Tradition

I've wasted a lot of time over the nine years I've been teaching high school English, and I've spent even more time being told that everything I do in my profession is a waste of time. It is a tenet of teenage complaint that you don't need to learn anything after 8th grade, as that is where they stop teaching you basic skills and move on into "things you'll never need to know." Especially English. Everybody agrees you need English, because everyone has to read and write (And this is a sign of at least some wisdom and true progress from the prevailing opinion of a hundred years ago -- cf. Huckleberry Finn's father in Mark Twain's novel, who beats his son for trying to be smarter than his pa, when he learns that Huck has become literate.), but nobody thinks you need to learn to read Shakespeare.

And so, of all the days and weeks and months that I have spent teaching Shakespeare, quite a bit of it has been wasted time, has been little more than my voice ringing dully off of closed teenage ears as I explain and expound the text, and they think about what they're going to have for lunch. Even more time has been wasted arguing with students about ridiculous things, such as why they lost credit for turning in a paper late or why they have to go to the office when all they did was kick that kid that nobody likes anyway, or why I can't just give the whole class an A or why we can't just sit and do nothing for the class period, or why we have to read this book anyway -- why can't we just watch the movie? I argue with them anyway because I have been taught (and to a certain extent I believe) that it is important to validate and value these children and their opinions, their voices, their questions and curiosities and frustrations. I want them to be able to speak their minds, and get some kind of response from an adult, authority figure, even if it's only me. But it's still a waste of time, because I could be validating their opinions about Romeo and Juliet or The Grapes of Wrath or "anyone lived in a pretty how town." Instead I have to fight them to do every little thing the school asks of them, because they don't want to do it. And it's a waste of time, because forcing people to do something doesn't change them into people who will do it -- it just makes them do it around you. Ask a teenager if it's okay to break the law as long as they don't get caught, and then ask yourself if the time spent teaching that kid to obey and respect the law and rules and authority was time well spent, or if it was wasted time. Right. To some extent, that's all of school.

But when I think of wasted time, there are two days that come prominently to mind, like flashing neon letters on a hillside. At night. And the letters are on fire, and fireworks are going off all around them while an air raid siren wails and massive speakers play the 1812 Overture. I mean, they're really, really noticeable, these two days. Today was very nearly the third.

The first day was September 11th, 2001. It was a Tuesday, and I was teaching English at San Pasqual High School in Escondido. I had gotten up, showered, drunk coffee, smoked cigarettes, and -- I don't remember which -- either read a book or played a video game until it was time to go to school. I woke up my wife and kissed her goodbye, waved to the bunny and the iguana, and drove to work listening to music on my truck's tapedeck. When I got to school, I unlocked my classroom, dropped my bag and my coffee cup off at my desk, and headed to the office to use the restroom and check my mailbox. And one of my former students said, "Hey, Mr. Humphrey -- did you hear? A plane crashed into the Twin Towers."

When I got to the office, I found that he was right; the secretaries were crying as they watched the footage roll again and again -- it was 7:30am Pacific time, and the videotape of the second crash, the clear, stark image of the explosion as the jet hit the building, had been found and delivered to the news channels for mass consumption. My wife called on my classroom phone just as I got back to my room; my grandfather had been watching the news and had spread the word to all of the Humphreys (and to one DeBiasi, of course). I had a TV in my room at that school, and a cable feed, and for the first two class periods that day, we watched the news unfold; watched the towers burn, and then collapse, watched the planes hit again and again and again, watched the tiny black dots of bodies falling from the sky, watched the people on the ground with their gray-dust skin and pink tear-tracked cheeks as they looked up and asked the same question, again and again.

Then I had a prep period, and I spent it smoking and talking to Toni about what was happening. She told me that the schools in the area were closing, were sending students home to be with their families; partly to deal with grief, and partly because we were learning then that this was an intentional attack on the United States by terrorists, and nobody knew if there was going to be another attack, or if there were, where it would come -- but Southern California, home of Los Angeles and Hollywood and Disneyland, and the multiple military installations in and around San Diego County where we were, seemed like a logical choice, so people were scared.

