Cynthia?” I asked. Cynthia was a junior this year. Several years earlier, she’d been a student in one of my English classes. She was a good kid.

She looked startled. “No,” she said, looking guilty. “It was the first cigarette I’ve ever tasted. It made my mouth feel horrible. I’ll never do it again.”

“I hope you can stop,” I said. “Since nicotine is addictive, if you can’t stop, don’t smoke in a forest like this one. The fire danger is high in these mountains and forest fires in thick brush can be devastating—killing people and animals and burning houses.” The look of guilt on her face doubled.

“There is good news,” I said. “I’m sure you will go to college and get a good job that includes the health insurance needed to take care of you when get lung cancer.

“When I was a kid, our next door neighbor had lung cancer. She smoked a lot. They removed half of her lungs. She died anyway. She went through a lot of agony struggling to hang on to life. Her bedroom window was close to our kitchen so we heard her cries of pain. Ruined my appetite. She left two young sons that were still in high school.” We really didn’t hear the cries of pain, but the rest was true.

I wasn’t done. I could tell by the look in Cynthia’s eyes that she didn’t want to hear anymore.

“My dad died of emphysema at seventy-nine,” I continued. “The doctor told him he stopped smoking ten years too late. During the last few months of his life, his lungs couldn’t get enough oxygen to his brain. He didn’t recognize my mother. He had to wear diapers. She’s the one that took care of him as he was dying. After fifty-four years of marriage, that must have been really hard on my mother. I couldn’t help, since I had this teaching job and they lived two hundred miles from me. My older brother and sister were in the same situation and they lived even further away.” That was all true.

We dropped the hikers off in the Nogales parking lot by four in the afternoon. Other than the fact that Cynthia had smoked her first cigarette, and hopefully her last, the day had been ideal.

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