Chapter One
August & September 1994
On bad days I drove home thinking that if given a choice between combat in Vietnam and teaching, I’d take Vietnam. At least over there you carried a weapon for defense and could shoot your adversaries.
I knew a teacher that carried a concealed weapon. She would have been fired if administration had found out. This teacher’s husband was a police officer. He taught her how to use it and encouraged her to carry it for safety. He worked the streets. He knew how crazy it could be. She kept that small automatic in her purse locked in a file cabinet in her classroom. The teachers she trusted knew about it.
Even the campus police weren’t allowed to carry fire arms. The district seemed more worried about the possibility of an accident with a weapon and the resulting media coverage and law suits than the death or beating of a teacher or campus officer. When gang fights broke out at lunch, campus police, teachers and administrators had to wade into the mass of flailing bodies to stop the violence.
After one lunch brawl, a campus police officer chased the gang banger that started the fight off campus and down the street. When the officer returned, he said the kid stopped half-a-block from campus and pulled a pistol from the pocket of his baggy pants. The kid pointed the weapon at the officer and smiled. The unarmed officer retreated. Another skirmish lost.
I read a statistic in a newspaper that an average of five thousand teachers a year end in hospital emergency because of students attacking them in the classroom. A teacher at our school was knocked out. Two weeks later the same girl that knocked her teacher out farted in my face. She lifted her leg like a dog and let go with a loud one to voice her opinion of my writing a referral for her being thirty minutes tardy to class for the sixth time.
I was threatened in class at least once a year. “What would you do if we jumped you?”
My response, “I don’t fight. The Marine Corps trained me to kill. The first kid that throws a punch at me is going to be dead. I figure I’ve got nothing to lose if a gang is jumping me.”
The standard response, “You can’t do that.” I didn’t smile.
There was a rumor spread by students that I had a ‘flashback’ in the classroom once. Every year, a kid asked if it was true. I said I didn’t remember. That was a lie. I remembered all of my ‘flashbacks’. They took place at night. Not in the classroom. I am a combat veteran. I have PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I hear and see things in the dark that take me back to 1966.
My favorite weapon is the U.S.M.C. fighting knife, the KA-BAR. It has a seven inch blade and is a silent killer. It doesn’t give away your position when you use it. I have a couple of them stashed around the house.
Right now some parent reading this is probably thinking this guy is crazy. He should have never been allowed around our kids. I got news for you. I left teaching more than two years ago. No one, including myself, ever got beat up or hurt by me or another student while I was in the class room. I survived thirty years. Half of the new teachers that enter the profession are gone within three years and they never come back. We had one teacher last until lunch before he quit.
I’ve known other teachers working in other school districts in Southern California. I knew one teacher that taught in Canada. He told me that Canada had the same problems America has. After hearing some of his stories, it may be worse up north. All of the teachers I knew had horror stories to tell. What I’m writing is not unique— not in cities like Los Angeles and the surrounding suburbs. There are over a hundred thousand gang members in Los Angeles. The LA Police Department only has about ten thousand officers. This is the way it is in most of America’s cities.
I never carried a weapon with me to school. I didn’t want to take the chance I’d lose my job or go to jail. That was the only reason.
Students were caught every year with knives and even an occasional pistol. I caught a kid carrying a sword cane on Halloween. That hollow cane was part of his costume. The sword hidden inside the cane was eighteen inches long. I recognized the cane when he walked into class. It’s a felony in California to carry one in public. After the police picked him up, he spend a few days locked in juvie before his mother managed to bail him out. Since he had to go to court, it would be weeks before he returned to school. The sad thing is that he was a good kid. I felt bad taking that sword from him and turning it over to the campus police. However, there was nothing else I could do. There were thirty-six witnesses in that class when I unscrewed the handle and pulled the sword out.
That ‘flashback’ rumor probably started due to an incident that happened early in my career when I was teaching seventh grade English. It took place in my third or fourth year.
Thinking about that ’flashback’ rumor reminded me of the ditto machines. Back then, there weren’t enough textbooks to go around, so I made my own worksheets. Every night, after correcting papers for several hours, I sat at the kitchen table and printed the master worksheets and quizzes by hand. My handwriting was horrible so I had no choice. Printing for me is a painstaking process. We didn’t have copy machines yet. We had a ditto machine. and the fluid stained my fingers purple.
The other teachers in my building called me ‘Mr. Ditto’. At the end of that year, the stack of ditto masters was as tall as me.
Anyway, back to the incident that probably started the ‘flashback’ rumor. This boy was talking to a friend at the back of the room while I was giving instructions to the class about an assignment. The two boys were sitting at least thirty feet apart.