Not our superintendent, though. No, the Escondido Union High School District stuck it out, to the bitter end of the school day. And so for the next two class periods I tried to get students to talk about the events of the day and how they felt about them. But the students had been doing that with different teachers since classes started at 7:30; they were tired of talking about their feelings, because their feelings hadn't changed, and wouldn't change: they were scared, and sad for the people who had died, and vaguely angry at whoever would do this but confused about why anyone would, or what we could do about it. They felt the way I felt, and the way everyone felt. And they wanted to go home. By the time my last class came in, the students were so sick of talking about the attack, and so tired of wondering why the school district hadn't sent us home -- they all knew that every surrounding town had canceled the remainder of the school day; Escondido was the only holdout in north San Diego County -- that they simply refused.

So I taught Antigone. While people died, and the military and emergency services personnel scrambled, and millions gathered with their friends and families around television sets to try to find something to understand, something to hold on to, I talked about ancient Greek drama. I have never felt more intensely that I was doing the wrong thing. I know they were tired of talking about the actual real life tragedy to the relative strangers in the classrooms, and perhaps I served as some small distraction from what was going on -- but it was still the wrong thing to do. I regret it.

The second day came four years later, after my wife and I had moved to St. Helens, Oregon. Once again, there was a threat, and the same resultant terror and incompetent reaction from the powers that be, and once again, I had to waste my time and everyone else's trying to teach in an environment where nobody could learn. But this time was a whole lot more stupid.

In November of 2005, on a Wednesday morning during club activity time, while I was playing Magic: The Gathering with my new Gaming Club, the fire alarm started blaring through the public address system. The students looked up at me skeptically. "Do we really have to leave?" I had heard nothing about a drill, so I treated it like the real thing. I jumped up and said, "Yes, everybody out, right now, go go go!" They moved slowly, of course, gathering up their things and walking out the door leading out of the building. We headed for the far side of the administration parking lot and commenced standing around.

We would stay there for two hours. We watched as the police and the administrators came and went, searching all of the buildings, walking along the roof, talking into walkie-talkies. They were looking for explosives, because some time the night before, somebody had called in a bomb threat; they had demanded money or an explosive device "in the air ducts" would detonate on the following day, Thursday. So we waited in the bitter cold, standing on dying grass without access to food, drink, or restrooms, until 10:00, when the day was finally canceled and all of the students went home. They had been sneaking away -- and in some cases, driving away while waving and yelling and honking horns, secure in their parents' approval of their departure and thus indifferent to the administration's insistence that nobody leave until dismissed -- for hours, but at 10:30 or so, we told them they were allowed to go, and we brought in the buses. The teachers gathered for a staff meeting, at which our new principal Brian told us that we would be expected to stay and treat this as a work day. This was the only time that I heard my colleague, Ron Barnett -- a man of consummate professionalism and eternal good cheer (Though I must admit that students who have been involved in the drama department that Ron runs have a different view of the man. But what the hell do students know?) -- lose his temper and raise his voice: he stood up and asked, "If it's too dangerous for the students to be here, why is it not too dangerous for the staff?" Maybe it was only my ears, but I thought the words "the fuck" between "why" and "is" were pretty clear, at least by implication. Brian fumbled the play (Forgive the sports metaphor; it is only too appropriate when describing the actions of Mr. Brian Heinze, a former gym teacher and athletic director who wasn't equipped to manage anything larger or more complicated than a locker room) and our superintendent, Patty Adams, stepped up and said simply, "Of course you will be allowed to go home if you don't wish to stay." She asked that we stay just long enough to look over our classrooms for suspicious packages, which we were not to touch but only inform the police about, and then we could go.

All fine and good. Though I find I am still bitter enough to mention one small incident: while we were standing out in the cold, and we were just hearing the rumors that there was a bomb in the building, one of my students came to me in a panic; she told me that her backpack was still inside the building, and it had her asthma inhaler, and she was desperate to get it back but she wasn't allowed inside. I told her not to worry, I would go get it, and I was escorted inside (by the superintendent, no less, who was new that year and whom I had never met), where I grabbed backpacks as quickly as I could and took them back outside. I only mention this incident because this girl doesn't have asthma. She does, however, smoke, drink, and use marijuana, and I am sure now that she was panicked because she thought her backpack might get searched and whatever illicit substance she had in it would be found and traced to her, and so she sent me into a building that might blow up so she wouldn't get in trouble. She didn't even say thank you when I gave it to her. She is currently repeating my class for the third time, and she has openly told me that she doesn't like me -- she considers herself honest and forthright, and like many teenagers, doesn't understand the difference between lying and tact. Whenever students ask me if I hate any of them, I always say that I've only known three students that I've actually hated (Though as an aside to this tangent, I have to note that the list has swelled to five in the last year, and may be longer before the end of this semester). She's on that list. I can't stand that bitch.

