I’ve been thinking about a lot of things and doing some intense soul searching over the last few weeks since finding out my position has been cut at school and I don’t have a job next year. To be honest, I’ve been seriously considering some field other than education just because the endless politics and prurience keep dragging me down. So I’m publishing this article that I originally wrote for my state association’s newsletter. I’ve been rereading it to try and boost my flagging spirits.  I hope y’all like it.

“Of Starfish”

Starfish and coffee, maple syrup and jam;

butterscotch clouds, tangerines, side order of ham.

If you set your mind free, baby, maybe you’d understand

Starfish and coffee, maple syrup and jam. (Music and lyrics by Prince Rogers Nelson)

Most everyone in education has or has read the poster / cup / screensaver about the young boy throwing starfish back into the ocean as the older gentleman watches him and comments on how useless the boy’s efforts are. Many of us, especially after a hard day when the children (and faculty) have tried our patience, are sustained by the hopeful last line of that free verse that says, “It made a difference to that one.”

We all have starfish in our careers. They are our life’s blood and they keep us going; their very existence validating our best efforts and giving us the desire to come back in August even if we left in May or June swearing we’ll “never come back again.” Our starfish, our precious students and even teachers, in whose lives we have made a noted, tangible difference, are the most valuable revitalizing resources we possess.

I got to pondering starfish last Saturday after eating with my wife at one of the nicer Italian restaurants in town. Our regular waiter at that particular eatery happens to be one of my first, and still one of my most beloved, starfish. Jason (not his real name) was a sensitive, broody young man in my honors English class during a particularly bad year for me professionally. He thought deeply of subjects far beyond the purview of many of his classmates. He pondered much more than proms, power, and the popular crowd, of which he was an abject outcast. Jason had problems at home where a burly stepfather insisted he play football even though Jason had precious little athletic aptitude and even less interest. To make his life even more stressful at the time, Jason was also extremely confused about his sexual orientation. For some reason, he chose to confide in me. In all honesty, it wasn’t a subject I liked, was comfortable with, knew much about, or wanted to discuss, but something in me knew that Jason wasn’t going to go to anyone else, at school or out.

So, I listened before school, after classes and at the end of the day as he talked through what he was feeling. I felt terrible because I didn’t think I was being much help other than as a sounding board. Then one day, whether by luck, intuition, or some latent librarian skill, I gave him a copy of a book that had come to me in a box of classroom library donations. The title character was a teenaged boy with an emotionally abusive stepfather and confusion about what sexual orientation he had. It wasn’t a famous book; if someone put a gun to my head and demanded I tell him the title, I’d be shot dead.

Be all that as it may, the book seemed to be a key for Jason. He took solace that someone, even a fictional someone, had similar thoughts to his own. I don’t know why, but whatever the reason, he seemed to regain a little more life and a bit of zest. I remained his unofficial father confessor through his senior year and he stopped by quite often during his first year of junior college. We lost touch for about two years until he walked up in his spiffy waiter’s uniform and apron to be our waiter one night about two years ago. Between the breadbaskets and the ice cream desserts, he told Budge and me that he’d dropped out of college, gone back, dropped out again, started waiting tables in good restaurants and got certification as a physical therapy masseur. He now has a wonderful live-in girlfriend, whom I have met, so apparently, as I’ve kidded him, he has a handle on his orientation. We see each other about once a month, either at the restaurant or at a bookstore or ice creamery. He mentions those bad times every now and then, but no matter how many times he says it, I still get shivers and Budge says my face lights up when Jason says, “Coach, you listened when no one else did . . . I appreciated it so much.”

Jason was my first memorable starfish, but I’m glad to say, not my last. I hardly have space to talk about the wonderful parade of miscreants and misfits, talkative and taciturn, popular and pauper who have made my career as a teacher and now as a librarian incredibly interesting and unbelievably fulfilling, like the five boys who demanded I sign their diplomas because they felt I was the only reason they got them or the young lady and her beau who asked that I perform their wedding after graduation. Then I had the two tough middle school football players who say I’m the only one who could ever get them to read a book, the list could easily go on. They are all my starfish.

