Last week I paid homage to the substitute teachers of the world, sharing personal experiences from long ago. I wasn’t a very good sub. I bent the rules, showed up late, and usually raced the kids out the door. Somehow, despite all that, I got a job offer. The call came late in December. Caller: Mr. Wootten, we have a full-time position we’d like to offer you. Me: I’ll take it! Caller: Can I tell you about it first? Me: Does it pay a regular teacher salary? Caller: Yes. Me: Not thirty-six bucks a day? A full salary? Caller: Yes. Me: I’ll take it. On January 4, 1982 I reported for work at Louisville’s Central State Hospital. Formerly it had been called Lakeland Asylum; before that, it was the Central Kentucky Asylum for the Insane. The building you see below was the original building, still in use in 1981, but since razed. An aside – mental illness is not something to joke about. It is very real, and I’ve seen its effects. The treatment of mental illness and those who suffer from it has changed dramatically since 1981. That said, the rest of this post will share my experiences. Some are funny, others are sad. The people are real, many lost in the state mental health system. Others placed there for reasons ranging from rational to absurd. My assignment was to teach English and Social Studies to 14-18 year-old male patients. I showed up ready to hit the road running. Dress slacks and shirt; sportcoat and tie. Tie? First mistake. The lady in charge told me to lose the tie. Ties were dangerous. Someone might use it to hang themselves, she said. Violence was a problem, I was told. Fortunately, I had a classroom aide. Mrs. A. was in her early fifties, and probably didn’t weigh a hundred pounds. She was brought in for a quick introduction, then I started orientation. The First Lesson of Orientation – subduing violent students. I was instructed to sweep their legs out from under them and sit on them until help arrived. We would then remove their shoes and take them to a self-containment room. Believe it or not, rubber rooms really existed. Soft rubber walls and floors that kept residents from hurting themselves. We practice for a few minutes, until they were satisfied I had it down. Fortunately, I never had to put this lesson into practice. Next lesson – Okay, there wasn’t another lesson. I asked about curriculum, and was told there was stuff in the classroom, and to use what I could find. And that was it. Off to class I went. Fortunately, there were some GREAT teachers and support staff at Central State. As I found my way, I came to rely on them daily. Soon after arriving at my classroom, a colleague came in to introduce himself and let me know I was the fourth teacher since the beginning of school. Oh boy. Surprisingly, the kids were pretty special too. I remember many of them, such as… Jeff– Jeff was the only student who became physical with me, and it was partly my fault. Fourteen, baby-faced, obese, with a long record of violence, today Jeff would be in a self-contained classroom in public school, getting the help he needed. Back then he was dumped into the mental health system and forgotten. Once, when Jeff was having a bad day, I made the mistake of questioning something he said AND leaving a stapler out on my desk. When I turned my back, Jeff hit me with the stapler. He was placed in solitary confinement, and I felt bad about that. The next day it was forgotten. JJ – A great kid. Tall, gangly, with a great white-boy afro. For some reason, we didn’t get along until I visited the outdoor recreation area one day. JJ asked if I wanted to shoot some hoops, then play one-on-one. Within a few days we were playing for money. If I lost, which I usually did, I’d put fifty cents in JJ’s store account, which he used to buy cigarettes (Most of the kids who were sixteen and older smoked). If I won, JJ had to help me clean the classroom. As the year went on, I started smuggling in cigarettes for when I lost, because of the exorbitant price they charged in the hospital canteen. Jessie – Jessie had a violent past AND a love of anything related to the Civil War. We could never get him to do any work, until Mrs. A. had the idea of tying all his work to the Civil War. Bang! Civil War math problems, Civil War reports for history, everything was Civil War. After I’d been at Central State a couple months, we moved to a new classroom facility. State-of-the-art, they said. Shatter-proof glass panels on all sides, so the hospital staff could see and respond quickly to problems. Sadly, no one bothered to make sure the shatter-proof glass was really shatter-proof. One day, angry about something, Jessie decided to find out for himself, by picking up his desk and throwing it against the shatter-proof glass. Guess what? It shattered. A couple students decided to follow Jessie’s lead. Mrs. A. and I hid under our desks until it was over. Five of sixteen shatter-proof windows were shattered. After that, we were an open-air classroom. Dino – Dino was a spitter. Staff members were directed to spit back, but I could never bring myself to do that. The night of a full moon, Dino jumped a fence and ran away. I never saw him again. Robert – Robert shot his father, supposedly for cheating on his mother. A good boy. A quiet boy. At seventeen, he was classified as criminally insane. Bryan – I never knew Bryan’s clinical diagnosis, but he swore he