Peter Scotchmer’s fictional story of an administrator straying into matters she doesn’t understand may be too close to reality for those committed to following the latest fad of the day.
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Geoff Carter, a veteran teacher of thirty years’ standing, tried hard to win over the troubled students in his Grade 10 remedial English class, now euphemistically known as ‘Effective Communications II.’ Some he could cajole into a semblance of industry with his characteristic rough humour, but most remained either sullenly defiant or detached to the point of indifference to language structure and grammar rules, until Geoff supplemented grammar with stories of his own choosing. Widely read himself, and not without sympathy for their plight as hostages of compulsory education, Geoff read aloud to them the usual stories of alienation, adolescent and otherwise, by Sillitoe, Steinbeck and others, leavening these with lighter fare such as Ten-Minute Mysteries, comic stories of various kinds, print bloopers from Richard Lederer’s anthologies, and real-life adventure stories from Reader’s Digest and elsewhere. If hardened criminals in the Soviet gulags could privilege a talented storyteller, reducing even the most unregenerate offender to tears or laughter, Carter thought stories they could relate to would work on his reluctant learners, and he was right. The class appreciated his efforts, especially when he acted dramatic stories out, and put on funny voices. They were attentive and engaged during the reading of these, and, even better, accepted the need to work on their grammar and usage more readily than was the case before these stories became the highlight of each English class. Only Jake Mallette, sixteen and glowering with restlessness, was immune to their appeal.
Once Geoff read them an affecting short memoir about a young boy’s bitter discovery that a long, golden summer ended because all things had to come to an end, even the good times. He noted the air of subdued thoughtfulness that had settled over the class at the end of the story, and saw with satisfaction flighty Rita May dab her eyes with a balled-up tissue. It had clearly struck close to home.
‘That’s not true! Fun can go on forever! You can have fun and do what you want. I do! It doesn’t have to end!’
Jake Mallette’s outburst first shocked the class, and then sparked a clamour of disagreement. Most of them, like Jake himself, lived at the blunt end of life. Most were the sons and daughters of put-upon service industry workers, eking out uncertain futures on the minimum wage along the sprawling city of Scarborough’s unending suburban wasteland, a hideous neon fringe of brutal concrete apartment blocks, used-car lots, fast food chain eateries, gas bars and all-night convenience stores. Their diets were unhealthy, their bored and lonely home lives punctuated by domestic discord exacerbated by parental unemployment or irregular shift-work routines, and their imaginations stunted by violent videos and mindless computer games. Few read; most prowled, some played the lottery with forlorn hopes of an imminent ‘big win,’ and many hung listlessly around the largest neighbourhood shopping mall. Unwanted pregnancy, single parenthood, “juvie,” juvenile court, or days spent in idle monotonous leisure watching game shows on TV were too often the unintended consequences of the fun that Jake had in mind, and his fellow-students knew it. They and their brothers and sisters lived it. The bell ended a mild uproar. It had been a productive use of class time.
Not long after this episode, Carter was summoned to the Principal’s office. This was unusual. The Principal, it was widely known, played favourites, and avoided those like Geoff who kept themselves to their classrooms and did not spread gossip or rumour. He, like them, was not on a first-name basis with the Principal, nor intimate with her cronies.
Jake had pulled a knife on another student in the smoking area and had had to be suspended. In view of his history of such flare-ups, the Principal, Mariana Trench, could not revoke his sentence, although, she assured Geoff when he appeared, that she had laboured mightily on Jake’s behalf to change the official mind. Jake, she insisted, should be back in school. Geoff listened attentively, suspecting that the real reason for his summons was the lingering difference between them over his ‘Eff. Com.’ class average, so low, the Principal had maintained, as to be injurious to the students’ collective ‘self-esteem.’ Geoff asked politely what Jake’s misbehaviour had to do with him.
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‘Don’t you care about what happens to one of your students?’ Ms. Trench glared.
‘All of them,’ came Geoff’s prompt reply. ‘And all of his teachers, too. Am I especially favoured here, or are you conducting solo interviews with my colleagues as well?’
She ignored the insinuation, resorting to a familiar line of attack: ‘He told me you didn’t like him. He said you didn’t believe in fun. He said all you do in class is read stories.’ The tone was unabashedly accusatory; the last word nakedly scornful.
‘Were those his words or yours?” Geoff countered, unfazed, suspecting an untruth.
‘I believe that’s what he meant.’
A pause. Then, mildly, Geoff’s rejoinder,
‘In our system of justice, a defendant has the right to face his accuser.’
‘That won’t happen. He’s not allowed on school property.’ A note of triumph was clear.
In spite of himself, Geoff smiled. ‘I could meet him at the public library, or even where he works—I do not need your permission to do so…’
Ms. Trench frowned. This teacher was insolent, but worse than that, he had no sense of the pressing need to save the young man entrusted to her care.