“I’m not talking,” the student replied when I told him to stop.
He must have been deaf not to hear his own voice. “If I hear one more word out of you, you’re going to the office.”
“You can’t make me go,” he said. He turned his eyes away from me and resumed his loud conversation with the other kid sitting in the opposite corner of the room.
“Okay, you’re out of here.” I reached for a referral.
“I didn’t do anything,” he responded and leaped out of his seat. “You don’t like me.” At least that was true.
He locked eyes with me and bunched his hands into fists. My anger got the better of me, and I charged shoving desks aside with students still sitting in them as I made a straight line to reach this non-talking kid with the loud mouth. I stopped halfway there realizing that I’d lose my job if I ripped his head off. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in jail.
Oh man, did I regret turning around. My hands ached to get hold of his neck.
It was a long way to the intercom. Once this kid realized what was going to happen, he sauntered to his friend’s desk and sat on it to continue the conversation. Eventually, ten or fifteen minutes later, the campus police officer arrived and escorted that defiant mouth out of my room. I had a difficult time getting to sleep that night. There would be many sleepless nights over the years.
This kid wasn’t tough. He only had a big mouth. The toughest kid I taught during those thirty years was one of the quiet ones. He was polite and never confronted me in the classroom. He didn’t do any work either. As a matter of fact, I didn’t hear him talk until the school year was almost over. By the time he was thirteen, he’d killed seven rival gang members and had a thousand dollar bounty on his head. He told me he expected to be dead before he reached eighteen. During my last year of teaching, I heard he’d survived, was married and had kids. He had this laugh that sounded like Goofy the cartoon character.
Goofy was in my second period. The room I taught in faced a hillside. At the top of the hill was the street. There was no fence. A half dozen rival gang members came down that hill on a Tuesday. They had bats. They were going to walk into my room and drag Goofy out so they could beat him to death. They planned to use the bats on me if I attempted to stop them. Mr. M, a big African American math teacher, probably saved me from a few broken bones. He was also a friend. He was on his planning period when he saw this group headed toward my classroom. He stopped them and was fascinated with one of the bats. He stood close enough to smell the alcohol on their breaths.
“Wow,” he said, “that reminds me of my Little League Days. I used to have one just like it. Can I see it?” He held his hand out. Once he had that bat, he swung it at them and chased them off campus. A few yards away inside my classroom, I was starting a lesson on the parts-of-speech and had no idea what was going on outside.
The next day the defiant mouth was back in class acting as if nothing had happened. He didn’t challenge me again. He also never brought a textbook or did any class work. Day after day, he sat there and filled one piece of paper after another with gang signs.
“As long as you’re writing, you might as well do an assignment once-in-a-while,” I said.
He ignored me. When the class ended, he carefully put each piece of paper inside his binder as if they were gold. As long as he didn’t disrupt the class, I let him stay. The office had far too many to deal with that had to be removed from classes so teachers could teach. I tried to call the parents but all of the listed phone numbers on the family contact card were disconnected.
That school had a tough principal. His name was Ralph Pagan (real name). He was a Korean War Veteran and after thirty years of teaching I can look back and see that he was the best darn principal I ever worked with. Several of the teachers on that campus were combat veterans like me. Pagan hired all of us.
NOTE: posted up to here for Storymash on 6-14-08
* * * *
Most of the time, the first couple of weeks of school are like a honeymoon. The kids are quiet as they learn that the teacher isn’t going to eat them. Once the kids learned that I wasn’t Dracula or Frankenstein, they came out of the closet.
For me, the school year started more than a month early, and during that time, I worked for free. Teachers are paid a monthly salary starting at the end of September and running to the end of June. Ten paydays. Some districts divide the salary into twelve checks. It doesn’t matter how many hours you work, the money stays the same. True, coaches and advisors like me are paid a stipend for the extra duty but the stipend, if you divided the extra hours worked into the amount, usually came to several cents an hour before tax.
* * * *
The new classroom was a mess. The desks, tables and chairs were piled on top of each other and pushed to one side. This wasn’t how I had left the room a few days earlier after everything was moved from the old to the new.
The room really wasn’t new. The portable classroom with the bulging floor and dead cats was new compared to this thirty or forty year old brick building with the almost flat roof. What counted was that it was new to me. It was the first real classroom I had taught out of since transferring to the high school in 1989. During my first year, I had been assigned to more than one room and was constantly on the move. It was during my second year that I ended in that windowless dungeon next to the chain link fence and the street. That portable classroom had heat and an air conditioner but using them meant the students couldn’t hear me, and I couldn’t hear them unless I walked to the kid’s desk and knelt down. If the kid was soft spoken, forget about it.