I suppose my reasons for focusing so much on starfish have a lot to do with one particular young student I knew well once upon a time. He was very overweight and had pasty white-pink skin. His middle school playground nickname was “The Great White Marshmallow.” Overly smart for his age, non-athletic to the extreme, bookish, he was simply not a success in the shark tank of middle school. I can see him now in sixth grade huddled in the back of the small library poring over a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, hoping earnestly that the large eighth grade jocks wouldn’t come inhere after him.

The young man’s best ally was the school’s librarian. She was the picture of kindness to him, even lending him her personal first edition of The Fellowship of the Ring because the school’s library didn’t have one. Looking back, he can understand how incredibly busy she was at the time and he knows now that she was going through tough times of her own, but she always took as much time he needed to talk about elves and dwarves and hobbits.

Because of the love of books and learning she imparted to one lonely starfish, that starfish had the desire to go on to college, then to library school and become a librarian himself. The librarian is now at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory as a psychometrician on the venerated faculty of Harvard University, but the boy starfish is now a middle school librarian and he’s never forgotten what it felt like to be burning up on life’s beach only to have a caring set of hands take him back to the cool ocean.

In closing, my esteemed colleagues, remember your starfish. Some of them may drive you crazy while some may make you smile and laugh, but either way, remember you never know the difference you make in someone’s, some starfish’s, life.

Love y’all and don’t forget to wash your feet.

It’s not often that I post on back to back days, but I fear my days as an educator in constant contact with students may be numbered so I want to get as much discussion out of my system as I can before I return to being a cog in some Man’s machine.

One thing I’ve always noticed about educators is most of us seem to have a two year old’s desire for things to be “fair.” That’s fine, as long as we all realize one thing my daddy taught me long ago. “Son,” he said, “fair is where you go to ride on rides, eat cotton candy, and step in donkey poop at the petting zoo.” That was immediately followed up with the sage declaration, “Son, get it through your head right now — life never has been, is not now, nor ever will be FAIR.”

So, let’s explore this idea of educational fairness. First comes the sainted desire for “everyone to have an equal opportunity to succeed.” Okay, that’s great as far as it goes, but it’s never going to happen. Call it Original Sin or negative karma or just plain old bad luck of the draw but, Jeffersonian assertions and American Dream drivel to the contrary, all people are not created equal.

A child born to a wealthy Manhattan banker has it made for life cradle to grave as long as he or she doesn’t do something colossally stupid and even then, a tall enough stack of Benjamins can cover a great deal of stupidity. By the same token, an AIDS orphan in sub-Saharan Africa or a dumpster diving child gang member in Guatemala City doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of anything much more than a short, painful and nasty life. The banker’s child will be educated beyond his ability and the poor children will die of disease or starvation having never learned how to write their own name. Sadly, neither will ever likely stop to think, “Gee, this isn’t very fair, is it?”

Now, lest anyone be decieved, not only is that the way it is, but when it comes right down to where the rubber meets the road, it’s that way because we tolerate it. You see, people don’t REALLY want fairness and equality. Educators are no different. What people, including educators, want is for the world to be fair TO THEM. For instance, I know a tremendous teacher at another school whom I had the opportunity to speak with at some length. This teacher waxed eloquent about the perils and perditions of the children along the I-95 Corridor here in South Carolina who go to school in abject poverty in schools that were built, at best, during the Wilson Administration. So, I took the teacher to task and asked, “If you are so passionate about the cause of these children, why don’t you leave the Upstate and go down there to Williamsburg or Lee county and teach in those schools. They could really use you!” The reply? “I couldn’t ever live somewhere like that!” Hypocrisy? Not really, more like plain old honesty.

The way this “fairness” thing works is for the underadvantaged to have more, the overadvantaged have to have less. That thinking runs completely opposite from the way we good American Capitalists have been brought up to believe. Here’s another example. In Greenville County, raising property taxes one mille will net the county and by extension the schools over a million dollars. That’s one mille. The same one mille increase in a county like Jasper will barely bring in five thousand dollars to the educational coffers. Now, a few years ago, the idea was floated around about making things “more fair” by taking ALL the property tax money earmarked for education and dropping it all in the same pot then doling it out according to need. People came UNGLUED at the very idea! Anyone who supported the idea was practically branded a Communist. The reaction I heard most often was “how dare they take money from MY CHILD’S school and send it to THOSE SCHOOLS.”

