Memoirs of a Recovering Teacher

MEMOIRS

OF A

RECOVERING TEACHER

David Peterson

with

Peter Davidson

[email protected]

Published by Sweet Memories Publishing at Smashwords

Sweet Memories Publishing

A Division of Sweet Memories, Inc.

Copyright © 2013 by David R. Peterson

This book is also available in print at most online retailers.

This book contains reference to real stories about real people; however, people generally are not identified by their real names and in many cases, persons’ roles, positions, or titles have been changed to protect the actual identity of the persons depicted in the stories. All of the events and stories in the book are a product of the author’s remembrance and interpretation of these events, which might vary slightly from the actual events themselves.

All rights reserved. No part of this e-book may be used or reproduced in whole or part or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission from the publisher except for a reviewer who wishes to use brief quotations for a review in newspapers, magazines, or other form of broadcast. For information address Sweet Memories Publishing, Sweet Memories, Inc., P.O. Box 497, Arnolds Park, IA 51331-0497.

Acknowledgments

Editor: Beterzone Wordright Services

Graphic Design: Debbie Wilson

Front and Back Cover Photos: David DeVary

eBook Design & Marketing: Jean Tennant

Readers: L. Louwagie, C. Marshall, B. Peterson, K. Schendel, N. Schendel, B. Schomaker

Dedications

To my wife, Bev, who has heard each of these stories dozens of times through the years and who, nevertheless, consented to read the manuscript to make sure that I told them accurately.

To each person who is the subject of one or more of the stories in this book, thanks. Your identity is safe with me. Since the events described in this book cover a time span of several decades and a significant geographic area, it is possible that several different people may have been involved in events similar to those described in the book. In other words, the story may not even be about you. But, if you want to identify yourself and take the credit, or blame, you’re on your own.

To anyone who has ever been a student, be assured that, even though your teachers may have been perplexed by you at one time or another, they still cared for you and hoped for the best for you.

To anyone who has ever been a teacher, administrator, secretary, custodian, or other employee of any school or college, you’ll probably recognize many of the occurrences presented here as similar to those that you have witnessed first-hand. Perhaps you’ll want to share a few of your own stories with colleagues and friends.

To you, the reader, please be aware that these stories are presented not to embarrass or ridicule anyone involved, but are, instead, intended for your amusement and enjoyment. As for me, I sure enjoyed telling them.

David Peterson

Table of Contents

In Recovery

Choosing a Career

Inspired By Some Teacher?

Country School .

Town School

High School

A Family Tradition?

To Contribute To Society?

My Real Reason For Becoming A Teacher

Choosing a College Major

A College Stoodent

Registering For Classes

My Personal Faculty Advisor

Just Trying To Have A Little Fun

Judy, Judy, Judy

A Few More College Daze Stories

Job Hunting

A College Graduate – And Back To The Farm

This Is Teaching? (Faculty In-Service)