I found out the reason for the mess was that the new room didn’t get its ‘deep cleaning’ until after I moved in. That’s the word they used— deep cleaning. All the furniture was stacked up and moved to one side. They could have at least put it back.
Before they ‘deep cleaned’, I had picked up the paper airplanes and spit wads and wadded paper that littered the floor before I vacuumed. The ceiling was cluttered with miniature paper cones that kids had stuck pins in before tossing them to stick in the soft acoustic ceiling tiles. Some of the ceiling tiles were brown and warped from water stains. Other tiles had cracks or pieces were missing. The bulletin boards were covered in graffiti.
The previous teacher retired after more than thirty-eight years in that classroom. He died of cancer within two years. It doesn’t seem fair.
Once the rainy season arrived, I would need more trashcans to catch the water from the leaking roof. Some of the leaks were above the new journalism computers at the back of the room. I bought a package of thin, plastic painters tarps at Home Depot to protect the computers from water damage. There were days when it rained so hard that sections of the floor turned squishy like a saturated sponge.
Even after the ‘deep cleaning’, the carpet looked old and threadbare. Dark spots where gum had been ground into the fibers stood out like dark and evil patches of skin cancer. Before the first day of school, I crawled around using ice and a single edged razor blade to break up and scrape off those dark blotches of gum from the carpet. The bottoms of the desks were worse. I scraped the desks clean too. After school started, it wouldn’t take long for the kids to put the gum back. Keeping the gum out of that carpet and off the bottoms of the desks would turn out to be a year long duel. When ever I caught a kid chewing gum, the penalty was either a Saturday detention that lasted six hours or thirty piece of gum scraped off the bottoms of the desks or from the sidewalk outside the room.
It wasn’t like I allowed kids to chew gum, eat candy or drink sodas. They did it when my back was turned or when I wasn’t looking. Occasionally I caught one and sometimes there would be a verbal battle filled with threats and complaints— not from me. I can cuss like a Marine, but I respect the classroom environment.
“Wait until my mother hears you threw my Coke into the trash. You owe me a dollar.” It didn’t matter that there was a large sign on each wall that said coke and candy along with gum were against the rules. Don’t bring them to class.
“Is this the teacher that can’t keep the kids quiet?” a mother said on parent conference night. “Oh no, Mom. Not him. His room is like a church.”
This kid’s family must have attended a noisy church. Either that, or the other classrooms were like the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. In my class, we had endless skirmishes. I know that the teacher across the hall from my room had two hearing aids and he turned them off in class.
* * * *
The previous year, the year of drive by shootings, had been my first as the school’s journalism advisor. Even though my BA was in journalism and I had looked forward with enthusiasm to the change, that year turned out to be almost a death sentence, a true trial with fire. It would have been easier to walk across a bed of red hot coals in my naked feet.
The senior editors I inherited from the previous advisor ran an overt and covert operation against my style of teaching and advising. I expected everyone to meet the assigned deadlines and write according to what I had learned at the university of Fresno where I earned my degree.
These seniors didn’t like my way of doing things by the book. One afternoon after school when they couldn’t stand me and the journalistic standards I wanted them to follow, they stormed out in a pack and went to the councilor’s office to complain.
To my relief, the principal supported me. At the final confrontation there were two of us and a dozen of them. The principal and I were at the front of the room while they sat close together with their arms crossed at the back. There wasn’t a smile in the room. If the look in their eyes had been weapons, the two of us would have been shot full of holes.
“If you don’t like to work with me as your advisor, the principal has agreed to allow you to drop the class. If you decide to stay, this newspaper will be run professionally. Since I’m the one that has a degree in journalism, think of me as a benevolent dictator.” Only one of the seniors quit. I had been worried. If they had all quit, I had seven underclassmen to keep the paper going and only one of them knew how to work the computer programs. That person was Jia, the future editor-in-chief. The eight page newspaper would have turned into two to four pages.
After that meeting, the senior editors sort of put up with me. It was an uneasy truce that didn’t end until graduation.
The editors in the classroom that night last June when the shotgun blast interrupted the work on the last issue of 1994 were the new editors, the seven undergraduates.
The final edition of the school paper had two sections— the senior section and the section the freshmen, sophomores and juniors put together. With Jia Mingmei as the new editor-in-chief, I was hoping the 94-95 school year would be like a cool breeze after a hot day. I felt like a kid before Christmas morning full of anticipation. I had a new classroom in a real building and a new editor-in-chief that talked nice and actually smiled. Imagine how nice that was after four periods of skirmishes in ninth grade English. For one period a day, I was a teacher.