Now, is that fair? Needless to say, the plan didn’t get far so for now, if you have the unmitigated bad luck to be born in Allendale County instead of Anderson County, you are, as my student patrons like to say, S.O.L. Of course, I hear these people say, “Well, if a parent wants what’s best for his or her children, they will be willing to sacrifice and move to a better school.” So, if you have the unmitigated bad luck to be born to a crack addicted mother or an uneducated teen mother or just a poor family in general you are, once again, S.O.L.

As long as we are a state and, farther up, a nation, and farther up still, a world where some people unthinkingly eat caviar costing $1K an ounce while others scrounge around in a garbage heap  to find lightly rotten fruit to stave off hunger, equal educational opportunity will be a pipe dream of the first magnitude.

So what does all this have to do with NCLB? Well, is it “fair” for a child born in poverty and neglect to be held to the same standard as the child born with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth? Is it “fair” for the teacher teaching the first child to be held to the same standard as the teacher teaching the second? Is it “fair” for the school that the first child attends to be held to the same standard as the school educating the second? Well?

The saddest part of the whole equation is the fact that it doesn’t have to be this way. Enough resources are available to ensure every child has an equal opportunity, but those resources are not distributed equitably or, as some would say it, “fairly.”

To put it bluntly, No Child Left Behind is a farce and a joke. As long as one child goes to a palatial new school brimming with newest technology to be taught by the best and brightest who were attracted by the highest pay while another child goes to an ancient brick monolith where a dry erase board would be considered bleeding edge technology and be taught by a brand new teacher trying to pay off a student loan or a burned out teacher too tired to be effective and too close to retirement to quit, as long as that situation exists, the very idea of “educational equal opportunity” will continue to be a laughingstock in every teachers’ lounge in this country.

I said a paragraph ago that the saddest part is the “unfairness” behind the distribution of resources; I was wrong. The gravest and saddest part of the equation is that people who could initiate change are too wrapped up in their own agendas to try to change things or too unwilling to risk a little hardship to care if things change or not.

So, I’m going to have a candied apple and ride the Tilt-a-Whirl then I’ll wash the donkey poo off my feet and go home safe in the knowledge that I was treated as “fairly” as I’m ever likely to be.

Once again, I love y’all, but I sure wish things could be different. Unfortunately, as Daddy always said, “If wishes and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a merry Christmas.” Or at least a “fair chance.”

I’m not going to break any new ground in this post, but ever since spring break, I’ve had something I’ve wanted to get off my chest and it’s not going away. I’ve fought back the urge to write this post because I didn’t want to insult anyone or get anyone’s knickers in a knot. But, it’s in my nature to make people mad, so I’m taking Admiral Farragut’s advice and steaming on ahead.

Simply put, the greatest argument against the wrongheaded thinking that is No Child Left Behind and all its accompanying legislation can be summed up in two words — Waffle House. Okay, so maybe in your neck of the woods it’s Huddle House or Pancake House or even Falafel House, but you know the place I’m talking about. If everyone has to be, as the pundits would have us believe, a rocket scientist, who is going to work at Waffle House? Who is going to write down my order for two waffles, dark and a large order of hash-browns scattered, smothered, covered, chunked, topped, diced, capped, and peppered — with a vanilla Diet Coke? Who is going to ladle the Batter of Life onto that Heavenly waffle iron at 3:00 AM so I can bring my inevitable meeting with the cardiac surgeon just a bit closer?

Now, let me, as the cowboys say, “Whoa up,” right here a minute and get one thing straight with everyone who has gotten all red in the face at my perceived elitism. Those of you who know me are aware that I was raised from pillar to post following Mama after we lost our home when my daddy left. When we finally got to settle down the summer before I started 8th grade, it was to live in a 15’X50′ 1965ish single wide trailer with no heat in the winter and one room of A/C in the summer. Mama dropped out of school in 10th grade and still kept a roof over my head and enough food on the table to make me fat a freaking mud. Mama worked in a textile mill. Long as you are earning your money and not hurting anyone, you work where you can or where you want to. If slinging burgers at the Golden Arches is the best a person can do then sling on, my brother, and as a matter of fact I will have fries with that. I’ve got NO PROBLEM with a man, woman, boy, or girl earning an honest dime as best as he or she can.

