Down in my basement, tucked in a corner of what used to be the kids’ playroom but nowadays is an adjunct storage area, are two nondescript filing cabinets from Staples --- a four-drawer and a two-drawer --- with a bunch of textbooks and rolls of posters stacked/thrown on top.
(I bought the filing cabinets, by the way, lest you scurrilously suspect I might’ve pilfered them from my employer. Oh, no, perish the thought: I had to purchase them myself when I arrived at what turned out to be my final school, because there were no filing cabinets at all in my new classroom. WTF? I asked the head caretaker, an amiable fellow who didn’t move too fast and turned out to be always amenable to stop for a chat, if he might have any kicking around. He looked first amused, then extremely dubious as he belatedly realized I wasn’t joking. But he eventually allowed as he might have something stored in the bowels of the school, so we descended several levels, past clanking steam pipes and roaring machinery which irresistibly reminded me of deserted, haunted dystopian factories. Eventually, we reached a subterranean storeroom full of scarred, dusty furniture which clearly hadn’t seen use since the time of Dickens. He pointed at one venerable piece and said that was all he had by way of filing cabinets. I peered more closely and blinked: it resembled nothing so much as an old-fashioned card catalogue --- Google it, Gen Xers --- which clearly was bafflingly unsuitable, so I just thanked him politely and we climbed back up out of Morlocks territory. Then, muttering to myself about what a cheap bunch of Shylocks my employers were, I hied myself over to Staples, and came back with the filing cabinets. When I retired, my wife asked if I was going to donate the filing cabinets to the school, and I replied with some spirit that I’d be damned if I was going to give the parsimonious bastards $400 worth of filing cabinets. Sorry. Long story, which really doesn’t even have anything to do with the point of today’s epistle, but there it is. Clearly, I still have some issues to work through regarding my former employer.)
(Caretakers always liked me, by the way, because I kept my classroom immaculate. I don’t mean I polished the floors or anything, but for example, kids writing on desks knew if I caught them, they’d be cleaning ALL the desks after school, armed with paper towels and a can of Comet. And perhaps most importantly, I just made sure they cleaned up after themselves… which, as any parent knows, is something of a challenge when you’re dealing with only one hormonal adolescent, let alone 35. So, yes, caretakers liked me: when they got to my room on their rounds after school ended for the day, it didn’t look like an EF5 tornado had just gone through. In fact, it looked pretty pristine. I’ll always remember one couple of cleaners, a man and a woman, who spoke very little English; they’d just come in, smile and nod respectfully, gesture to ask whether it was okay to come in, and go about silently emptying the garbage cans and giving the floors a quick sweep, which was usually all which was needed. One day, they obviously felt something more was warranted, though, so the woman, struggling a bit with the words, said to me, “We… like your… room.” I thought she was referring to the decorations --- I had every inch of wallspace decorated with posters --- so I thanked her and thought that was it. But she continued, determined to make her meaning clear. “Yes… is very clean… not like others.”)
Anyway. The filing cabinets. Yes. They’re mute evidence, all that physically remains, of thirty-four and a half years spent in the public teaching trenches of secondary school. They contain my teaching units from junior and senior high English (along with my junior high social studies units). I was not one of those teachers who walked out of school on the last day with no more than my lunch bag, no indeed. Sure, when I retired, I recycled class sets of readings, scads of documents, and old markbooks --- I could tell you what grade Mortimer Snerd earned in English 9 back in 1991, for example --- but couldn’t emotionally bring myself to part with my various units. Many of them were like old friends, and I could even measure the year’s progress by what I taught when. (“Oh, look, it’s time to teach the business letter with the grade nines… must be nearly Christmas.”) I know this may sound sounds just a little bit strange, but again, there it is.
And… on top of the filing cabinets, as mentioned, a bunch of textbooks… and the Lantern O’ Learning. I inherited the LOL (the initials were quite unintentional, I swear) from the room’s previous occupant, who departed hastily in the middle of the year --- I won’t say ‘in the dark of night’ but there were times it kinda seemed like that --- leaving quite a lot of flotsam behind in the process. I’ve included a picture of it (and the Infamous Filing Cabinets) at the head of this post to save myself the bother of describing it --- following in the footsteps of the immortal Chekhov, who exhorted us as writers to ‘show, don’t tell.’ As I was setting up my classroom, I came across the LOL and wondered what the hell it was doing there and, more importantly, what the hell to do with it. Then, rather like the Grinch, I got an awful, wonderful idea: I’d call it the Lantern O’ Learning, put it up above the whiteboard at the front, and add a sign saying, “This week, the Lantern O’ Learning Is…” and add some pithy, relevant, sarcastic educational commentary. Oh, yes. I won’t go so far as to compare my teaching style to Sgt. Hartman of Full Metal Jacket fame, but I definitely was not Miss Honey from Matilda, either. Couldn’t be, what with the aforementioned hormonal adolescents and all.
But it worked, and I (mostly) loved my job. For 34 and a half years.