Training the new staff started on July 25, earlier than expected. When Jia called and told me she wanted more time to instruct her staff properly and introduce them to the new textbook that this year’s editors had selected over the summer, I agreed. We met in the dungeon with the bulging floor since the new room wasn’t ready. There were thirty new staff members not counting the seven editors.
Last year those seven had all been reporters. Half of the new staff had been recruited out of my four ninth grade English classes by me. I had selected the best. Every class I taught had a few good kids. The other English teachers had also been asked to recommend students. Some had been recruited by the seven veterans. We had one goal and that was to build a strong, hard working, dependable and skilled staff that could be depended on. Every applicant was interviewed by Jia and the other six veterans. Jia even assigned a timed news piece to evaluate their writing skills. Some applicants were turned away. We started the new school year with about thirty new reporters.
The word would get out that the school newspaper was not a kick-back, party class designed to boost shallow self-esteem and make kids feel good. We did not support slackers and for the next few years there would be more ‘A’ students wanting into journalism than we had room for. The room could hold only so many bodies.
This journalism class was going against the popular self-esteem movement of the time. We’d get away with it for about five years until a new principal arrived, a man I would nickname ‘Hitler’. In 1994, the war to come was years away.
When that day arrived, it would involve the Teachers Union, the ACLU, the Student Law Press Center, and the media supporting the school newspaper. The attorney for the district would stand behind ‘Hitler’ who was supported by District Administration until the issue became so hot that an elected school board member had to step in and put a stop to the carnage that destroyed an award winning high school newspaper. In the end, ‘Hitler’ lost his job. The newspaper lost too. There would be no survivors. Everyone involved would walk away wounded.
* * * *
Jia worked with the staff until 5:30 pm on August 4. Over the previous two weeks, she’d put me to work training small groups how to size a story so it would fit into the column inches assigned. If a story was to run fifteen column inches on paper, it could only be so long and no longer. If it was too short, it would have to be rewritten until it was long enough to fill the space. There was one rule Jia and the other editors were adamant about. Passive verbs were not allowed. I didn’t come up with that rule. They did.
On the last day of training, I asked for volunteers to help me move the furniture from the old classroom. Most of the editors said they would be there. Some of the reporters agreed too.
Only two of the volunteers showed up moving day. David and Bobby, one of the new reporters. David had been on the staff the previous year. With their help, along with a few custodians, the move took place. Since the air conditioning was turned off, it was hot and miserable with the temperature flirting with a hundred.
To save money the school district controlled the air conditioning from the main office on the other side of the 60 Freeway. The thermostat that cooled the district office was set at 78 degrees. On the other hand, the school’s air conditioning was turned off. Why waste electricity? After all, most of the people working on campus were only teachers like me and the office staff.
Whenever I visited the district office, I always admired the carpeting that looked as if it had just been installed. There wasn’t one black patch of gum ground into the fibers. When I attended a meeting one afternoon, I looked.
Back at the high school later in the afternoon, that new classroom was hotter than it was outside where the temperature was tickling one hundred and two degrees. When school opened in a week, I had to be ready. The room had windows but there was no way to open them. They were painted shut. The only opening was the one door. That room was an oven.
Teacher orientation was scheduled in the mornings when it was cool. Due to a rare, three year accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, the meetings ran longer than usual. That meant working late until six or later each day to get ready for Tuesday, September 6.
* * * *
I hate bells.
My fifth period ninth grade English class walked in quietly the first day of school. It was right after the half hour lunch. Many of the students had a liquid lunch that was usually a sixty ounce soda with maybe a bag of greasy French fries. The district made a nice profit from sodas.
The first assignment was to copy the classroom rules displayed on the white board with the help of an overhead projector. The principal said we were to have ten rules, no more. “Keep it simple,” he instructed his staff, “so your students will have an easier time remembering how to conduct themselves in your classroom.”
After going over the rules and having the students copy them, I opened for questions.
“Do you make us do book reports?” Edmund asked.
“Yes.”
“How many do we have to do?” LaTanya asked without raising her hand. Raising a hand before asking a question was one of the rules they had just copied. I ignored her and nodded at another student that had his hand up.
“Hey, I asked first ,” LaTanya protested. I walked to the poster on the wall at the front of the room where the rules were written. There were four posters, one on each wall. I pointed at the number that said to raise your hand and wait to be recognized before asking a question.
“So!” she said. I reached for a referral. She made a face and stuck her hand in the air.
I turned to the boy. “How many book reports?” he asked. I heard LaTanya snort like a bull. I still had the blank referral in my hand.
“Four a semester,” I replied. “Eight for the entire school year.”
