First, I’d like to thank everyone for your kind wishes and prayers. We laid Aunt Betty to rest in a little country church cemetery Tuesday amidst an explosion of fall color and sunshine. She always loved Elvis, so we buried her with her favorite picture of him and played his recording of “How Great Thou Art” at the end of the ceremony. I think she’d have been pleased.

Now to business. I don’t comment much on politics because I am most determinately apolitical. Republican or Democrat, man or woman, North, South, East, or West makes no difference to me. I am apolitical for one reason . . . no one POTUS, Senator, Congressman, or Supreme Court Justice is going to fix what’s wrong with this country by himself or herself.

So, to all you McCain zealots who are weeping, wailing, and gnashing your teeth, GET OVER IT. He lost and he was a lot more gracious in losing than many of his supporters can claim to be. If you are so disgusted with the election results, do what I see so many cute buttons and bumper stickers suggest — move to Canada. Just make sure you stay there. Also, in the spirit of egalatarianism, to all you Obama zealots who are holding parties and dancing in the streets, GET OVER IT. He won and that means exactly nothing. The economy is still in the tank, our boys and girls are still dying across the sea for nothing, and I don’t have one dime more in my pocket today than I did Tuesday morning.

I will bow before the weight and majesty of the history made Tuesday; however, and give my heartfelt congratulations to President-Elect Obama for finally reaching one of those mountaintops that Dr. King spoke of so eloquently so many years ago. When it comes to the ugliness of race relations in America, I view Barack Obama’s election as POTUS by such a healthy and unquestionable margin the same way Sir Winston Churchill viewed what would be called World War II when he heard of the German defeat at El Alamein in North Africa, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” The scourge of chattel slavery persisted on these enlightened shores for 246 years and the stain of Jim Crow bled through another 102. While the election of the first man of color to arguably the highest office in the world is an admirable step, one step cannot — will not — erase 348 years of shackles and nooses, blood and bondage, segregation and degradation.

Now, despite the history involved in this election, I can’t help but feel that, once again, I and those I serve in my position as librarian are still not being represented. We have yet to see “our guy (or gal)” mount the podium to give an acceptance speech after winning the Presidency. I firmly believe that I nor any of my descendents, will ever see that day. In order for me to feel like the person in the Oval Office represents me, a poor man or woman would have to get elected and that is never going to happen.

I want a President who knows what it feels like to be hungry because the month outlasted the money. I want a President who knows what it is to sit in the dark and swelter in the Southern summer night heat because Mama had to choose between the light bill and antibiotics for an illness. I want a President who knows deprivation in his or her bones . . . natural-born deprivation. Certainly Senator McCain knew the horrors of deprivation deeper than most of us ever will as he sat in the Hanoi Hilton all those years, and I do not dare make light of his suffering, but the fact remains that he left a silver spoon on the table to enter the military and he picked up that silver spoon as soon as he finally returned to America and even though he was defeated for the Presidency, he’ll still eat his soup with that silver spoon until the day he dies.

Just a casual glance down the list of Presidents will reveal precious little in the way of poverty. Instead, the list reads like a litany of properous farmers, lawyers, and businessmen. Basically, with no disrespect intended to any who hold, have held, or will hold the office of POTUS, I want a President who doesn’t take a pay cut when he or she takes office.

I want a President who, in this technologically advanced 21st Century, still has to use an outhouse when he returns to his Appalachian home. I’d like a President who has two children by two different “baby daddies” and Air Force One is the first plane she’s been able to ride in. I want a President who went to public schools K4-12 preferably somewhere along the I-95 Corridor in South Carolina or on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota then went to a community college for two years to save up for a STATE university. I want a President who knows by experience and not pollsters what it’s like to be a common person.

Of course, people in Hell want ice water; so as Daddy always said, “Want in one hand and spit in the other and see which one gets full fastest.” (Actually, Daddy didn’t quite put it that way, but it’s a family friendly blog, I hope)

None of those hypothetical people will ever be President, however. The third biggest lie in the world, right after number two’s “I promise I turned that book in already” and number one’s “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction” is “Even YOU can grow up to be President.” No you can’t because if you are reading this blog, you are most likely in the wrong class of people to be President, and in this case, class has little to do with race, religion, or politics. It’s about educational birthrights.

Two books that every person who works with children should read tell the story of those birthrights. The first is Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol and the second is Literacy with an Attitude by Patrick J. Finn. Kozol strips bare the differences in education that students receive based solely on the luck of the draw and in this case, the draw is where they happen to have been born. Meanwhile, Finn, in his book’s preface, powerfully enumerates the reasons for the inequality. Simply put, we live in a dualistic society of the governors and the governed. I’m willing to bet my paycheck for a year that if you are reading this blog, you are not only one of the governed but you are training (notice I didn’t say “teaching”) the next generation of the governed.

Please understand, this isn’t about some conspiracy theory dreamed up by the tinfoil hat crowd where the whole world is “really” ruled by the Illuminati, Tri-Lateral Commission, Skulls&Bones, or the Bilderburgers. This is real life where millions of students are withering on the vine and all the time people are jumping for joy because another rich, impeccably well educated globetrotter has been elected President. The only difference this time is skin color (an important difference, to be sure, but still).

I’ve seen several blogs with “Dear Obama” messages about what their authors want the new President to do. My request is simple and I’d make it of any new President — black, white, pink, or green. Leave the press corp, leave the entourage, leave the glitz and glamour of DC, leave all but a couple of the Secret Service folks and go on the road incognito. Meet some people who aren’t at a rally. Sit in classrooms in schools with holes in the ceilings. Spend a week in some inner city projects talking with crack dealers and gang lords. Go up in the hills and spend some time with people whose way of life hasn’t changed in a hundred years (but, um, you might want to take a few extra Secret Service guys when you make that trip).

The long and the short of it is I’m jaded and cynical when it comes to politicians. I’ve seen so many promises made to get someone elected that were broken as soon as the hand came off the Bible that I don’t know if I’ll ever believe in anyone anymore. I’ve endured Presidents who were Paris Hilton celebrities with IQs to match. Maybe the wind is finally changing. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to play wait and see. My political heart has been broken too many time by people who said they represented me and mine, but who have no idea what it’s like to live in a trailer. Here’s hoping it’s not all hype.

Now take the signs down, put your copy of Wednesday’s newspaper up on eBay for the kids’ college funds, but most of all . . . don’t forget to wash your feel y’all 🙂

This isn’t a library related post if you’d prefer to skip it.

Today was the first day of a nice four day weekend. Budge and I planned to do a little housework, do a little yard work, and do a lot of nothing. That all came to a screeching halt with one phone call today at 3:00. I may have never said this, but I hate telephones and cell phones especially. Of all the inventions ever invented, it is the telephone that allows the wide instantaneous spread of misery better than all others.

I had a splitting headache today, so I was taking a nap when the phone rang. I heard Budge say, “Oh God. We’re on our way.” I sat up blinking to the news that my great-aunt, the woman who had babysat me as an infant until I started kindergarten, was dead. She was 70 years old, my Granny Hughes’ baby sister.

