thomas leverett weblog

Public School Crisis

I got the chance to sub in an art class today, and it reminded me of my own youth; how, when an art teacher allowed kids to play music, they played horrible music (our version of metal), as loudly as they could; about how he wouldn't allow talking in class, but I thought that was ridiculous, and needed to talk to keep my mind off the music; how he made me write a 500-word essay on why I shouldn't talk in art class; and how I wrote it all in one sentence, as mad as I was. I'm sure he noticed and graded me accordingly, and, in fact, I wasn't all that great an artist, but, I never took another art class; my career in art was effectively over, my junior year in high school.

Nowadays we're wondering if any high school students will walk out in protest of the fact that we actually aren't safe in these schools anymore. I work in three different ones in a small town in New Mexico, two middle schools and the high school, and I can assure you, we aren't safe anymore. Arming the teachers is not the solution. Paying them just a little bit more to carry guns is an even worse solution. I wouldn't even call them solutions.

So I'm subbing in this art class, and I told them to draw the space station uplink, which was an event that we had in our town yesterday, where students went to the high school, packed into the gym, got to talk by wireless to this astronaut, and basically learned a little about what it was like in space. I encouraged them to draw space, or the space station, or the guy, or whatever they wanted, or, I gave them the option of drawing a physical drawing of the middle school itself. Instead some drew tigers, which is the mascot. I said, why not put the tigers in space? I tried to encourage them to think creatively. Some, on the wild side, were more interested in being Jackson Pollock, and throwing the brush at the picture in order to splatter it with stars. They had the excuse to go a little over the edge, and I was, after all, a sub.

So I got through that experience ok, and went immediately out to the streets of this neighborhood, where I had duty as a crossing guard. This is an interesting experience because you suddenly relate to the whole neighborhood in a quite practical way, although everyone is on our side, and nobody is really trying to run the kids over. We're talking 11-13 year olds, though, and anything can happen.

This is actually a very nice neighborhood, not nice in the sense of rich, but nice in the sense that it has a lot of New-Mexico-type character, and these huge dramatic mountains look down upon the entire scene; it's very pretty. At one point a truck stopped to pick up a kid, and he had an enormous dog, which jumped out of the truck and kind of terrorized some middle-school girl. The owner came running after the dog, sure enough, but it was a little uncomfortable.

As a sub I get so sick of resistance, refusal to learn or do anything, bad attitude, disrespect, and just general badness, that sometimes I don't have a whole lot of sympathy. Trouble is, the victims are not the same as what I experience as the perpetrators in any given class of sub-breaking young punks. They're all just kids, and they don't really know from anything. I don't know if these particular ones really feel that they aren't safe, as I feel. I know that, further up in the high school, there are lots of malcontents. And many, if not most of them, have access to far worse weapons than just apathy, or whatever they're using on a daily basis.

Oh but here's what I was going to tell you. In my "prep" hour (an ironic term, since subs have nothing to "prep"), I do research on my ancestors, and I do this partly because I'm grieving my dad, who died recently, but I also do this because reading old puritan accounts of life in Boston in the 1600's is fascinating. I had this one, whom I'm named after, who actually wrote the document starting the first public school in the US. This would be Boston Latin School, and I can't say it was his idea; he was merely the notetaker, but nevertheless, he was right there when it all started. And I can't prove absolutely that I'm related to him; that's a story of infinite intrigue involving slippery characters in late-1600's Boston, who kept mistaking Mary for Sarah, and couldn't spell Phoebe, not to mention Leverett. Leverett itself is often spelled Leverit, Leveret, Leveritt or even Leuerett; thus making googling kind of infinite as well as intense. But there's a remarkable explosion of things on the internet these days which means basically that I can find a lot of stuff without even moving from my chair. And that's what I do with my art class "prep" hour.

Back to my point: the public schools are worth saving. My sub experience, I can take it or leave it, but public schools are the main thing we have. Some folks are out there, ready to trash the whole thing, but I'm not. I still kind of like the place. I tell them to turn off the music, but talking's ok. They can talk all they want.

posted by tom @ 8:13 PM