‘That would be ill-advised. We have failed Jake, Mr. Carter. I have failed him, and so have you. Jake’s marks in your class were abysmal. No wonder he was angry. And now, we have lost him. Education is his only salvation. We all know that if a student fails, it’s the teacher’s fault.’ She paused for effect. Geoff decided to ignore the patent absurdity of her outrageous claim. No true teacher could believe such arrant nonsense. He decided to parry it with his own knowledge of Jake’s troubled life experience:
‘Jake’s anger is rooted in his difficult home life, not his marks, and for that we have no remedy.’ He added pointedly, ‘As you know. As for failure, ‘fail’ stands for First Attempt In Learning. When Thomas Edison was asked how it felt to fail a thousand time before inventing the light bulb, he denied the accusation by asserting that “the light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.” James Dyson–’
‘ You don’t understand–’
‘Don’t interrupt me, please, Ms. Trench. As I was about to say, James Dyson failed more than five thousand times before he invented the cyclonic vacuum cleaner. He says he doesn’t mind failures, as they are an indication of creativity.’
‘Jake isn’t an inventor.’
‘Not yet, he isn’t. School isn’t for everyone, and marks, for that class at least, matter only to— academics.’ He let the jab sink in. ‘Just as you can lead a horse to water but cannot make it drink, you can lead a lad to wisdom, but you cannot make him think. My cousin is a millionaire with a Grade Nine education. By his own admission, school was a waste of time for him, and it is for Jake, too. By his own admission, as everyone knows. He’s old enough to leave school any day now.’
‘You are a defeatist.’
‘No, ma’am, with respect, a realist. Students, like the rest of us, excel in ways that cannot be evaluated statistically,’ he emphasized the word, ‘in persistence, in kindness to one another, in courage to face the dreary monotony of their lives. For example–’
‘We have had this debate before,’ interrupted the Principal impatiently. ‘You can’t cite individual cases without understanding the big picture. It’s not statistically valid.’
‘I don’t teach statistics, Ms. Trench, but students. Each is an individual, not a number.’
She changed tactics again. ‘I believe in progressive solutions. It is obvious to me that you do not. No doubt you know who chalked ‘SOW Committee’ over the Status of Women Committee billboard in the staff room?”
‘No. I can’t take the blame–or credit– for that. But whoever did, noticed that you yourself headed an e-mail announcement about one of its meetings using that very acronym.’
Ms. Trench blanched. ‘I put it with periods before each letter!’ she replied indignantly before changing the subject, perhaps realizing the weakness of, and even an admission of error on her part, in her rejoinder. ‘Jake needs to be back in school. He needs to feel good about himself. I believe in empowerment. I am going to empower him. I want him to succeed. I intend to get him back here in spite of the Board, in spite of you, and in spite of your defeatism.’ The note of triumph was unmistakable.
‘As for empowerment, ma’am, you should know power tends to corrupt, as Lord Acton so memorably warned. I suspect Jake will find his place in life without school having much to do with it.’
‘You seem very sure of that. What do you know about progressive pedagogy?’
‘Oh, nothing at all,’ replied Geoff. ‘I don’t need to. I study the human heart. It doesn’t change with the seasons, unlike educational theory. I’ve studied humanity for years in the classroom. It’s a pity that you have chosen to forfeit that privilege.’
Ms. Trench kept both her temper and her promise to bring Jake back to school. One day after school, Geoff caught a glimpse of a familiar figure in a janitor’s uniform pushing a broom down a dim corridor in the fading light, and he went up to greet Jake.
‘So they got you back in school, Jake,’ he smiled.
Jake managed a self-conscious smile himself. ‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘But at least they’re payin’ me for it. I’m on the night crew, so I get to sleep during the day when those other suckers gotta work. No offence, eh?’
‘None taken. It’s good to see you again.’
He saw Jake from time to time over the next few weeks. They even nodded to each other as if in silent complicity, each a vital part of Trench Progressive Pedagogy.
But the illusion could not last. A mere week before Jake’s employment was to have been made permanent, the chief custodian, investigating an alarm signal on his beeper on a Saturday morning and suspecting a break-in, discovered Jake Mallette lying fast asleep on a sofa in the staff room, an open case of beer and the remains of an orgy of fast food beside him. He had apparently had at least one unauthorized visitor with him. The school’s telephone bill for that night revealed a large number of long-distance calls had been made at the school’s expense to escort services and ‘lonely hearts’ numbers, ‘Talk Dirty to Me’ prominent among them.
Jake quickly disappeared in a face-saving cover-up into the anonymity of menial employment, to a distant industrial park, and Ms. Trench was moved ‘laterally’ to a desk job at the school board office at the end of the year. The two events might not have been related: perhaps this was mere coincidence?
As for Geoff, he smiled upon reading a book review praising a teacher’s memoir for its author’s inspired decision to enrich the lives of his tough inner-city students by reading them stories and relating them to his students’ rough living circumstances. He was briefly tempted to forward the review to her, but thought better of it. She was now in a world more suited to her, in possession of an office on the fourth floor of the board’s imposing Administration building, with delusions of “empowerment” to climb past the “bean counters” to the Director of Education’s palatial suite of offices on the eighth floor above, with its own Media Centre and broadcasting facility, blissfully unaware that, as a former math teacher, she was merely a bean counter herself. In the interim, she was in charge of the board’s extensive playground equipment, with dizzying responsibility for overseeing the deployment of school buses and other vehicles, ordering supplies for the central offices, and even more importantly, allocating parking spots to board administrators, all tasks for which her curious devotion to numbers admirably qualified her, and for which insight into the behaviour of troubled adolescents would have been a decided liability.
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