She’d gone “to town” to get some money out of the bank from her Social Security check. On her way back home, as near as we and the police can piece together, she got turned around at a new cloverleaf and instead of going down the on ramp to the highway, she went across the intersection like the layout USED to be and went down the OFF ramp. We’ll never know if she realized her mistake or not.

She got to the bottom of the ramp and shot across three lanes of traffic before a young girl driving an SUV stuck my aunt’s mini-pickup truck at full highway speed and slammed it back into the barrier wall between north and southbound lanes. My aunt, who was always a small woman and sat too near the steering wheel as small elderly ladies often do, was not wearing a seatbelt and the steering column and steering wheel itself crushed her chest as the airbag that was meant to save her life instead detonated into the side of her head with the force of a baseball bat. She was killed on impact. The young girl, blessedly, suffered only a broken leg, but I can only imagine how the mental trauma of this accident that she in no way could have avoided will haunt her the rest of her life.

My aunt was a widow with one daughter who is four years my senior. I was always viewed more as a brother and a son than a nephew. Therefore, it fell to me to take my cousin to the hospital to first positively identify her mother’s body and then to say goodbye to the only remaining relative in her immediate family. I don’t know how many of you have had the experience of standing in a morgue. Shows like CSI and its offspring don’t really portray the utter hopelessness, the complete lack of warmth in a holding room when you see a loved one, vibrant and smiling just a few hours before, wrapped in a sheet to hide body trauma lying cold, grey and lifeless on the stainless steel table. I don’t know how many of you have had to listen to or maybe even utter that most heartrending of cries, “Why?!” The question for which even Christ on the Cross received no answer.

The last seven hours have been a whirlwind of phone calls to other elderly aunts and uncles as well as to their children, cousins barely remembered from long ago play times on the “home place”. The phone, that demon with a bell or a ringtone, never ceased its macabre music for long at a time. I was able to see my cousin safely to her home where I left her in the care of a trusted family friend. When I spoke to Sis last, she was slipping into the blessed bliss of a tranquilizer and that for the best. She bore up well under the shock of the day, but as any doctor will tell you, the pain of an amputation is always least when it happens. The next day will reveal the beginning of the agony.

Then I had to turn my attention to Mother who has now lost three of the dearest people to her in less than six months. Then there is Granny, my aunt’s sister, whose growing dementia keeps her from understanding that the sister she held closest in love has been taken away. How do you explain to one in her second childhood that one of the most important members of her first childhood won’t be by to sit on the couch and watch Family Feud while eating forbidden ice cream with her anymore?

I keep returning to the theme of poverty and its effects and this is another example. I am by far the best educated member of my family. I’m the only one on Mother’s immediate side with a Master’s degree (or even a BA, for that matter) and one of just a bare handful who finished high school. The family’s perception of me is one of dependence. In times like this, for whatever reason, the family turns to me for guidance and advice as if having a limp piece of paper on the wall somehow has given me better insight into how this off-kilter world runs. In times of death or crisis, I am asked for answers that I do not have, but I must provide some measure of comfort. It is expected.

Also, a fact that many, even those like Cathy-Jo, who are closest to me may not know, is that I am an ordained minister. I’ve never been to seminary, but I do have my ordination and license to preach and perform the offices of the church from two separate ordaining bodies. I am the minister of my family. Even though they attend a myriad of different houses of worship, my late grandfather was the one who was called upon for ministry to the family and with his passing, that responsiblility has fallen to me. I confess that since his passing, I have been in a crisis of faith the likes of which I have never experience nor even imagined, but which is very real nonetheless.

For now though, I must push aside my questions and my agony of uncertainty to take up an agony of a different type. I must do what I feel unable to do and provide my family with comfort and direction over the next few days. Tomorrow, Sis and I will meet to make final arrangements at the funeral home where the last two years have seen me all to frequently a visitor. She has no one else to help her and so I must, even if I feel I cannot.

I have tears of my own to shed for this beloved lady who has been taken from us so abruptly, but just as I could not grieve for my grandfather until I had seen my mother through the crisis, so to must I bear up grief again and somehow shepherd Sis through this unbearable time. It never ceases to amaze me how people are capable of doing what they cannot do when it must be done.

So Tuesday, while the rest of the country watches television and huddles in tense expectation for an election that, regardless of its outcome, will be historic; as many of my colleagues make their way to the annual education technology conference, I will be, once again, standing before an open grave attempting to provide a channel of peace that I myself do not feel because it must be done.

I ask two boons of you all. First, remember my huddled and bewildered family in you thoughts, but second and more important, take a moment tonight or tomorrow at the latest to call some family member or friend whom you have not seen in a while or with whom you have some petty disagreement. Make things right as much as it is in your power to do. Don’t let another sun set without clearing air or reconnecting with a loved one. I do not say this as fearmongering, but from my heart . . . you never know what conversation, hug, or argument you have with someone will be the last. Keep that in mind, my friends and acquaintances in the blogosphere and believe me when I say I hope that it will be a long time before any of you receive one of those calls.

I hope you will all forgive my ramblings. It has proven to be a long and trying day. Tonight, I’ll let each of you decide on your own if you want to wash your feet or not.

I have a confession to make to all of you out there in the blogosphere. I think it either relates to my previous post about growing up in poverty or it’s a result of some of the negative life experiences I’ve had. Maybe if Ms. Payne reads this, I hope she has some insight that I lack, but here goes. I have an unhealthy, almost pathological, some may even say suicidal lack of respect for authority of all facets and flavors, but especially for supervisory authority. I don’t respect “offices;” I respect people. Period. For instance, I would crawl through Hell in kerosene overalls for my present principal, but I’ve had other supervisors earlier in my life that I wouldn’t [insert colorful, but Biblical (at least in KJV) word picture of bodily function here] on if they were on fire. As the Apostle Paul puts it, I am not one to “suffer fools gladly,” even if I don’t think myself particularly wise.

That is bad enough. Unfortunately, I am also a horrible poker player (Daddy was a great one, but that’s another story). What I mean is I have an impossible time trying to keep from showing obvious disdain toward someone I don’t much care for, especially if that someone happens to be in a position of authority over me. I don’t necessarily mind being told what to do, but I am extraordinarily sensitive to how I’m told what to do.

Here’s the essential problem as I see it. Management is made up of two types of people. On the one hand are born leaders. These women and men exude confidence, vision, and control. They will be leaders no matter what they choose to do or where they choose to do it. If a born leader like I have in mind ended up on a chain gang, he or she would be a trusty within a month and working for the warden within a year.

Born leaders have followings because people believe in them. They inspire. They calm. They care, or do a really good job of acting like they care. On the other hand are those who are not born leaders but who have risen through intelligence, hard work, or possibly Machiavellian guile to a position of authority. These leaders rely on their position for their authority. They are not naturally inspiring and they completely lack vision. All too often the only way they can answer the question, “Why?” is with “Because I said so and I’m the [assistant principal, shift supervisor, President of the United States or whatever]. These people expect respect but have little in the way of getting it or earning it.