(I haven’t even gotten to the subject of today’s epistle --- I was going to talk about one of the textbooks in particular --- but I’ve reached and passed my self-imposed limit of 1K words, so… next time.)
(I bought the filing cabinets, by the way, lest you scurrilously suspect I might’ve pilfered them from my employer. Oh, no, perish the thought: I had to purchase them myself when I arrived at what turned out to be my final school, because there were no filing cabinets at all in my new classroom. WTF? I asked the head caretaker, an amiable fellow who didn’t move too fast and turned out to be always amenable to stop for a chat, if he might have any kicking around. He looked first amused, then extremely dubious as he belatedly realized I wasn’t joking. But he eventually allowed as he might have something stored in the bowels of the school, so we descended several levels, past clanking steam pipes and roaring machinery which irresistibly reminded me of deserted, haunted dystopian factories. Eventually, we reached a subterranean storeroom full of scarred, dusty furniture which clearly hadn’t seen use since the time of Dickens. He pointed at one venerable piece and said that was all he had by way of filing cabinets. I peered more closely and blinked: it resembled nothing so much as an old-fashioned card catalogue --- Google it, Gen Xers --- which clearly was bafflingly unsuitable, so I just thanked him politely and we climbed back up out of Morlocks territory. Then, muttering to myself about what a cheap bunch of Shylocks my employers were, I hied myself over to Staples, and came back with the filing cabinets. When I retired, my wife asked if I was going to donate the filing cabinets to the school, and I replied with some spirit that I’d be damned if I was going to give the parsimonious bastards $400 worth of filing cabinets. Sorry. Long story, which really doesn’t even have anything to do with the point of today’s epistle, but there it is. Clearly, I still have some issues to work through regarding my former employer.)
(Caretakers always liked me, by the way, because I kept my classroom immaculate. I don’t mean I polished the floors or anything, but for example, kids writing on desks knew if I caught them, they’d be cleaning ALL the desks after school, armed with paper towels and a can of Comet. And perhaps most importantly, I just made sure they cleaned up after themselves… which, as any parent knows, is something of a challenge when you’re dealing with only one hormonal adolescent, let alone 35. So, yes, caretakers liked me: when they got to my room on their rounds after school ended for the day, it didn’t look like an EF5 tornado had just gone through. In fact, it looked pretty pristine. I’ll always remember one couple of cleaners, a man and a woman, who spoke very little English; they’d just come in, smile and nod respectfully, gesture to ask whether it was okay to come in, and go about silently emptying the garbage cans and giving the floors a quick sweep, which was usually all which was needed. One day, they obviously felt something more was warranted, though, so the woman, struggling a bit with the words, said to me, “We… like your… room.” I thought she was referring to the decorations --- I had every inch of wallspace decorated with posters --- so I thanked her and thought that was it. But she continued, determined to make her meaning clear. “Yes… is very clean… not like others.”)
Anyway. The filing cabinets. Yes. They’re mute evidence, all that physically remains, of thirty-four and a half years spent in the public teaching trenches of secondary school. They contain my teaching units from junior and senior high English (along with my junior high social studies units). I was not one of those teachers who walked out of school on the last day with no more than my lunch bag, no indeed. Sure, when I retired, I recycled class sets of readings, scads of documents, and old markbooks --- I could tell you what grade Mortimer Snerd earned in English 9 back in 1991, for example --- but couldn’t emotionally bring myself to part with my various units. Many of them were like old friends, and I could even measure the year’s progress by what I taught when. (“Oh, look, it’s time to teach the business letter with the grade nines… must be nearly Christmas.”) I know this may sound sounds just a little bit strange, but again, there it is.
And… on top of the filing cabinets, as mentioned, a bunch of textbooks… and the Lantern O’ Learning. I inherited the LOL (the initials were quite unintentional, I swear) from the room’s previous occupant, who departed hastily in the middle of the year --- I won’t say ‘in the dark of night’ but there were times it kinda seemed like that --- leaving quite a lot of flotsam behind in the process. I’ve included a picture of it (and the Infamous Filing Cabinets) at the head of this post to save myself the bother of describing it --- following in the footsteps of the immortal Chekhov, who exhorted us as writers to ‘show, don’t tell.’ As I was setting up my classroom, I came across the LOL and wondered what the hell it was doing there and, more importantly, what the hell to do with it. Then, rather like the Grinch, I got an awful, wonderful idea: I’d call it the Lantern O’ Learning, put it up above the whiteboard at the front, and add a sign saying, “This week, the Lantern O’ Learning Is…” and add some pithy, relevant, sarcastic educational commentary. Oh, yes. I won’t go so far as to compare my teaching style to Sgt. Hartman of Full Metal Jacket fame, but I definitely was not Miss Honey from Matilda, either. Couldn’t be, what with the aforementioned hormonal adolescents and all.
But it worked, and I (mostly) loved my job. For 34 and a half years.
(I haven’t even gotten to the subject of today’s epistle --- I was going to talk about one of the textbooks in particular --- but I’ve reached and passed my self-imposed limit of 1K words, so… next time.)
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