had a pencil in his head. “I can’t work today, Mr. Wootten,” he would say. “This pencil in my head hurts too much.” One day Bryan fell asleep in class. Unbeknownst to me, while he dozed, JJ placed a pencil on his desk. When Bryan woke up, JJ exclaimed, “Hey Bryan, look! The pencil fell out.” We never saw Bryan again. Raymond – A sweet boy of fifteen. His father, a jockey at Churchill Downs, had badly abused Raymond, including force-feeding him soda laced with tabasco sauce and red-pepper flakes. Despite that, Raymond was sent home after an eight-week stay. Two weeks later, he was back, as delighted to see us as we were to see him. A mental hospital was preferable to home. Donnie – Donnie was mentally retarded, as it was called back then. Nothing else. His presence made me fully aware of the deficiencies in the mental health system of the time. Donnie came to class every day, but could do little more than color and read his ABC’s. Had there been more staff and more time, he could have learned more. Years later, I saw Donnie’s picture on the front page of the Louisville Courier-Journal, in a story about the city’s homeless population. The job could be grueling, and one reprieve was a ninety-minute lunch break when fellow teachers and I bolted from the building. As the year went on, The Middletown Pub became the destination of choice. The pizza was good and the beer was cheap. By May, several of my colleagues were returning to work intoxicated. Somehow, they pulled it off. The school supervisor either didn’t see or didn’t choose to see. Then, there was the curious case of Mrs. N. A mousy woman of sixty who rarely spoke to anyone, Mrs. N. taught art. As the year progressed, Mrs. N’s attendance and appearance started to slip, and she became more and more distant. One Monday in April, she didn’t show up at all. By noon we discovered she had left work the previous Friday, gone to the adult side of the facility, and checked herself in as a patient. She returned after a couple weeks and resumed teaching. There was no summer school at the hospital, and as June approached, I was pulled into the principal’s office and offered a position for the next school year. By then, I had committed to a teaching job in Missouri, but it was still a tough decision. I’d taken the usual education courses in college, student taught, substitute taught, and worked as an elementary school aide. Nothing prepared me more than my six months at Central State Hospital. When the last day came, I was sad. For a couple years, I kept up with some colleagues. Thirty-five years later, all I have are the memories. Most are sweet. Hey everybody, THANKS for reading! I'll be looking for beta-readers for Shunned, my next novel, which is due out March 1. Are you interested? If so, click here to sign up. You'll receive regular email updates, and I'll be choosing beta-readers from the mailing list. Haven't read Harvest of Thorns yet? Find out why readers are giving it four and five-star reviews on Amazon. You can purchase it in traditional or ebook form by clicking here. This is my last blog post of 2016. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
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What's the toughest job in America? Brain Surgeon? Explosives Tester? Restaurant Attendant at the State Fair? Not even close. Substitute Teacher? Ding, ding, ding! And while I’ve never operated on brains, test-fired TNT, or cleaned bathrooms at the state fair, I have substitute taught, and let me tell you, it is HARD. Let's start with a quiz - which of the following is the substitute teacher? The first? No way. Look at how hard those kids are working, even while she has her back turned. She spent hours planning this lesson. The middle? No chance. Subs don't get to lecture. They get worksheets. The third is probably the sub. My sub adventure was thirty-five years ago. I'd graduated and couldn’t find a job, so I decided to sub in Louisville, Kentucky. Several of my friends today are subs. They log onto school websites, browse through available assignments, and choose the ones they want. Too easy! They probably sip tea and listen to light jazz, too. It wasn’t that way in 1981. Back then, the ringing phone jarred you from a deep sleep at five in the morning. “Mr. Wootten, can you sub at _____ High School today?” If you wanted the thirty-six bucks, you said yes. Yep, you read correctly. Subbing in 1981 paid thirty-six bucks a day. I didn’t drive, so I’d hurriedly shower and hop the city bus to wherever I was going, showing up just as school was starting. Louisville’s city schools were a hot mess back then. Kids were bussed across town, parents were unhappy, teacher morale was low. And there I was, showing up to take over Mrs. Bradford’s high school history classes so she could have her root canal. Lesson plans? Sometimes. Mostly I improvised, becoming the master of trivia contests. We’d divide the class into groups and play our own version of Jeopardy. Think Alex Trebek’s job is hard? Hah! His show is only thirty minutes long. The sub teacher version of Jeopardy lasted fifty minutes, and questions had to be easy enough for all kids to have a chance (I invented No Child Left Behind). If the theatrics and offbeat lessons didn’t meet the principals’ expectations, they never said anything. I was a warm body, and that’s as good as it got. Favorite memories?