When I was in the classroom teaching high school English, I always gave out a single sided sheet of my expectations for my students on the first day of class. They were consistently amazed by #3 “I do not expect you to have any respect for me until I have earned it from you.” That blew them away. Now I’m not saying I’m a genius or anything, but I am a realist and I’ve looked around enough to know that the days of being respected because one is an adult or teacher or anything else are long, long over . . . if they ever truly existed. Respect does not come from a tie or heels and hose any more [although I FIRMLY respect most any woman who can wear heels and hose all day on a Monday night Parent Open House in August, but I digress].

I told those juniors and seniors I taught that if I couldn’t earn their respect, they had every right in the world to diss me. That bothers some people, but it’s the way the world works. Sorry if some of you don’t think it’s fair. To you I must say what I’ve told more than one student in my time in education, “Fair is a place where you go to ride rides and eat cotton candy until you puke.” Life, as the great man said, is not fair.

Now, all that rant leads to this. I had a fire hydrant day today. That means I was the fire hydrant and not the dog. First thing, I’m hit with email being down. If you want to see the truth in human nature, don’t put people on an island with no food or water, put them in a school with no email. Then I have a teacher who has found a great lesson using the Internet only to discover that all the links showing examples of propaganda are YouTube videos and YouTube is blocked for students in our school so her students wouldn’t be able to complete the exercise. Well, they can now because I downloaded the videos and got them into a usable form for her, but that’s a post for another time.

In the midst of all this, a member of the “School Leadership Team” comes in to my office at 9:30 and says, “Has Chris [my assistant] burned the video of our presentation to DVD yet?” Okay, the day just got interesting because this is the first I’ve heard of a DVD.

In any event, a person is in the office waiting for this DVD and it’s VERY important. I won’t go into detail, but apparently it’s pretty much a life or death situation to the Leadership Team so, apparently, it’s a life or death situation for Chris and me. Anyway, I find out that this all-important DVD was plopped in Chris’ lap at 9:00 this morning. No deadline given, no instruction, no nothing. Just “we need this put on DVD.” Fast forward to 2:00 this afternoon. The DVD is still not done because it’s freaking 45 minutes long. That means it took 45 minutes to capture, 45 minutes to edit, 45 minutes to transcode, and 15 minutes to actually burn to a DVD. The SLT “didn’t think it would take that long.” Perhaps that’s because no one on the SLT bothered to ask the doofus who usually makes the DVDs (that’d be me if you aren’t keeping up) how the process worked. Oh yeah, and I had those annoying students to check books out to and help with computer questions. Imagine that. Meanwhile, Chris is working on the DVD with limited success.

2:00 an A.P. walks in and asks, for the fifth time today, “when’s the DVD going to be ready?” Chris and I told her we didn’t know; it was transcoding then.  She left angry and I later apologized because she’s actually usually very kind to me and it wasn’t like it was her fault. I can’t really say it was anyone’s “fault.” Fifteen minutes after the A.P. leaves, the original  SLT member returns and wants to know when the DVD will be ready.

Folks, I’m not proud of this next fact, but it is a fact: I can go from zero to full redneck in about 4 seconds. I did. In spades. We had been hounded all day about a problem we did not create that was TERTIARY to any teaching or learning going on in the building. By the time she left the library and I sat down at my desk with a splitting headache and that awful coppery adrenaline taste in my mouth I hate so much, heated words had been exchanged (which, thankfully, I later apologized for). Then, as the cherry on the top of this poop pie sundae of a day, Chris and I went up to the studio to find that the DVD would not burn to disc. The studio burner was DVD+R and all the DVDs we had were DVD-R. We are already “behind” in a game we didn’t even know we were in and the ball we were playing with just blew up.

At that point, I did all I could do. I laughed out loud. Chris thought I’d lost my mind. I transferred the video files to my 16 GB flash drive and went to my computer. About halfway through the second burning attempt, my principal herself appears. She is a born leader, remember? She’s calm. She’s smiling. She wants to know where the DVD is. I point to my computer and tell her it’ll be ready in 54 minutes. She stopped smiling for a bit. It was already 4:30. I assured her now that I was handling it, everything would go fine. She reluctantly agreed to leave after I begged her to just let me finish what we’d started. I finished the DVD in the 54 minutes. It worked perfectly and we tricked it out with a cool label and jewel case we’d made. I made a copy to keep at school and on my way home, I dropped the other DVD off where it needed to be. Problem solved. Why? Because a true leader who didn’t know squat about how to fix the problem turned the problem over to someone who did and got out of the way after a positional leader had hovered all day and couldn’t make the thing work any faster. As I explained to my principal, “I can do a whole lot of things, but I cannot change the laws of physics and I cannot alter the space time continuum.” The DVD turned out perfectly though. Isn’t all well that ends well? I dunno.

Moral of the story? I don’t know if there is one. In no uncertain terms, I certainly don’t advocate being as much of a jerk as I was to my A.P. OR the other SLT member. I guess if I have a point it’s this: don’t be a doormat. If you don’t stand up for yourself, no one else will. Remember to show respect to those who earn it. They’ll have your back later on most likely. Also, push to be in the loop in everything. That way, you don’t get blindsided. Most of all though, remember — they can kill you, but they can’t eat you. Stand your ground and do what you get paid to do, which is be awesome 🙂

Don’t forget to wash your feet, y’all.

This isn’t going to win me any friends in my chosen profession, but anyone reading this blog or who knows me personally will realize that’s never been a big deal. If I was just a little bit easier to get along with and used just a tiny bit more tact, I’d probably be making a lot more money doing something much easier, but what fun would that be. Someone has to go through life kicking fire ant mounds and throwing rocks at wasps’ nest and since it seems no one is lining up for that job, I may as well be the one.

Having said that, here’s the sentence that will likely get me banned from librarianship for life . . . I’ll be the Pete Rose of media centers. School librarians are unnecessary in more schools than they are necessary regardless of how much we want to think otherwise.

Oh my gosh, I’ve sent a tremor through the Force now. Since I’ve tied myself to the stake, I may as well stand the course. Here’s what I mean. Under the present educational paradigm, which worships at the altar of testing with all the zeal of a new convert, school librarians aren’t needed because few teachers have time to come to the library and still “cover” all the standards needed for the almighty AYP garnering or losing TEST (cue ominous music).

Now I know that people out there can bury me in copies of Information Power and the vaunted Colorado Study by Keith Curry Lance and I’m not going to argue. I’m not going to change my point of view, but I’m not going to argue either. See, we all want to believe that libraries are essential to the school. We all want to believe that we librarians can help improve test scores. We want to believe in the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and Santa Claus. Unfortunately, belief counts for nothing in education.

Fire will burn you whether you believe it or not. Water will drown you whether you believe it or not. Stand in front of a train and shout “I don’t believe in you” and they will bury what they can find of you in a Ziploc baggie. The hard fact is that, once again, under the present educational regime, testing is king. Specifically, testing in ELA is king and testing in Math is the co-regent. Libraries don’t contribute MEASURABLY to either discipline. Sure, we can teach phenomenal lessons in research skills, information literacy, and comparing information sources. Unfortunately, none of that is on THE TEST (cue the Vader music.)