Believe me, I’ve worked some crappy jobs. I’ve also worked some nasty jobs that, if I’d stayed with them and the job had kept going, would have netted me a whole lot more than I make now. I personally knew (as friends only, not in the Biblical sense of “and Cain knew his wife and they begat . . . “) more than one young lady of unimpeachable morals and inadequate resources who put herself through a certain university in the Upstate of South Carolina by um, . . . “dancing” at a “gentlemen’s” establishment called CatTails. One is a doctor now. One is a lawyer . . . and one, well, one got used to $1000 a week for three nights’ of work and never bother to get out of the trade and last I heard she’s down in Atlanta at one of those high dollar clubs the Atlanta Falcons, Braves, and Hawks visit after practice.

Bottom line, I’m not pointing fingers at what anyone does to get by because in the end, that’s all any of us are trying to do — get us and ours by and make ends meet hopefully with a little left over to have some fun every now and then.

A brief digression if you will permit me. Waffle House now and forever holds a special place in my heart because in my Papa John’s last years after many strokes and heart attacks took his vitality but left him insomnia, he would get up at all hours of the night and drive 25 mph all 14 miles on back roads to the Waffle House near our hometown and he’d sit for hours drinking coffee and eating fried egg sandwiches that a precious cook named Mr. Willie and a loving waitress named Ms. Maggie would fix for him. Then they’d call me or Mama and let us know where he was and that he was safe. That might not seem like much you, but to a man like my Papa John, full of pride but past his prime, it meant the world.

Mr. Willie didn’t need a master’s degree in culinary arts from Johnson and Wales to cook bacon and eggs at Waffle House! Ms. Maggie didn’t even need a high school diploma. For that matter, observing the usual third shift crew at our local store, you don’t even need all your teeth, but a tattoo or four does seem to be mandatory. Waffle House employs a tandem axle dump-truck load (that’s a whole bunch for the yankees in the audience) of people as waitresses and cooks and a good chunk of them have never walked across ANY stage to pick up a piece of paper.

Our homes are built by day laborers and equipment operators and carpenters and plumbers who dropped out of school but got a degree in LIFE and now are productive and motivated in a way that every standardized test in America will never measure. My Papa Frank used to always tell me the world would make a place for a man with a quick mind and a strong back. Jobs are available all over this country that, contrary to what our guidance counselors and career specialists say, don’t require any formal training at all. Some of those jobs pay very, very well. If you don’t believe it, get in the phone book and get some quotes on having your driveway paved by a good crew. The job ain’t cheap folks, but asphalt is, so somebody is getting money somewhere and that redneck looking fellow in the cab of the steamroller might look scary, but — assuming he’s worth the powder it would take to blow his brains out — his bills are paid and his family is fed and he isn’t holding up a liquor store.

It’s all well and good to say “everyone needs to graduate high school.” What we really need to do is look hard at WHY we say that. Who are we making feel good? I’ve got a buddy right now whose mama was my fourth grade reading teacher, his daddy’s an engineer, but he dropped out of college after half a semester to start his own landscaping business and he’s done just fine. He employs about 15 people in 3 crews and is making money hand over fist. So, who is elitist? Who gets to decide that “everyone needs to graduate high school.” Papa Wham always said “This world needs ditch-diggers just as much as it needs doctors.”

What’s the difference other than the fact one has a lot cleaner feet! I can tell I’ll be coming back to this topic later, but for now . . .

Love y’all and, Mr. Cook, if you would, make my bacon crispy, my toast dark, and my feet . . . well, y’all know how I want my feet now, don’t y’all!  Til next time.