At any rate, the wasted day I wanted to describe was not that Wednesday morning; I understand keeping the students there while they searched the building, and even though it was cold, it was still only a couple of hours before they were released. No, the wasted day was the next day, Thursday -- the day the bomb was supposed to go off. The superintendent and the police were pretty sure at that point that the bomb threat was a hoax, but they had not yet caught the perpetrators, and they had found no device to defuse. So the logical thing to do would be to cancel school, not so? Apparently not. School was in session, but was made optional; anyone who wanted to stay home that day, could. Except for the staff, of course, who were required to show up and do their jobs; I don't doubt that Mr. Barnett had a little huddle with Coach Brian about it, but sadly, I was not there to watch the gory highlights.

This situation was made worse by the fact that on Monday and Tuesday of that week, my classes had finished their first major unit of study; we had been about to start the new unit on Wednesday and Thursday (For those who don't know, St. Helens High is on an A/B block schedule, so it takes two days to get through a single set of classes) of that week -- and for a final piece of the joke, there was no school on that Friday; it was either Veteran's Day or a work day, I don't remember. Wednesday was gone, Thursday would be a waste, and so I figured I'd start the new unit on Monday of the following week, and for once, I'd just let my classes relax (Again for those who don't know: I never do that. I don't show movies, I don't have parties, I never let them play Head's Up, Seven Up. When we're in class, we're working. It's a thing.). So when first period started on Thursday, and eight of my 27 students showed up, I handed out the information for the coming unit so they could get a head start on it, and then I put on a tape of The Simpsons.

Half an hour later, Coach Brian showed up at my room and asked to speak to me. He told me that one of my students had called home on a cellphone and asked his mother why he had to be in school today if all they were going to do was watch The Simpsons. This was clearly another salvo in an ongoing argument about mandatory school attendance, and so the mother, irate, had called the office and complained. Brian told me I had to turn off The Simpsons and teach English. So I did: we went over the project, and then we worked on vocabulary and grammar for the remainder of the period. When Monday rolled around -- with no explosion, of course; the threat had come from two teenagers, both students, both morons (obviously), and there had never been any bomb -- I went over the same material again, with the entire class. But at least that mother won her argument with her kid, because by God, we did schoolwork that day.

It was a complete waste of time.

Today, Friday, December 19, is the last day before our two-week Christmas Break. It is snowing. It has been snowing all week, and subsequently, we have had snow days: we had no school on Monday, a two-hour late start on Tuesday, and then no school on Wednesday and Thursday. It has been wonderfully relaxing, as it has meant I haven't had to see the students I hate, and haven't had to deal with antsy teenagers ready for vacation, and haven't had to try desperately to keep my heart from breaking as my students ignore and complain about and refuse to read (Because it's soooooo BOring!) one of my all-time favorite books, Fahrenheit 451. It has also meant that nobody has gotten into a fatal car accident with some idiot teenager driving too fast to school, or away from campus to get lunch, or trying to do donuts and drift around corners on the still-snowy roads, and it has meant that the staff haven't had to bust thirty kids an hour for throwing snowballs. It's been a good week, and I have felt very thankful that my job has such things as snow days -- and also thankful that I no longer live in Southern California any more. Though we did once get a week off because of wildfires -- man, that was sweet. Not really. It has also been a wonderful week for students, who have not had to rush through projects that teachers always insist get finished before Christmas break, and have not had to sit in cold classrooms in icy, uncomfortable desks, listening to teachers drone on and on about some bullshit that nobody ever wants to hear, but they still have to pay attention to because their parents insist they get good grades -- even if they don't learn anything useful, or even learn anything at all. Just as long as they ace the test. This week, everybody was spared, at least for three days.