“That’s too many,” LaTanya said. It didn’t take a Sherlock to see to see that LaTanya was going to be a charm to work with.
Jennifer stuck her hand in the air. I looked at her and nodded. “What if we ain’t going to college?” she said.
“That doesn’t matter,” I replied. “This is a college prep class and some of you might not want to go to college but will change your mind later. That’s enough questions for now.” I turned to the overhead and switched it back on. “You are going to answer a ten question quiz testing your knowledge of the rules you copied. The answers will be multiple choice. Number from one to ten and write the letter for the correct answer behind the matching number. You can use your notes. The quiz is due before the bell.” I put the transparency on the glowing glass, and the questions appeared on the white board.
“You really are crazy like they say,” La Tanya said. “We can’t finish all that with the time that’s left.”
I looked at the clock. Twenty minutes remained. I noticed that one of the quiet students was already finished.
LaTanya was chewing gum. It was one of the rules. No chewing gum. I thought of all the gum I had scraped off the carpet and off the bottoms of the desks. I picked up the trash can next to my desk and walked over to her desk. I knelt down so we were face to face. “Get rid of the gum,” I said in a low voice.
“I ain’t got no gum,” she replied, and kept chewing.
I could see the white lump in her mouth flopping around between her teeth. She was a lousy liar. I went to my desk for a referral. “Unless you spit that gum in the trash right now, LaTanya, I’m going to assign you a one hour detention after school tomorrow.”
“I don’t have it in my mouth no more,” she said. “I swallowed it.”
“How can you swallow something you told me wasn’t there? You proved with your own words that you lied to me. Now you have two hours of detention.” She started to open her mouth to say something. I would have walked on shattered glass in my bare feet to see her gone for good.
After teaching for almost twenty years, I’d worked with at least four thousand students. There were students like LaTanya every year. Most of the time I never met the parent or parents. It didn’t matter how many referrals I wrote or how many failing grades went on the report card. On parent conference night, most of the parents that came had kids that were earning passing grades.
When I did meet a ‘LaTanya’ parent, she was usually combative and accused me of picking on her kid. The ‘LaTanya’ parent would claim that I was the first teacher to have trouble with her angel.
La Tanya’s accumulated records since kindergarten said otherwise. I always checked the records before a parent conference with a ‘LaTanya’ parent.
It helped to make a few phone calls to the kids other teachers. Eventually, the ‘LaTanya’ parent demanded that her ‘picked on angel’ be transferred to another teacher. Administration almost ‘always’ cooperated. After all, the law favored the parent. That was okay with me but not for the teacher that inherited a LaTanya. Sooner or later the other teacher complained. Two years later, LaTanya would be caught in the restroom bent over a toilet having sex with the boy standing behind her. Her mother called the principal a liar and said her daughter would never do anything like that.
Mr. O’Conner, a veteran with more than forty years in the classroom, stood up for me once during an English department meeting. “If you enforced the rules and wrote referrals like Lofthouse does, you wouldn’t get stuck with the kids that are moved out of his room.”
Mr. D, our half teacher, half administrator, handled the in-house suspensions and after school detentions. He said that five percent of the kids earned more than ninety percent of the twenty thousand or more referrals written each year. The student population was about three thousand. That meant that each of those hundred and fifty kids earned on average a hundred and thirty referrals a year. I wonder what a judge would do to a guy that got that many speeding tickets in a year?
I turned to the class, ignoring LaTanya. “How many plan to attend college?”
Half of the students stuck their hands in the air. LaTanya and Edmund were among them. Jennifer was not. At least she was honest.
I should have asked, ‘How many plan to go to college to work hard, read hundreds of textbooks, and write thousands of pages of notes until your hand cramps, so you can graduate and get a high paying job?’
Thanks to Hollywood movies, I suspected most of these kids thought College was a paid vacation.
* * * *
Sixth period was journalism. That’s when I found out our opinion editor had quit to join band.
“What do you want to do about the editorial position?” I asked Jia.
“I don’t want to do anything right now,” she relied. “I’ll do the opinion page myself.”
“That means you have two jobs. How many honors classes are you in?”
“Five,” she replied. “I don’t mind. I was the opinion editor last year. I liked doing opinion. I can handle it.”
I wished I could have cloned her.
After school ended, I stopped by the office to check my mail. There was an envelope from ‘Quill and Scroll’, the official journalism society for high schools and colleges. They were headquartered at the University of Iowa. I had entered last year’s school newspaper for an evaluation. The entry form had been twenty-eight pages long.
I opened the envelope. Last year’s paper had been earned nine hundred out of a thousand possible points for a first place international award. There was only one award higher. The Gallup Award.