Whoda Thunk It – A College Professor

Faculty Inservice, College Style

Students

Harold

Investigative Reporters

The Mass Cut

Course Syllabus

Class Attendance Policy

Sammy the Sometime Student

Classroom Pranksters

Turning The Tables

Student Demonstrations

Sue ’Em

And Then, I Remembered What You Taught Me

Quotable Quotes

A Tender Side

Tests And Grading

Giving Exams

World-Class Cheaters

Leonard, The Amazing Accountant

Cool Conrad

A Way With Words

Mysterious Fall From Grace

Begging For A Grade

Students: They’re Almost…

The Faculty

The Exhibition

A Wedding To Remember

Mathematical Wizardry

The Halftime Speech

Steven Marcus Becker

Bridges

Lil Hitchhiker

Television Stars

The Booksellers

Signs

The Poison Pen

Faculty Meetings

Elvis Was Here

And In This Corner, Weighing In At

Faculty Lounge Under Attack

The Great Debate

That Leisurely Lifestyle

Administrators

Listen, People

The Book Club

Voter Strategy

The Petition

Joining The Ranks

Moonlighting

Life Insurance Sales

Driver Training

The Glass Man

IGL Recording Company

Real Estate Sales

Real Estate Pre-License Course

The Author

Shoebox Accounting

Writing Up A Storm

Meet Peter Davidson

Peter Davidson’s Writer’s Seminars

All Work And No Play…

Surviving

Survival Techniques

The Decision

On The Road To Recovery

About the Author

In Recovery

My friend, George, told me that when he was honorably discharged from the navy some years ago, they said that it would take two years of recovery to get back to normal for every year he had spent in the navy. I personally believe that this same formula applies to teachers who retire or leave the profession.

Since I was a teacher for thirty-eight years – four years in high school and thirty-four years at a community college, it will take seventy-six years before I am fully recovered. I retired from teaching at age 59 to pursue other interests such as writing this book; therefore, I will be 135 years old when I am fully recovered. To celebrate my return to being normal, I intend to throw one hell of a party. You’re invited.

This book consists of true stories from my life as a teacher and of the people that I met along the way. The stories are about students, faculty, and administrators – and about survival. When you read some of the stories, you’re apt to say to yourself, "He made that up – it couldn’t be true." But it is.

After reading these stories, I trust that you will fully understand the aforementioned formula about two years of recovery that are needed for every year of teaching.

–David R. Peterson

Choosing a Career

Many of my colleagues in the teaching profession can pinpoint the exact moment when they decided to become a teacher, as though it were some kind of religious experience, and they can tell you precisely why they became a teacher. For some, it was their third grade teacher, Miss Snodgrass, or their high school English teacher, Mr. Whipple, who inspired them to follow in their footsteps. For others, it was to serve, to shape young minds, and to make a contribution to society. Still others chose teaching because both of their parents, their grandparents, and all of their uncles and aunts were teachers and it was their destiny to uphold the family tradition. I suspect others had been brilliant students and they decided to share their brilliance with lesser minds in a classroom setting.

During my thirty-eight year career as a teacher, I never stopped to analyze exactly why I became a teacher; it just more or less seemed to happen. When I decided to write this book, it appeared to me that it was finally time to answer that question for my own satisfaction and for you, too, so you can more fully understand some of the stories that I am about to tell you.

Inspired By Some Teacher?

So, was I inspired by some brilliant teacher that I had when I was a student? Well, I grew up on a farm in southwest Minnesota. For many years, prior to my entering school, farm kids attended country school through eighth grade and then went to town school for grades 9–12. When I was a child, though, farms were becoming larger which meant that there were fewer farm families and thus fewer farm kids for the country schools. The days of the one-room country schoolhouse were numbered.

It was obvious that the country school serving our rural township was on the brink of collapse because of declining enrollment. The teacher held only a two-year teaching certificate, which was grandfathered in and was permissible for teaching in a country school, but a four-year degree was required by the local school board in order for someone to teach in the town school. Thus, when her country school closed down, she would be out of a job. The country schoolteacher, therefore, took matters into her own hands to keep the school open as long as possible – she recruited students.

When I was barely four years old, the country schoolteacher paid a visit to my parents. She looked me over, asked me a couple of questions, sized me up, and pronounced me big enough, old enough, and smart enough to start school in the fall – none of which, by the way, were even close to being accurate. Since there was no kindergarten in country schools, I would go directly into first grade. My parents came from the old school where a teacher was respected and trusted and whatever the teacher said was accepted as the gospel. So, off to school it was.

Country School

There were three of us in the first grade and another five students in grades two through eight. Not a big enough student body to field a baseball team, but big enough to keep the doors open at least one or two more years.

The other students in the first grade were evenly divided between boys and girls – one of each. I had seen the girl somewhere before but had never laid eyes on the boy. I was duly impressed, though, when his dad dragged him into the schoolhouse by the ear as the boy was kicking and screaming. In the other hand, the one that wasn’t holding onto the ear, the dad carried a sawed-off boat oar about three feet long with a crack in it. He handed the boat oar to the teacher and said, Don’t be afraid to use this on him if he gets out of line.