I know people will argue this and write me ugly comments and maybe emails, but research skills and information literacy as they are defined in sacred library Scripture like Information Power ARE NOT ON A STATE BUBBLE IN TEST! You simply cannot reduce the art of research to a multiple choice question and if you can, it won’t take an MLIS institutionally trained, card carrying ALA member to teach it. ELA teachers can do just fine and it will take fewer minutes out of prime instructional time if they do. All libraries, or rather the computer labs formerly known as libraries, are good for in this educational climate of winner take all testing is for providing a place to boot up drill and practice software masquerading as video games.

Now, I made all those audacious statements to get everyone’s attention and now that I have it, what smart cookie out there can tell me the point I’m trying to make? Do we need to get rid of libraries in order to focus on better testing? Wrong, you go to the back of the class.

What I’m trying to say is we need to quit wasting energy fighting FOR libraries and redirect our energy fighting AGAINST testing as the end all and be all that it is now.

Folks, I’m not making this crap up. I know what the books say and what “the studies” say. I know what the “advocates” say. Then I know what I SEE when I walk in to my so-called underperforming middle school every day. I see a slew of students who cannot READ on anything that approaches grade level. What good is trying to do a “Non-Bird Unit” research project going to do their teachers? That time can’t be spent in the library. It has to go towards remediation in basic reading skills. My ELA teachers can’t come to the library except to check out books for Sustained Silent Reading because they are MANDATED by our administration (who are very supportive of me, by the way) to cover every standard in the state guide just so we as a school can at least say “well, they’ve ‘seen’ everything that will be on the test.” To ensure this happens, each teacher has a copy of his or her subject’s standards turned into a pacing guide with a checkoff system for each standard taught.

I heard that gasp and see those shaking heads, but if I’m lying I’m dying. It’s the truth with my hand up.

The spectre of AYP is causing administrators all over my state to LOSE THEIR MINDS. The apparent dictate is “all that matters is that damn test.” Therefore, the mindset has become “raise test scores AT ANY COST.” One of the costs is the expanded research project of any kind, bird unit or no bird unit.

Y’all, this breaks my heart on many levels. First, my heart goes out to my principals who are getting so much pressure from the top to raise test scores or find new jobs. I ache inside for the teachers who are having to abandon many of the techniques and much of the content that they enjoyed teaching and THAT REALLY MATTERED so they can devote more time to remediation, “covering” standards, and slowly burning out in the process. Most of all, however, I feel the pain of a generation of students who have been born into one of the richest periods in educational potential in all of history and yet are forced to bend all their energy to passing one god-forsaken test in one week of one month of their year.

I realize this may not be a problem in affluent districts where the students come to school reading and who have vast educational resources at home, but it’s an elephantine problem in Title I schools and other poor districts that are serving the underfunded, underfed, and misunderstood. The students who could benefit most from a rich educational experience complete with extensive library activities like I see modeled every year at conferences are the fartherest behind THE TEST measurements so they have to pay for what they did not seek to purchase by being force fed test taking strategies and rote skills that will help them pass THE TEST while at the same time burning out at the roots ANY love of learning and literacy they may have had at one time.

So, to close, libraries aren’t needed as long as THE TEST is all that matters. So, if you are dead set on advocating for something, please, quit begging the legislature for a million dollars for more books for students who can’t read. Instead, focus all the letter writing and representative calling on overthrowing the dictatorship of THE TEST and free our students to learn again.

One quick thought before the main post: I’m getting comments on this blog from people I never imagined would ever know I existed, much less would ever correspond with me. Now, that is incredibly humbling for one thing. For another thing, it is the best argument I can ever put forward for blogging in the classroom as teachers and as students.

Now, to work. As I’ve said before, I learned almost all I know about computers from my F-I-L who basically co-opted me as an indentured servant after I started dating his daughter. He and I spent many hours and miles riding around between jobs in an old ’88 red Ranger mini-pickup and in those times, he imparted wisdom to me. Some I managed to forget but some has stuck with me. This post is about one that has stuck. It is not original with Dad so it’s certainly not original with me. If anyone knows the “owner” of this model, let me know and I’ll gladly acknowledge them. He called it the Triangle Theory of Production.

Basically the model says this: “For any job, three possible areas of production exist. They are Quality, Cost, and Speed. Whoever commissions the job must pick two, and only two, of the three areas at the total exclusion of the third. No matter how hard one tries, one cannot have all three.”

It shakes out like this. You can have something Fast and of Quality, but it won’t be Cheap. You can have something Cheap and of Quality, but it won’t be Fast. You can have something Fast and Cheap, but it will have dubious Quality. So y’all see how it works. Unfortunately, in lots of the jobs Dad and I did, the owners of the businesses would want all three. It doesn’t work that way. It just can’t, and one day on my home from the library I was chewing over memories like cud and that conversation with Dad popped up. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how appropriate it was to education AND how little people followed it in attempt to have ALL three legs of the triangle.

Here’s one easy example from the library . . . searching. When you teach students to search on the ‘Net, they get to pick two legs. Let’s say they pick a straight Google search. That’ll be Fast and it’ll be Cheap (free, as a matter of fact), but the Quality in most cases will be lacking. If you teach them how to obtain good Quality from Google, it will usually come at the sacrifice of Speed. So you’ll get a Quality search that is still Cheap, but now isn’t Fast.

However, if you teach the students about subscription online databases that you’ve purchased for your library or that maybe your state has purchased for you (we have DISCUS here in SC and I think Georgia next door has Galileo, but that may be wrong), they get two different triangle legs. In this case, they get a Speedy search for information of good Quality, but it isn’t Cheap. It may not cost the student anything and it may not cost the library anything, but since these statewide database purchases are paid for with tax money, we all pay in the end. Not that I’m saying that’s bad. I just think it’s important for us to remember another universal model all educators should know, namely “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.” (post for another time)

This model also applies in Spades to any equipment purchases we make. In my own library, we were contemplating buying a “letter folder” for the school. This is a wonderful machine that does the ungodly mindnumbing work of folding flyers and such. Looking through the catalog, I saw the same old story. We could get Cheap and decent Quality, but it was SLOOOOOWWWW. One page at a time. Now, if we wanted to maintain the Quality, maybe even improve it slightly, Speed would go up, but Cost would skyrocket. We’re talking a jump from low 3 digits to middle 4 digits in price. The model holds up pretty well.

Now for the esoteric and since I’m not really good at esoteric, hopefully this’ll make sense. I feel in education that the powers that be have too often made the mistake of grabbing for all three triangle legs. Politicians want an educational solution that is Fast, Good, and Cheap. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. The area I see it most in is assessment.

Multiple choice test, for example, are loved by politicians. Some examples include our state’s late and very unlamented Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test, universally called the PACT test, which is redundant, but hey. Now PACT was mostly a MC test. Sure, it had a writing component and some short answers, but at the heart it was a MC bubble test. Those tests are Fast (of course, speed is relative since we never get the scores before October) and they are comparatively Cheap (again, relatively speaking). What they are NOT, as much as people want to cling to the hope that they are, is excellent Quality. A one size fits all MC test doesn’t give as much information about a student as most teachers would like to have. At best, we get a snapshot when what we want is time lapse video.