🙂

Well, Spring Break is over for me. For an entire week, I put school stuff, specifically my job cut, as far out of my mind as I could. I read three of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels and thoroughly enjoyed each of them. I’ve never been a fan of series fiction, but I do believe I’m going to make an exception in this case. The-Reason-I-Get-Up-In-The-Morning and I had a great many plans made to accomplish this week and in true G.S. Feet style, we did nothing. It’s the thought that counts, right? In the spirit of not being totally useless on Spring Break, I did manage to get our rather eccetric riding lawnmower going this afternoon and cut the hayfield that was masquerading as our backyard. I put it off as long as I could because I have such godawful allergies, but when Beau and Jack start disappearing when they lie down, Budge insists that I cut grass. It didn’t help that the neighbors on each side of me cut their yards — naturally making mine look even worse!

But anyway, I’ve spent the last two hours checking out job leads in every school district within an hour’s drive from my house. I’ve even included neighboring states as long as they meet the hour’s drive criteria. I’d be willing to drive even farther, but once I get much past an hour, fuel and car maintenance costs start becoming so prohibitive that I begin to see the point of diminishing returns. I’ve updated my resume’ and I’ve already sent it to a couple of places to get some feelers out. I’ve got to be honest, though — I despise job hunting. I’ve never been very good at it and dumb blind luck has always played a greater than normal hand in most jobs I’ve worked at over the years. For example, I got my first job without even trying when my grandmother went to get groceries at the local Community Cash and the manager told her to send her grandson up to see him for a job.

Well, I started working there as a stockboy and bagger two weeks after I turned sixteen and come to find out about six weeks in, Mr. Caldwell, my manager, had confused my grandmother with another woman who had been actively seeking a job for her ne’er do well grandson. I knew the boy and he thanked me profusely for affording him the opportunity to mooch and laze around for several more months.

My first teaching job wasn’t much more glorious. I still remember that first summer out of college. I didn’t have my own computer then so I TYPED my resume’ on an old portable typewriter with a thermal transfer ribbon. I sent out 92 resumes in that two month span and got ONE interview that puttered out. So, I went to work with Mama at the textile plant as a cloth dyer and general flunky. About three months after school started, I was called to the communal pay phone in the break room to take a call and it was a principal from a nearby school who knew someone who knew me and wanted me to come interview that afternoon before 5:00. I asked her if I could go home and change first and she said, “No, I want to give you this job and I need you here at 5:00 if not sooner.”

Well, as I mentioned, I was dyeing cloth for a living at the time and when she’d called me I was in the middle of switching from one color and fabric type to another color and fabric. As a result, I had been INSIDE the dye tank and washer cleaning all traces of the previous color off the various rollers and surfaces. The color I was cleaning was a rather striking deep royal blue and, since it was very tight quarters in the dye vat and the washer, I had as much dye on me as I had on the cleaning cloths. Basically I looked like a giant mutant Smurf on steroids. I had blue hair, blue clothes, blue work boots, and blue hands. The dye wasn’t indelible on skin and hair, but it didn’t come off after the first washing either. As a side note, I’d always preferred the blue to the burnt orange we dyed some furniture cloth. Whenever I had to clean up after a run of that stuff, I looked like the demented love child of the Clemson Tiger mascot and an Oompah-Loompah from Charlie’s Chocolate Factory.

So, I got off work at four and washed up as well as I could and drove out to the school. The principal’s jaw hit the floor when I walked in. I told her right then and there, “I tried to warn you, ma’am.” I had to stand up for the entire interview because the dye WAS indelible on polyester fabric and that’s just what her brand new office chairs were covered in. As luck would have it, the color I was drenched in was almost a perfect match to the school’s main colors. The athletic director thought I’d done it on purpose. The last question of the interview was, “how long will it take that stuff to wear off?” I told her about four days. That was on a Monday and I started to work much the next Monday much closer in hue to UNC than to Duke.

So now I’m back out there looking again. I’ll have to interview, of course, and I truly hate interviewing because I never know what the “right” answer to the question is, and we all know that, no matter how open ended the question seems, there is a right answer and woe unto you if you don’t give it. I just hope I find something before TRIGUITM gets anxious and worried. I hate it when she gets anxious. If she just wasn’t so used to hot meals and a roof over her head, it’d be different.

As it is, I guess I’m going to have to really scrub my feet because I don’t think many interviewers will take kindly to a real live set of G.S. Feet, do y’all? I just hope I don’t have to break out the Clorox! 🙂