But last night, they didn't call to cancel school (My district got a new autodialer this year, which calls every family in the district with emergency updates. And it's cool and all, but was this really a good way to spend money? What happened to watching the news, waiting with fingers crossed for them to get to your school? I grew up doing that. Nobody cares about the classics any more.). And it wasn't announced on the local news, or posted on the district website. All the way up to this morning, when I got up at 5:30 to see that the snow that had not melted from yesterday (we had 7 inches fall on Wednesday and Thursday, and then melt Thursday afternoon only to freeze into ice Thursday night) had been joined by the new snow that was falling, our superintendent, the same woman who walked me into a potentially explosive building, who let us go home that day only to make us come back the next, had been planning to have school. For the second day this week. The day before Christmas Break. When three of the other four school districts in the county had already canceled today's classes on Wednesday, when the forecast first called for heavy snow and icy conditions for the remainder of the week.

It was ridiculous. Who would think that students, or teachers, would be capable of doing any useful work today? I would understand asking people to go to school on a normal Friday even if the previous four days had been snow days; I would also understand having school today if conditions were good, if the snowfall had been light and all of it had melted away on Thursday. But today was not a normal school day, it was the last day before vacation. And last night, it was snowing. Only a little, but the road outside my window was white with snow and ice last night, before the temperature dropped. Why would anyone think that having school today would be a good idea? Why would anyone think there would be a point to insisting that students go in to school today? Why wouldn't someone do the nice thing, the Christmas-y thing, and call school off for the rest of the week Wednesday night, so that people could maybe get an early start on their vacations? No, our superintendent, who last year made teachers come in to school on a work day when this county was in the middle of the worst flood of the past decade, only so they could tell us to go back home because it wasn't safe to be driving (and we have a handful of teachers who commute thirty miles from Portland, let us not forget), our superintendent waited until 5:30 this morning to make the call. Now I have the day off -- which I am thankful for, by the way, and everyone who still has to go to work in this weather, I am truly sorry for you. Though you should try teaching grammar to a group of freshmen after their ADHD medicine has worn off before you get too self-righteous about how easy my job is compared to yours.

Today would have been a wasted day, and I resent that our superintendent didn't recognize that. I resent that she didn't recognize it when the day of the bomb threat was a wasted day. I am particularly resentful that the superintendent in Escondido didn't give us 9/11, that he wasted that day, of all days. But in talking about this last night and thinking about it this morning -- and let me tell you, my resentment pales in comparison to that of my wife, who is very protective of my well-being and my happiness, and who feels none of the guilt and compunctions I suffer from in regards to doing my duty and what is best for the children; she got rather irate, shall we say -- I realized something. These days are not special. While it would be more dangerous to ask people to go into school today in these conditions, it would be a waste of time to have school today regardless of the weather -- nobody can pay attention to math class on the day before vacation, especially not at my school, when half of this last school day of the calendar year is taken up by Winter Festival, a 90-minute pep rally featuring not only skits but also song-and-dance routines from each of the four classes and the staff, and the cheerleaders, AND the dance team; it's like the Sonny and Cher show, but with less talent and charisma and far worse production values.

But here's the real point: this resentment that I feel is how students feel every single day. The circumstances today were more extreme, and so they highlighted the issue, but the underlying problem is the same: we don't give the students what they want, we give them what we tell them they need, and they don't take it, because they don't want it. Even if this were a regular Friday, it would be a waste of time to force people to go to school who don't want to be there, because even if they go, they will either sleep or ignore the classwork in order to do what they prefer doing -- play video games or flirt with other kids or get stoned and space out. Even if today were Tuesday, it would be a waste of time to force people to sit in class and learn something they see no value in learning, because they don't learn it. Not even a little bit, not even by osmosis. And time is wasted in trying, time and energy and money, and nothing is gained by it. Nothing but some good approval ratings for our politicians, who can point to how hard the schools are working, as if effort without results were enough in life. Nothing but some free day care for parents, who, if they don't have relatives or friends or neighbors who could watch their kids while they worked, could certainly afford to pay for day care -- and shouldn't need to by the time their kids are high school age and become my students -- if they didn't have to shove so much money into the schools, building new buildings and hiring new teachers and paying six figures for a superintendent who won't give them a couple of days off for extra vacation when there is snow on the ground a week before Christmas.