BUT, if we developed one of those time lapse video tests or, even better, ditched tests all together in favor of more authentic assessments, we’d get better Quality, but we’ll either give up Speed of grading altogether or the Cost will be astronomical. So, we muddle along in the status quo.

So, what’s the answer? I’d be a fool to say I knew when all I am is a librarian in a podunk school in the middle of BFE, but I do have a bit of an idea. We need to urge our policy makers to take this Triangle model to heart. The one non-negotiable needs to be Quality. If politicians are going to insist on a single test to define what goes on in the classroom (which I DISPISE the THOUGHT OF, but I’m bending to a reality here) then we need to do pick the other Triangle leg to stand on. If Cheap becomes a must, then people at the policy making and the policy implementing levels will HAVE to discover that precious and long dead treasure called PATIENCE. It’ll take time to develop a good program that comes in relatively Cheaply. On the other hand, if we leave Patience to Guns and Roses and pursue the Speed that so defines our culture today, then taxpayers will have to be prepared to come off the hip, because developing a really good test in a short time frame WON’T be Cheap.

Now, do I know what’s going to happen? Heck yeah, NOTHING. Inertia is a deadly force, especially in education. Still, it is nice to think about what could be, now isn’t it?

Don’t wash your feet, y’all 🙂

Today is Blog Action Day 2008, which is when a bloggers around the world focus on one issue with the hope of attracting attention to it and, maybe, changing it. This year’s topic is poverty and few topics in this world or the next get my attention and raise my ire more than poverty. I’ve been there and done that.

Let me start by clarifying that last statement. I’ve done poverty, lived in poverty, BUT, my poverty and the poverty this post will focus on is “American Style” poverty. What that means is I’ve never lived in a garbage dump scrounging rotten fruit for food like a pack of children I have pictures of in Guatemala City, Guatemala. I’ve never walked down a street naked because I literally did not own any clothes like some of the children my former pastor saw on the streets of Mumbai, India. In America, our HOMELESS, the bottom of the economic ladder, are STILL exponentially wealthier than MILLIONS of people across this world. Poverty “American Style” is a dream to MILLIONS of Indians, Chinese, Latin Americans, Aboriginal Australians, Africans, and countless, countless others in the Third World. Let’s keep everything in perspective.

Having said that, the knowledge that others in the world are far more miserable than you is ice cold comfort to a five year old child whose father has abandoned him and whose mother is desparately trying to keep herself and her son fiscally afloat with a tenth grade education, a textile plant job, $125 a week salary, and $20 per month child support. That was me in 1977. I’ve endured lights being cut off, phones being cut off, and groceries being one bag with bread and peanut butter. I still love peanut butter to this day, but I will not touch ketchup. If you ever eat a ketchup sandwich on stale bread, not because you want to but because you have to, you might develop a similar loathing.

From the time I was in K5 until the summer between my eighth and ninth grade years, we moved all over Hell and half of Georgia (technically, it was South Carolina, but it doesn’t sound the same). We lived with my dad’s parents (hey ladies, how many of you would live with your EX-INLAWS?), my mom’s dad, my mom’s cousin, some family down in Columbia . . . we just sort of bounced all over. Finally, my dad’s parents decided I needed a stable place to live so the summer before I started high school, they bought us a 1964 Fleetwood Special mobile home.

Nota Bene: I’ve lived 95% of my life in a trailer. Please remember that if you are around me at a conference and decide to make a remark about “trailer trash.” We TT don’t appreciate those who don’t know what it means to be TT calling us TT.

Anyway, the place was a palace to us. It was 15’x50′. No heat, no central air. We had a window unit and a kerosene heater that we couldn’t use because me and Mama both had asthma. I remember more than one January morning contemplating if I really wanted to get out from under the covers in my bedroom when I could see my breath and make a dash for the unheated bathroom. I’ve got a jillion stories about that place and those times, but I’ll save them and try to keep this post on target.

Poverty is a crippler. For example, people look at you differently once you get labeled white trash. I was in all honors courses in high school, graduated second in my class, was a National Merit Semi-Finalist, had a measured 140 IQ, made a 1380 on the SAT when that score actually meant something, blah, blah, blah . . . I was a smart kid. Still, I remember being treated a little differently because I was almost always the poorest person in the honors classes. I also remember my AP English teacher glaring at me the night of graduation and saying, “You don’t deserve HALF the honors you’ve gotten! You’re trailer trash and you’ll never amount to anything.”

Pardon my French, but she was damn near right.

I was the first person in my family, both sides, to graduate high school with 12 grades. Everyone else in my AP classes kept getting letters from colleges. They had everything planned out. Several were legacies at this school or that university. Everyone kept asking me where I was going. I told them I was going to work after Senior Week at the beach, if I survived Senior Week (again, a story for another time). I had no idea how to apply to college, how to pay for college, or why I needed college. I didn’t understand the mindset. It wasn’t that Mama didn’t value my education — she did. She was, and is, insanely proud of me. She was just too busy keeping a roof over my head and food in my stomach to worry about a college fund.

So, twenty years later I have an AA, a BA, and an MLIS. I work in education. I drive a Honda Element. I still live in a trailer. Not a double wide either. See, here’s the thing, and before you criticize me, email me and I’ll tell you stories I don’t have time or space to tell here, a part of me never left that 15×50 unheated trailer. If I ever get to meet Ruby Payne in person, I swear I want to walk up to her and kiss her right square on the mouth because the books she wrote for professional development are like my life story. Case in point, no savings. People from poverty don’t save, they spend. If you save it, it may get gone.

That’s a hard mindset to break. I still haven’t really broken it. I still have an extreme dislike for people I perceive as “being rich” or “acting rich.” I am very uncomfortable in ritzy social settings because I have no idea which fork to use and I feel everyone is watching me. Growing up, we used one fork for every course . . . the beans and the franks . . . and more times than not it was plastic. I will never consider a job at a school that serves an upper class population. I’ve been looked down on my whole life; why the blazes do I want some kid’s lawyer daddy and doctor mama looking down their nose at me at a parent Open House?

I’m not proud of my impoverished roots (although I am damn proud of my mama for keeping us going when she could have left me with my grandparents and gone out and had a life . . . my mama was a fine looking woman) but I can’t get away from them no matter how hard I try. Part of me goes to work every day with the sole purpose of proving that teacher on graduation night wrong.

Look, I’ll try and wrap this up as best I can. I shouldn’t have even tried posting about this topic because it is way to raw and viscerally emotional for me to deal with outside my therapist’s office. But since I have, here’s my point: it is extremely hard for a child who doesn’t know what, if anything he’s going to eat for supper, or where he’s going to lay his head, to give a tiny little damn about your pretty planned collection, your shiny computers, or your “book learnin'”. A girl who has to keep house and her three younger siblings while her mother works (or parties, you never know) is going to be a Child Left Behind no matter WHAT the godforsaken federal law says. You can’t expect a child who has to act like an adult, basically BE an adult, to settle down and do what you say just because you’re older than him or her.

Final thought . . . poverty is brutal, even “American Style” poverty. Thousands of your kids are living in that brutal poverty RIGHT NOW. If the economy tanks worse, even more kids will be there. Homeless and hopeless is a Hell of a way to live for anyone, but it’s almost insurmountable for a child.