I felt terribly sorry for my new classmate, Delbert, and I could tell just by looking that the rest of the student body felt sorry for him also.

After just two days of school, however, I came to realize that Delbert’s dad wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Delbert was the meanest, sneakiest, lyingest, nastiest, cheatingest, most worthless little bastard I’d ever seen in my life. Every time the teacher turned her back, Delbert would pull the hair of the girl in our class or try to punch or kick me. And, he must have had a death wish because he also picked on the upperclassmen. By the end of the third day of school, the entire student body was praying for the teacher to bring out the boat oar and give Delbert what he deserved.

One day, in the middle of the second week of school, the teacher opened her lunchbox and found nothing but an apple core and some waxed paper that once held her sandwich. She came unglued. She accused Delbert, but he denied it. She went to get the boat oar to beat the truth out of him, but it was missing. As we learned later, Delbert had thrown it down into the pit in the outhouse several days before eating the teacher’s lunch.

Not having the boat oar available to mete out a proper punishment to Delbert, the teacher imposed the next most horrible punishment that she could think of – she sat Delbert on a stool in the back corner of the room facing the wall and put the Dunce Hat on his head and ordered him to sit there for the remainder of the day. For the uninformed, the dunce hat was a cone-like hat that resembled a Halloween witch’s hat that had the word, DUNCE, written on it in big letters. Any time a student did something dumb, or was naughty, the teacher would sit them in the corner and make them wear the dunce hat. I, of course, never had to wear the dunce hat, but most of the student body did at one time or the other.

From time to time, I ponder the chicken and egg theory as it pertained to Delbert – you know, which came first, the chicken or the egg? But in Delbert’s case I wonder which came first – the boat oar or the nastiness? But, one thing is for certain, Delbert was the meanest, sneakiest, lyingest, nastiest, cheatingest, most worthless little bastard I’ve ever known.

When I was in second grade, there were only three students in the whole school and it folded after that year.

Town School

I entered town school in the third grade and made a huge discovery – the rest of the students in my class could read and print and they were starting to write in cursive. Apparently, although the country schoolteacher kept the doors open those extra two years, she had actually quit teaching the fall that I entered first grade. I built a birdhouse, I recall, and played a lot of games, but we didn’t get into the academics. The third grade teacher assumed that there was a simple explanation to why I could not read or write – I was stupid.

My mother would not accept the teacher’s assessment that a child of hers could not read or write because he was stupid and she hit upon the idea that maybe I had eyesight problems and needed glasses.

My mother took me to the doctor for an eye checkup. In our small rural town, there was only one doctor who did it all from physical exams to treating any and all ailments known or unknown to mankind. He was also the eye doctor and would even pull a tooth or perform surgery in an emergency.

The doctor sat me down in a chair and used a projector to put some letters up on the wall. They were X P R G K Z. Can you read that? he asked. I thought I was there for an eye exam, but the doctor had ambushed me with a reading exam – X P R G K Z – it was the damndest word I’d ever seen. No, I admitted. I could not read the word. The doctor continued flashing other complicated words up on the wall, each one bigger in size than the previous one – words like T V Y W X, B L P Z, and Q Y P. Finally, he put something on the wall that I could read - a great big E – and I shouted out, E.

The doctor confirmed what my mother had suspected. Perhaps I wasn’t stupid – he wasn’t sure – but I definitely needed glasses. And, that is how I came to wear the pair of pink plastic framed glasses that I am seen wearing in my third grade picture.

Now, in addition to not being able to read or write, I had another handicap to overcome – trying to see out of a pair of eyeglasses that made my eyes spin.

I had a lot of ground to make up in reading and writing, but with noontime tutoring from my older brother and nighttime tutoring from my mother, I finally caught up with most of them by the end of