CSotD: To Mrs. Olson, with Love
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Caulfield has been setting up this scam in Frazz for a few days now, playing on the technicality that Mrs. Olson didn't specify "US President" when assigning them to write a report.
It's been awhile since Caulfield pulled off a really epic prank like this. I enjoy them because it does create a flashback or two.
My class was not inclined towards major scams, though. My little brother and some friends climbed up on the roof one night and created a snow sculpture of a bird — not the feathered kind, the flipping kind — pointed across the playground at the high school and towards a particular teacher's classroom. The prank became a local legend.
Our class was inventive, but less playful. We would do wonderful work for teachers we liked, but getting on our wrong side could make for a very long year, and I think the school was happy to see us graduate and get out of their hair.
As the phrase goes, "The boys throw rocks in play, but the frog dies in earnest."
We had one poor physics teacher senior year that we dogged to an extent that, 46 years later, still makes me cringe. He never, ever should have been placed in a classroom in the first place, but it would have been much kinder if someone — anyone — in the administration had quietly removed him at the end of the first semester rather than leaving the poor guy to our tender ministrations.
Think of the worst time your class ever gave a sub. That was every day for this poor fish, and not just in physics but in his other classes as well. Some of it was inventive and some of it was pure disruption, and the weird thing is, it was coming not just from me and my C-student sweat-hog buddies but from the National Honor Society kids.
It wasn't just that they weren't turning us in. They were joining in the harassment.
We had a kid doing Sgt. Schultz impressions and throwing wads of chewing gum at the blackboard in class who went on to work at the National Science Foundation. Our valedictorian, who was also president of the Student Council ferchrissake, pulled a prank on the guy that left him holding a beaker of water in such a way that he couldn't move without spilling it on himself — the next class into the room had to rescue him from this ridiculous predicament.
I don't know if, at the end of that year, he fled or was asked not to return, but I'm amazed he lasted until June and I give him a lot of credit for sticking it out. I feel genuinely guilty about how we played with him, but I also blame the administration for letting him twist in the wind.
Teaching is a terribly isolating job, in that, for all you may have meetings and in-service days and chitchat in the faculty lounge, once you close that classroom door, you're on your own. It's you and the kids and, at least in the olden days, things had to get woefully out of control before any of the other adults figured out that you were in over your head.
Basically, if you turned your grades in on time and the kids weren't setting off the fire alarms, you were on your own. (Though one benefit of life in NY State was that, if half the class failed the state Regents exam at the end of the year, someone would realize that the teacher wasn't getting the job done. In our case, we actually set up a study group to cram for the Physics Regents, with my dad's help. We knew we weren't gonna get through it with this guy at the helm.)
Things are improving. They didn't even have "observations" in those days. Here's a guy straight out of teachers' college and nobody from the administration ever even came in and sat through one of his classes to see how he was doing — not that we'd have been pitching pennies into the glassware closet with the principal in the room.
Besides the observations — which may be poorly done but which at least happen these days — there are moves in most schools now to establish mentorships and to identify master teachers to help young teachers get their feet on the ground. I also think that the move to "shared decision making" has put better and better administrators in place.
They need to do more. New teachers flame out at a prodigious rate, and, while some of that is to be expected — it's an extraordinarily demanding job — there is an element of structural hazing involved that is starting to be recognized as counterproductive.
In a small school like ours, there was only one or, at the most, two teachers per subject area. But in most schools, you find that seniority allows faculty members to opt out of some of the least pleasant assignments. This results in the hardest, most grueling assignments being dumped into the laps of the rawest, least experienced teachers.
I mentioned this to a group of teachers I was working with a few years ago, and they all shuddered to remember their first years, several mentioning having to share classroom space with a veteran teacher who didn't want you to touch anything.
A science teacher recalled that she didn't even have a shared classroom. She was completely itinerant within the building and would have to trundle a cart full of lab equipment from room to room, depending on where her next class was slated to meet.
At one point in the day, she said, she had a class on the first floor followed by a class on the third floor followed by a class back on the first floor again — and this in an age before the Americans with Disabilities Act had mandated elevators in public buildings, so that she was hauling that small-wheeled, top-heavy cart up and down two flights of stairs in the three minutes between bells.
One of the things in "To Sir With Love" that survived the transition from fictionalized memoir to Hollywood film intact was the level of burn-out and frustration that Braithwaite encountered among the faculty, and the dispiriting atmosphere of "yeah, we've tried that …" despair that he found among his fellow-teachers.
What the film fictionalized was that final scene when he sees the rowdy, out-of-control hoodlums who will be next year's seniors, tears up his job offer from the engineering firm and decides to stay.
In real life, he got the hell out of there, and who could blame him?
However — and I like the fact that Frazz makes this clear — the Mrs. Olsons in our schools are as depressing to their fellow educators as they are to the students. You can't simply fire them because they aren't doing anything wrong and their kids achieve well enough.
But one principal told me that early retirement packages have been a godsend to our schools, that every administrator has a list of people where, in his mind, he marks off each day until they are going to get out and let someone come in and teach, instead.
(And the armchair reformers who want to go through the schools firing everyone who isn't fabulous simply don't understand how very, very few people are fabulous or what happens when a few top administrators are allowed to decree fabulosity. Besides, those hard-nosed types would be inclined to keep Mrs. Olson because she yells at the kids if they chew gum and she makes them keep their desks in straight lines — she's obviously a good teacher!)
UPDATES — Obituary section:
It turns out that Corey Pandolph is, indeed, bringing "Elderberries" to an end, with the final strip to run March 4. On one level, it's a shame, because he's made the strip — which he inherited from its creator five years ago — into a funny, inventive daily pleasure. On the other hand, it's better to end it and let another strip have that space in newspapers than to have him phoning it in because he's no longer engaged in the project, or have it passed on to another artist and become one more zombie strip clogging up the real estate.
Meanwhile, over in "Heart of the City," Dean's sorrow turns out to have been over the need to euthanize his beloved cat, Spock. I could probably get in touch with Mark Tatulli and ask him how this is going to turn out, but the premise of this blog is that I'm only a slightly better informed comics fan than my readers, and it would be a spoiler anyway. At this point, I feel horrible for Dean, but am hoping against a last-minute miracle because these things do happen and, when they happen in the real world, there are no Lazarus solutions. We shall see.
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