Yeah, I got out . . . or did I?

Once again . . . poverty is BRUTAL and ALL CONSUMING and ALL AROUND YOU.

What are you going to do about it? Yes, you, reading this blog entry.

Congress won’t do spit, the President either. NO CALVARY IS COMING for these children.

What are you going to do about it?

I love my job and I love the teachers I work with, but my interaction with them as a librarian has produced some sidesplitting episodes over the last four years. Well, last night, Budge and I went to a small get-together at one of my teacher’s homes. Ben and his girlfriend were in attendance as well. Ben is the subject of two of my favorite stories about being a librarian. Both happened his first year as a teacher and my second year as a librarian.

These two stories are the unembellished, unvarnished truth. I can’t make anything this good up.

First, Ben came to me the second day of school, which was a workday, with a stack of posters and such to laminate. Now I come from a high school background and we didn’t laminate nearly as much as the lower grade. I quickly learned my first year that the more laminate on hand, the better. Middle school teachers would laminate the students if they could get them through the rollers and heat shoes.

Anyway, Ben has all this stuff to laminate and I’ve got a million other things to do, so I tell him the machine’s been on all day so it should be heated and ready to go. I know lots of librarians don’t let teachers do their on laminating, but I just figured reasonable, college educated people should be able to run something as simple as a laminator. It’s a pretty foolproof machine. Of course, a wise man once said that anyone who calls something foolproof usually underestimates the creativity of the average fool.

So all is quiet for about ten minutes. I can hear the laminator running from my office where I’m getting stuff ready for the first days. Sounds like all is well. Then I hear, “Uh oh.” Folks, you run into lots of situations where you don’t want to hear, “uh oh.” Doctors’ offices, car repair shops, and children’s birthday parties are some that come to mind. To that list add the laminator room.

I walked in and the machine was running strangely. I could tell something was wrong but couldn’t put my finger on it until I realized the laminate was UNDERNEATH the table and moving. Then I saw what had happened. Ben had run a poster through, but didn’t feel it was thick enough or some such. No problem. I have people double coat stuff all the time. What Ben did differently (and God alone knows what thought processes were involved) was he reached under the machine and pulled the poster through and up to the rollers and ran it again WITHOUT CUTTING IT FROM THE ROLL. The result was he literally laminated the laminator. Plastic and poster had wrapped every roller and heat shoe and semi-melted into a goopy stringy mess. I think if the poor boy hadn’t looked so confused and sad, I’d have run HIM through the laminator. As it was I ran him off, cut the machine off to cool, and went to sharpen my scissors. It took over an hour, many swear words, and two razor blades to get everything straight and unwrapped. Ben no longer laminates his own stuff.

This next one is even better.

I was in my office when I waved at Ben who was going into the copier room. He hadn’t been in there more than five minutes when he called me. I recognized the note of concern in his voice and went to see if I could help. He was standing in front of the copier holding some transparencies. He told me he’d run two transparencies through the machine, but nothing had come out the other side. I asked him for one of his sheets. It confirmed my worst fears . . . plain acetate write-on film. I wanted to cry since that kind of bone-headed move wasn’t covered under our service contract. BUT WAIT . . .

Ben looked at me, then at the plastic now fused around the fuser of the copier and said, “well, that explains the other two machines.”

Here’s the good part. Ben had gone to the OTHER copier room on the other side of the building and tried to run his “transparencies” through the copier in that room. Nothing had come out. Either time. Ben has very high self esteem, so he was certain he’d done nothing wrong and the machine was obviously defective. So, he proceeded to the LOUNGE to use that copier. Again, two tries with the bogus transparencies, two goose eggs in the hopper. Did I mention Ben’s self-esteem?

So, when he came to the library, Ben had already SHUT DOWN every other copier in the school. Did I mention Ben had FIRST PERIOD PLANNING, or that this was MONDAY? I looked at Ben and asked, calmly as I could, “Ben, why didn’t you come ask me or someone else when the FIRST machine didn’t make your transparency?” He said, “I thought something was wrong with the machine.” When I asked, “And the SECOND machine?” He said, “Same thing.”

For a long time, Ben was forbidden to use the copiers. I cleaned up an old spirit master machine, put it in his room and DARED him to come near a Mita machine. I still have two “butterfly” shaped pieces of acetate in a cup on my desk from that incident. I show them every year on the first day of new teacher training . . . along with the $1500 repair bill — $500 per copier.

I am happy to report that Ben has become much more technologically savvy. This year, with great trepidation, I checked out an ELMO P-10 document camera and a really nice InFocus projector to him. So far, students say he is doing great with both. He’s enrolled in the next SmartBoard training class, so we’ll see. I swear though, if he writes on that SmartBoard with a permanent marker I will not be responsible for my actions.

Six years ago this month, I got fired from the greatest teaching job I ever held for taking a stand. I was put on paid suspension then had a hearing before the School Board and when all was said and done, I was out of a job and mighty nearly out of a career. I worked odd jobs and lived on student loans for two years trying to support Budge in college and keep a roof over our heads. We lost pretty much everything but our home and one car. Bankruptcy and a rock bottom credit rating still haunt us today. Suffice it to say that this little grey duck isn’t worried one whit about the current financial meltdown . . . blood and turnips, you know.

The details of my stand aren’t important, but it basically involved me taking a tack counter to my supervisor’s. I thought I was right and in possession of the moral high ground. She thought I was wrong and in possession of an insubordinant attitude. The board agreed with her.

So, I tell you all that to ask you this: How far are you willing to go for what you believe in as a librarian and an educator? For example, we just celebrated Banned Books Week across the country. Had a lot of traffic on the listserv about displays and thoughts about intellectual freedom in general. People told war stories and gave their two cents about this challenge or that censorship attempt. Still, no one mentioned the unmentionable — what do you do when the challenge goes farther than you intended?

Let me cut to the chase. Are you willing to LOSE YOUR JOB because of a stance you take on intellectual freedom? Is the First Amendment so dear to your soul that you would risk unemployment for it? Think hard before you answer. This is the education field we’re talking about here. Say what you want, but for most of us, it’s not what you know, but who you know that gets you the interview that gets you the job. If that wasn’t true, the best qualified candidate would always get the position, not a nephew of a niece’s son’s best friend. You get fired, even if they don’t go after your certificate, it’s a long road back to another school. Principals talk just like we do. Administration has its listservs just like us librarians. They will know about you.

Do you want to be labeled a “boat rocker” for fighting the removal of Annie on my Mind from your library shelves? To get another librarian job after getting fired, you’ll have to have references. Where are they going to come from? “Um, Mr. X, I know you just had me fired and all, but is there any way you could write me a good recommendation for another job?” Oh yeah, and before you trot out that tired old horse about “They can’t blackball anyone . . . it’s illegal,” just remember this old fact . . . there’s the recommendation that the supervisor writes down in a nice neat paper trail and then there’s the recommendation the same supervisor gives over the phone when his buddy two districts over calls him about this librarian who worked at his school and now wants a job.