I believe in education. I like my job, I like doing it and I like what it stands for. The one thing I don't like about my job is that too much of it is not spent doing what I believe in. I am perhaps one-third educator; the other two-thirds of my working life are spent dealing with, not the three R's, but the three B's: bureaucracy, behavior, and bullshit. And most of these things are brought on me, and on every educator and every student and every parent, as well, not because they are the natural and unavoidable consequences of our modern society, like taxes, say, or telephone poles and electric wires and cancer (not that those things are related, of course), but because they are the unavoidable consequences of the stupid way we do things. Like the fact that education is mandatory, but those who are the recipients of that education do not get any control over what they learn -- the closest thing in our society to taxation without representation, which I thought was, y'know, kinda bad. They are forced to waste their time -- years of their lives -- doing things they don't want to do, and which will bring them no value whatsoever because they won't learn what they don't want. We all did this. I remember those bloody stupid art projects we did in elementary school. I remember having to climb the rope in gym class. I remember the time I had to spend doing other people's work because we were doing a group project, and the morons I got saddled with were too lazy to do anything and I was the only one who didn't want to get an F. Why was I forced to do this? What value did it give me? Did it help me make friends? Of course not; I was (am) a nerd. Working in a group with nerds does not make the cool kids like us, or us them. Did it help me learn to work with others? Not really; a few group things I did in college made some headway with that, but for the most part, I learned to work with others by working with others -- y'know, at work. And really, I have never learned to work well with others, but that's okay, because my nature is that of an artist, and we can't really work with anyone, ever. Nobody gets to write my books but me, and that's the way I like it. So what was the point? Even worse, what was the point of the years I spent doing things I don't remember at all?

It's a question that could be asked about a thousand artifacts of our education system, and that does get asked by millions of children, and adults, every single day. What's the point? And the answer, of course, is this: if you are asking the question, then there isn't any.

There isn't any point to forcing students to read Shakespeare if they don't want to. They don't learn it -- believe me. There isn't any point to forcing people to get to class before the tardy bell rings, or to sit quietly in their desks for 90 minutes, or to wait for the bell to ring before they leave; if these people are not interested in showing up on time and staying quietly until the end of the period, then school does not make them do it. They fight against it, every period, every day, every year until they graduate -- and then they show up late for work until they get fired, and then they show up late for their unemployment check. There isn't any point to forcing people to attend school Monday through Friday, from 8:20 to 3:05, 185 days a year with two weeks off at Christmas, a week off at Easter, and three months off in summer; people are ready to learn when they are ready to learn, and not when they are not, and the schedule of classes has absolutely no influence on that.

So why do we still do things this way? Why do we have compulsory attendance and required subjects and bell schedules and desks and chalkboards and textbooks and mandatory assessments? They don't work for those who don't want them to work, so why do we have them?

The only answer is, because we always have. In our past, people have taken from education what they wanted, and discarded what they did not, and what they have discarded, they have forgotten about -- naturally. And the people who are in charge of schooling today tend to be the ones who took the most out of their own schooling, because they wanted the most out of school, and so they got the most, and so they liked school -- and they want to give others the same things that were given them. And so we try to do that, and when our offerings are ignored or thrown back into our faces, because students today do not want the same things we wanted, or our parents wanted, or our grandparents wanted, we assume that these students are bad students. And we stop asking them to do what we want them to do, and we start telling them they have to do it, and then we start punishing them when they don't.

And we wonder why they don't do it, and why they rebel, and why they fail. And we wonder what's gone wrong with our schools.

And we keep wasting time.


I know why my superintendent didn't want to call off school today. I bet she wanted to give the kindergarteners a chance to put on their Christmas pageant, because even though some of those kids will be emotionally scarred by having to dress up like a snowflake and flubbing their lines in front of their entire family, she loved being in a pageant when she was in school, and she loved watching her kids in pageants. She wanted to see all those cute little kids dressed up like angels and animals and the three wise men -- oh wait, no, we can't do Nativity scenes any more. We have no right to force religion on students who don't believe the same things that we believe.

Shut up and do your math homework. It's important that you learn algebra.