The mandatory after-school conferences with principals were always interesting, too. “Mr. Wootten, I realize that the students cheated on the exam, and most left before class was over, but we’d really appreciate you coming back for the rest of the week.” The sub list must’ve been pretty short. But, guess what? Despite all that, I received a call in mid-December with an offer for a full-time job. It seemed too good to be true, and as it turned out, it was. More on that next time. I would love to hear your favorite sub teaching stories. Share on Facebook or leave a comment below. Thanks for reading! If you haven't already, please sign up to receive email updates of future books, giveaways and other surprises. I'll also be looking for advance readers for Shunned, my next book, due out this Spring. Click here to sign up. Last week, my Facebook friend Jen posted that a parent complaint led to the removal of To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn from library shelves in Virginia's Accomack County Schools. For me, this resurrected some unwelcome memories. First, full disclosure: I found The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to be okay, but Huckleberry Finn never did it for me. To Kill a Mockingbird? Now there’s a great book. Anyway, the parent, Marie Rothstein-Williams, wasn’t disputing the books’ place in history, but rather the racial slurs and offensive language. “You can’t get past that,” she said, “and right now we are a nation divided as it is.” It appears the Accomack County School Board is following proper procedures in response to Ms. Rothstein-Williams’ complaint. A committee of school employees and community members has been convened to determine the next step. They will take their time and make the decision they feel is best. Whatever that decision is, some will like it, some won’t. Book banning is nothing new. Huckleberry Finn is the most banned book in America, Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye. Shoot, even the Harry Potter books have been banned by some schools. Years ago, I faced my own book banning dilemma, and it turned out badly. The book is called Julie of the Wolves. Here’s the Amazon blurb about it: To her small Eskimo village, she is known as Miyax; to her friend in San Francisco, she is Julie. When her life in the village becomes dangerous, Miyax runs away, only to find herself lost in the Alaskan wilderness. Miyax tries to survive by copying the ways of a pack of wolves and soon grows to love her new wolf family. Life in the wilderness is a struggle, but when she finds her way back to civilization, Miyax is torn between her old and new lives. Is she Miyax of the Eskimos—or Julie of the wolves? Julie won a Newberry Award in 1973, and has been read in Middle School Communications Arts classes for decades. Despite all this, I’d never heard of the book until the complaint. It came from a parent who was also pastor of a small church. His issue was a scene that is said to describe the sexual attack of Julie by her husband. It’s a common complaint about the book, as you can find through a Google search. You can also Google the excerpt in question. Author Jean Craighead-George, is emphatic that the scene is not a rape. I felt it was strong language for an upper-elementary/middle school book. But my opinion didn’t matter. What mattered was policy. Here’s the policy:
It’s a good policy. A smart policy. It allows discussion and consideration rather than a knee-jerk reaction. It ensures that one person's viewpoints can't impact an entire school. But on a cold night two decades ago, a school board violated its own policy. The meeting convened to a packed house, as word of the complaint had leaked out. When it came up for discussion, the school principal stated that a review committee would be meeting the next week. The response? After a few moments of silence, a board member angrily said he didn’t need a committee. The book was inappropriate and that was that. He made a motion, received a second, and a majority of the seven board members voted to disregard their own policy. Julie of the Wolves was no more. As a school administrator, you expect to be overruled on occasion. After a while, those kinds of things don’t bother you. You do what you can do, and that’s all you can do. Julie of the Wolves, however, has stayed with me all these years. Book banning is wrong. Deciding to keep objectionable or age-inappropriate material out of kids’ hands isn’t. Where one ends and the other picks up isn’t a decision to be taken lightly. I wish the Accomack County School Board only the best as they carefully follow their policy. Thanks for reading! If you haven't already, please sign up to receive email
updates of future books, giveaways and other surprises. I'll also be looking for advance readers for Shunned, my next book, due out this Spring. You can click here to go to the sign-up form. |