How exactly do you plan to hide that gap in your resume’? Mine looks funny. “English Teacher — 1994 to October 2002” followed by “Local Delivery Truck Driver — ”

Here’s how this thing looks. This is the dirty story; not the nice pretty version ALA wants to put out of their Office of Intellectual Freedom. You take your stand against censorship as you see it. You go to ALA for help because the board is threatening you for causing such a fuss. (For the two of you on the back row who didn’t know, small town Southern school boards DO NOT like a fuss) ALA sends legal help. Legal help your former friendly colleagues view as “outside agitators.” You and your ALA lawyer put up a good fight, but in the end, you lose and you get fired. You go home without a job and the ALA lawyer goes back home with his pay from ALA.

You lose your income. You lose your insurance. Single moms? I know a lot of you in education — how are you going to pay for that sixth grader’s constant ear infections? Lots of doctors won’t even talk to you on the phone if you don’t have insurance. Sure, you could do COBRA, but I think anyone who can afford COBRA premiums doesn’t really need to work anyway. Ever lost your house? I did when I was a kid and my dad left me and Mama. Foreclosure is ugly when it leaves the nightly news and camps out in your former living room. Explain to your children why they are losing their individual rooms and their nice back yard to go live with Nana and Papa and you all have to share your old bedroom with the bubble gum pink canopy bed. You know, the one you swore after college you’d never sleep in again?

Guys out there? Think you’ll have it any better? Sure, you could get a construction job easier than the ladies could . . . if any construction firms were hiring. Oh, and those jobs don’t have insurance either. You ready to live off your wife’s check? Ready to face the in-laws who probably don’t like you much anyway?

I don’t want to be pessimistic or alarmist. I value intellectual freedom — to a point. I also value a roof over my head and a decent car to drive. ALA may be great at providing advice, but they are lousy at paying your utility bills.

It’s easy to sit back and play love seat lawyer when it’s not your bacon in the fire. What happens though when your principal walks in tomorrow and hands you a book that “someone in the community” wants off your shelves? By all means, follow your procedures and policies. Have all the forms ready that you want.

But what if he says, “The school doesn’t need this publicity. Take the book off now.”

You going to fight? How hard? Sure, you may not get fired outright, but principals have ways of getting rid of “boat rockers.” You ready to see your budget slashed? Ready to move from a flex to a fixed schedule again? Ready to have new duties? There are a hundred ways for an administrator to make your life so miserable that you’ll leave. But where are you going to go? You willing to drive two hours one way burning $4.00 gallon gas to get to a district that needs you bad enough to overlook the baggage?

Say what you want to, but don’t say it can’t happen. If push comes to shove, how firm is your stand?

My late and extremely beloved Papa John was a “Pentecostal, full gospel, fire-baptised, Holiness” preacher. By way of explanation of what a “Pentecostal, full gospel, fire-baptised, Holiness” church is, let me just say this — if you know what one is, good. Email me and we’ll swap stories; I’ve got some great ones. If you don’t know what one is, no amount of explanation on my part is going to suffice for you to truly grasp the experience so I won’t sully the memory of the church or insult your intelligence by trying.

I spent my formative years under his ministry in a tee-tiny three room white church of knotty pine pews and funeral home fans. We had a congregation that ranged from six to one hundred, depending on if the crops were in, if the cotton mill was running overtime, or if various members of the family were up in arms against some of the others. Papa had taken over the pastorate after my great-uncle Pastor Robert had passed and if anyone of the few of you who know me personally can believe it, I was supposed to assume the pulpit after Papa John went to Glory. Sometimes things don’t turn out quite like we’ve always known they were going to.

In any event, as Papa’s heir-apparent, I often accompanied him on his visits to parishoners and, on very rare occasions, to meetings with groups of pastors of churches similar to ours. Later, when I broke my mother’s heart by excusing myself from the line of pastoral succession, I became a deacon in a church of a more liberal denomination. In such a capacity, I often accompanied my pastor and fellow deacons to pastoral councils across the state. Both with Papa John and my other former pastor, I heard the same comment from the mouths of many of these devout men of God.

“Brethren, my church is about two, maybe three funerals away from some real change (or growth, or new direction, or progress, etc).”

What they meant by that seemingly callous statement is that once they had the pleasure honor of performing the funeral for old batty gossip Sister Mattie Grace or crochety curmudgeon Brother Smith or some other long-reigning pillar(s) of the church, the way would finally be cleared to do what they (and often a great part of the congregation) had been wanting to do for a long time, be it change service times, Sunday School literature, or (Heaven forbid) music style (since it has been theologically proven that when Lucifer was cast out of Glory, he fell headlong into the choir loft and orchestra pit of most evangelical churches). These aforementioned sainted members had, by use of their demeanor, voting bloc, family ties, or other political influence, managed to keep the demonic specter of change and innovation out of the church. They were not titularly in charge, but their presence ensured the safety and often enshrinement of the status quo.

As in Heaven, so also it often is on earth . . . or at least in education.

It may be bad form, almost certainly politically incorrect, and definitely tactless to say this, but many of our schools today are just like those beleaguered pastors’ churches. They are two or three key retirements (or deaths — accidents do happen) away from some real changes in the school’s direction and climate.

Think now. How many of you are picturing someone or another right now? You all know the one. He or she sits in righteous enthronement dead center at every faculty meeting.

Pity the poor freshly appointed principal eager to offer her new educational vision for the school only to be met with a spoken (or at least subliminal) “I was here to see that come through by another name ‘x’ years ago. It failed then and it’ll fail now.” They are not just negative, they are toxic.

Pity the poor first year teacher who blunders into their lair at the back of the teachers’ lounge as they regale the “youngsters” with stories of the “good old days” when all students were angels, discipline was swift for those who were not, and everyone was a lot smarter.

Pity the poor freshly minted librarian who approaches on of these grizzled veterans with an offer of collaboration or display of some new technology. If the librarian survives at all, he or she is liable to be scarred for the rest of a career by the snarling reply of “I’ve got too much to do as it is,” or “what can you teach that I can’t.” Sure, the words might not be exactly so brutal (but I’ve seen them exactly so) but the sentiment is there. That kind of coldness can freeze a librarian into his library for the rest of the year.

It only takes one or two of this type of educator on a faculty to bring any hope of innovation to a crawl and to spread a generally negative miasma over everything in the building. The smaller the school the more pronounced the effect.

Sadly, not all of these human roadblocks to progress are old and grey. Some are young and in the wrong profession while some are middle-aged and burned out. They all share a common component though — they fear change right to the very quivering soul of their beings. Many of them were once as idealistic and gung ho as the colleagues and supervisors they now regularly shoot down. They had hopes and dreams of great lessons and lovely children. Lots of them probably had fond, loving memories of school days.

Now though, everything has changed and they are frustrated, insecure, and often bitter. Usually the realization that things have changed and they hate doing this comes too late. They have too many years in the system to quit or, worse, they don’t know what else they could do if they weren’t in education. As much as their attitudes frustrate me to no end, I can’t help but feel pity for them. I know fully the deep rooted misery that comes with dragging oneself out of bed every morning to go to a “job” rather than bouncing up to get to the latest day in a “career.” It’s just a bad situation all around.

