Those Who Give

The New York City Board of Education was involved in a major recruiting drive to fill vacancies after having laid off 15,000 teachers five years earlier. The insolvent Boston school system was completing the year under court order. In the Logan Heights section of San Diego, 18 miles from the Mexican border, high school students were receiving "paper credit" amounting to twenty-five cents to attend six periods a day, not to exceed five dollars a month. The ninth grade president said, "I definitely think they should keep the program, but I guess they should, like, make it up to fifty cents. Some kids are getting just a little tired of twenty-five cents." The school principal cited the high cost of truancy in his defense of the program, which was described by a multitude of critics as quackery, bribery, blasphemy, and brilliance. The principal was called realist, idealist, and mountebank.

There was also a "new" trend, a "new" force in school districts advocating that special programs be established for gifted and talented children. The "new" task forces were insisting that removing gifted students from classes for extra attention in supplemental areas was the best way to adequately challenge those students. Furthermore, they advocated in-service training to indoctrinate teachers into accepting such pull-out programs. Classroom teachers were not skilled enough to handle the needs of gifted children, they needed in-service training in order to understand how pull-out programs worked so that they might support those programs.

That one made Alyssa Matthews see red and curse a blue streak. "If they take these kids out of classes for one more goddam reason, I'm going to start running a Film Festival all year," she told Jean. "They can take their rotten in-service training and stick it where it doesn't fit! Now we're not capable of teaching gifted kids! I used to get work out of gifted kids that these people wouldn't even understand. I know how to challenge gifted students, I did it for years with terrific results. Now one set of bastards has made it impossible for me to do it, and another set wants to farm out my job! Son-of-a-bitch. I'd like nothing better than to be able to take care of my own gifted students! What the hell is wrong with these people? Why doesn't somebody advocate some new programs that will let us teach again? Son-of-a-bitch. I've got kids who could have done great things this year if I had had the time and energy to challenge them. Christ, Jean, look at what happened to you. Where the hell is it all leading? Are we eventually going to be so involved with tracking down truants, keeping attendance records, and monitoring, that we won't be able to care about teaching at all anymore? Will we be using the same plan book year after year? That's what they're doing to us!"

She popped her cork often during May, 1981, but she spewed molten lava one day when she was alone in the faculty room. It was during sixth period, Jean was running errands, and Alyssa was leafing through a newspaper left by someone earlier in the day. When she saw the illustration, she was immediately offended; when she read the words, she was repulsed. It was as heinous a condemnation as she had ever seen, an insult not only to teachers but to students as well. The cartoon showed a big-nosed, droopy-eyed, long-faced student dressed in graduation gown and mortarboard. The question was: ALTHOUGH THE STUDENT PASSED EVERY COURSE WHAT DID THE TEACHERS FAIL TO DO? The answer was: FILL IN THE BLANK. And the blank was a dotted line running into one oversized ear and out the other.

She said nothing to Jean about the cartoon, she closed her mind to it, because, in the midst of the molten lava, one thought surfaced: Get used to it. Get used to it. Get used to it. Or get out.