So what can we do against such soul-numbing, embittered and negative obstructionist people? Not much, really. Try to go around them if you can. Work towards building strong relationships with more positive faculty members who want to innovate and grow. If enough of you can get together, you can begin to push back the negative cloud. Keep on reaching out to the crusty ones, though. Sure, you’ll fail with them more than succeed, but who knows? Daddy always said even a blind hog’ll find an acorn every now and then. Most importantly, keep your own positiveness about you. I know it’s hard to be Annie-full-of-Sunshine when it’s not really your personality, but keep trying.

Finally, if all else fails, get on your school’s version of the Special Occasions Committee and make sure every retirement or transfer at the end of the year is a HUGE blowout party. That way, maybe you’ll entice some of the dead wood to leave the forest earlier that they otherwise would have and, like Papa John and some of his friends always said, “The right funeral can solve a lot of problems,” so keep your black dress or suit cleaned and pressed. You never know . . .

We just finished MAP testing (NWEA anyone?) today and at supper tonight, Budge brought up a painful, but now side-splittingly hilarious story centering around my second year as a librarian and my first year as school MAP testing head person in charge. I thought I would regale you with this so the next time you feel you’ve done something foolish . . . well, let’s just say you probably don’t have a section in your district’s policy manual named after you.

I do. Here’s why, and this story is not only true, but is verifiable and documented.

Now I’m not crazy about MAP because it keeps my library tied up for four weeks out of the year, but the district says we have to give it and I like living in a house and driving a car, so I find it behooves me to do what the district says do. Anyway, it was two years ago and we’d just finished the math portion of MAP for the day. My buddy, David, stopped by my office and was mentioning how one of his honors seventh graders had just blown the top out of the math test. Then he asked the question that started the whole saga.

As an aside, I’d like for you to notice the first sign of danger. Here are two MEN discussing something. What is about to happen next would NEVER have happened if two women or even a woman and a man had been discussing the same thing we were discussing, the practical, intelligent side of the woman would have prevented the chaos that occured next. Think of boys and girls playing. Boys just grab the vine and swing on it. Girls ponder if the vine is attached to something stable, if the landing site is clear, etc. That’s why you don’t see NEARLY as many girls wearing casts in the lower grades as you do boys. Boys are afflicted by the SLAGIATT syndrome. That’s short for “Seemed like a good idea at the time.” Sadly, many boys never grow out of the SLAGIATT stage and so leave the world with the time-honored catchphrase “Hey, y’all, watch this.”

In any event, David, as I said, was remarking on the student’s exceptional score when he turned to me and said, “Is there any way you could put me in the MAP system so I could take the test? I’d like to see how I’d do.”  I said, “Sure thing,” and I proceeded to use my credentials as the MAP TAA person to create a seventh grade version of David complete with a schedule, birthday, and G/T placement.

As you are reading this, please understand . . . no planning was involved AT ALL. David just asked me a question and I was rather curious about the same thing and since I had the ability to do what he asked, I did it. After all, it wasn’t PACT (our state’s NCLB qualifier) or CTBS or Iowa or something like that. Sonia, our guidance counselor, didn’t lock the codes to MAP up in her office and threaten everyone within an inch of their lives if her door was disturbed. Shoot, we didn’t even have to sign anything before administering MAP . . . well, we didn’t until all this happened anyway. Remember that section in the District Operation Manual?

So, little seventh grade Davy sat down at a nearby terminal and proceeded to rack up a tremendous string of correct questions. At one point, I even noticed sweat on his brow and about halfway through the test he called for scratch paper. I sat at his side, thrilled at his obvious skill in math (though why anyone with such awesome skill in math would teach instead of making a mint in engineering or something is beyond me) and absorbing every detail of his classic struggle of man vs. machine. Along about question 38 though, Apollo stumbled and the screen went from second level differential equations down to addition. David got one wrong. In the end though, he scored twenty point higher than his genius student had and we both went back to our work with a warm and satisfied feeling of accomplishment and didn’t think another thing about our little experiment.

Then, a full four weeks later, I got a call on my office intercom / phone. Our principal wanted to see me in her office. No biggie. I told the secretary I’d be right there, saved what I was doing on the computer and sauntered on up to the front. I should have panicked when David came out of her office looking like Death on a stick with buttercream frosting. He looked at me and shook his head. I had no idea what was going on so like a little lamb to the slaughter, I went into the principal’s office.

Folks, it’s never good to get called to the principal’s office. Even if you’re 35 and have been teaching for years. Nothing good is going to come of that summons.

So I walked in and sat down in one of the nice burgundy faux leather chairs across from my boss-lady and that’s when I noticed the other chair in the room was occupied by Ms. C, our District Testing Director. She is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met with a bone dry wit and a perfectly no nonsense attitude. I smiled at her. She nodded. The gazelle still did not sense the cheetah crouching in the savannah grasses.

Ms. C asked, “Mr. Wham, did you put David into the MAP system so that he could take the MAP test?” Not thinking anything was seriously wrong enough to justify even an attempt at a lie, I confidently smiled and said, “Yes, ma’am, and he did great on the test.” I guess it should have been a bad sign when both women dropped their heads into their hands and rubbed their temples.

When my principal looked up, she asked me, “Why did you do that?” I replied, perfectly without malice since I STILL didn’t see anything bad up ahead, “Well, he wanted to take the test and it seemed perfectly logical to me for him to try.” Mrs. M, my principal, said, “Explain what happened, in detail.” So I launched into a thirty minute explanation of what David and I had done with the math MAP.Two heads back into four hands again. More temple rubbing.

It was then that Ms. C fixed me with a withering stare and educated me at length about the ramifications and repercussions of what I had done. Seems that I, in cahoots with David, had corrupted the district’s data gathering, thrown off several tracking initiatives, violated district policy, flushed a grant opportunity down the drain and apparently very nearly caused the polar ice caps to melt and the Apocolypse to begin. I sat and looked at her slack-jawed, which I’m very good at in the presence of powerful women, having been raised solely by my mama. It was only when she finished that the light dawned on me and I realized just what chin deep doo-doo David and I were in. The two women looked at each other and just shook their heads.

I found out later that Mrs. H, our AP had appeared at David’s door and told him Mrs. M wanted to see him in the office. He told me he’d said, “Okay, I’ll go up there during my planning next period.” That’s when Mrs. H said, “Um, no. She wants to see you NOW. I’m here to watch your class.”

In the end, what saved David and I was the utter innocence and lack of any trace of intentional wrongdoing in our explanations. Our stories of what had happened had been almost verbatim the same and it was blatantly obvious to both Mrs. M and Ms. C that we were being honest when we said we had no idea we couldn’t do what we did. We both ended up with mild letters of reprimand in our files and a strict admonishment to NEVER DO THIS AGAIN, which we’ve both taken to heart ever since. Then, of course, there’s the section in the District Manual that gets read at every MAP training session . . . The WHAM RULE . . . “No teacher is to enter anyone not a student into the system, nor is any teacher to take the MAP test under his / her or any other name.”

It’s funny now. It wasn’t then. The worst part though is David never got to take the test in the spring so we’ll never know if he made his growth goal.