Chapter 51 revisited September 27 2010
Classroom
teaching was not a racket.... President Obama’s “Crisis in Education” NBC’s
“Today” ;
It
was throwing yourself into a ocean of floating bodies andd derelicts
and wreckage and you had to eat ttime and float
and
keep breathing so you don't panic
and drown.
They would eat you alive, almost as
sure as flesh is grass And
God eats grass.
I
The
world outside the classroom had their own standard of success, but inside
bungalows sixteen and three A, Mister Farnham and Missus Gates knew
the
buck and the gimmick and the phony and the promoter
and
the gigolo and the star and the starlet and the model
and
the movie agents were a shade lower than the
street-walkers
and bitches of Paris who sold their bodies
without
the flimflam of a pretentious illusion.
Sure Mister Farnham was partial and
prejudiced; he
didn't
go into this battle for nickels and dimes, yet at
times
like now the challenge of doing the impossible
seemed
beyond his comprehension. He wanted to
tell Missus
Gates
that it was possible Joe Sablow could learn to read
-
but he also knew little Joe's capacity. An
overload
capacity
is like a tightrope walker, treading the rope as
a
hurricane bears down.
II
Let
Morris Pitchford tell Missus Gates what the score
was. That little Joe needed professional help; that
the
teacher
had become de-sensitized by so many housekeeping
chores
that a boy's brain couldn't be studied when
thirty-five
other brains were demanding equal time.
Little
Joe need the University reading clinic, not Mister
Leon
Farnham.
Why should the classroom teacher - the
heart and belly
of
the entire operation - waste his time over Joe Sablow's
third
grade reading. The principal was the
public
relations
genius, the great white father, the butter and
egg
man; let him say a mouthful of nothing to Missus
Gates. Why the hell should Mister Leon Farnham be a
good
humor
man, bartender and wet nurse to the parents of his
students. He had been hired to teach.
III
Missus
Gates waited with the over consuming patience of
desperation. Her foster son couldn't read at a pace
faster
than an eight year old. What if little
Joe Sablow
grows
up and can only get a job in the post office
pidgeon-holing
letters. What if the neighbors and
relatives
ask how little Joe's earning a living.
Should
she
say, "He's working in civil service." or "He's a mail
clerk
in the Post Office."
How could little Joe concentrate in such
noisy
classes,
where boys and girls got up whenever they wanted
to. How could little Joe ever learn to talk in
words
outside
the vernacular of his adolescence.
"Read good,"
"nice
kids," "read find," "cute girl," "cool
guy."
Maybe it was Mister Leon Farnham's fault
thought
Missus
Gates. Maybe I should report him to the
principal
and
the Board of Education and get him fired.
I can too,
you
know. I'm a taxpayer. What business does Mister
Farnham
have not improving my husband's first wife's real
son's
reading ability. I'll stir up the PTA
about this
and
we'll see who's running this three ring circus.
"I'm a taxpayer and damn it all, if
they spend my Tony's
money
for beautiful looking schools, and lousy teachers
can't
stop the kids from tearing up the walls and making a
mess
of the rooms and the blackboards, then all the audio
visual
material, PTA meetings, teas, cookie drives, are a
waste,"
she said.
"No, Missus Gates," said Mister
Leon Farnham, looking
directly
into the window of Missus Gate's brown eyes.
"It's
no ones fault but your own for letting things get
out
of hand. The French Revolution didn't
come while
Madame
De Farge knit. You forgot to plant the
seeds of
tradition. You forgot to let roots grow in a
desert.
Education
is quicksand in your son's case, he's sunken
deep
into the waste of the disposal. Missus
Gates, little
Joe
is in the cemetery and if you don't take him to a
reading
clinic, he'll be buried alive.
IV
You
don't want little Joe to die at thirteen and be buried at seventy.
You
want him to live and breathe and taste the flavors
that
pour out of people's minds when they struggle for
their
identity and learn who they are. An
effort which
transcends
their own prisons of flesh and perhaps carves
out
a universal design, for future generations to learn
and
live by. If these people who come after
us perpetuate
the
design, perhaps the earth as we know it, will become a
better
place to live and work in.
Missus
Gates, this life is damn short, it's loaded with bull and propaganda 'cause
people want to distort the facts when their self-interest
is
on the stake. Call the University
reading clinic, get
an
analysis of the boy's sickness and plan a program at
home
where you read aloud to him.
V
Let
little Joe discover the stories of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, the poetry
ofEdward Lear, David Copperfield, Robinson Crusoe, Alice in
Wonderland,
Treasure Island and the Mother Goose Rhymes.
"Missus Gates read to
your self .....,Shakespeare's
`Macbeth'and the Midsummer Night'
s Dream and Little
Women and Gulliver Travels and Moby
Dick
'If sickness
and sometimes death is contagious then so is
optimism and enthusiasm and love and
spirit and
tradition are contagious. (“hear here”)
You
wouldn't be here at school today if you weren't a woman of good will. Look around and you see the apathy of most
parents; they aren't here,
yet
their children are the ones who need the most help. I
wouldn't
be here either, if I didn't believe in the
struggle
and trying to win. There is a lot that
needs
wanting;
how can I overcome my moments of emptiness and
despair
and tiredness and exhaustion and brain pounding.
VII
I
see myself, a vision in solitude, kneeling by the water
dikes,
packing bag upon bag of cement, hoping beyond all
hope
to stop the dikes from flooding. And
throw back the
raging
sea. If you and I throw in the sponge
and become
disillusioned
by apathy - where less than five per cent of
the
parents show up in a school of over two thousand
students
- we'll all drown together and little Joe will
drown
with us."
Missus
Gates looked at the clock, urging the bell to
ring
and the period to end. She couldn't
remember the
torrents
of thoughts, but she did remember seeing a tongue
dart
back and forth in the crevice of Mister Leon
Farnham's
face. She, somehow, felt that the tongue
and
the
brain of Mister Farnham were somehow tied up together.
Sure
- a lot of the stuff he had said was repetitious
and
boring and had been said before, but, maybe, as one
grows
older, there isn't much to be said about life,
except
to add insight into what was once thought, was
known,
and make it knowable. Otherwise, it's
all a waste
of
time.
Mister
Farnham made himself clear; he hit the points,
perhaps
a little too emotional at times, but he, like
Missus
Gates, was a person of good will; otherwise he
wouldn't
be in the classroom, but would be out hustling
cars
or conning a customer into buying something he didn't
need
or throwing him a pitch about some lots in Salton Sea
in
the Imperial Valley, which for a couple of pennies a
day
or three hundred down and thirty a month and "they're
drilling
for water, don't worry about it, the main thing
is
you'll make money.
Today's foreclosures are tomorrow's
bargains."
VIII
Missus Gates was impressed with an
impression that
Mister
Leon Farnham was a windbag, perhaps a person with
an
inferiority complex who had to live in two world's -
the
world of the adolescent and the world of the everyday
eat
'em alive.
A
man torn in half by turmoil and distress.
A man schooled and educated. A
man with enthusiasm and some internal flame which ignited his
ego
centricity. Maybe he was crazy? Why else should he
stick
his neck out. For growth? Development?
Whose
development? And what direction would it go? The way of
Jefferson? Napoleon?
Lenin? Hitler? Modern
Republicanism? De Gaulle?
Mao Tse Tung? Khrushchev,
"Ike"? Peaceful coexistence? Ronnie ("the Gipper")
Reagan? Brezhnev?
Andropov? Gorbachev? Perstroika?
Glasnost? The Ayatollah? Obama and his open mindedness?
"Get you half brother Charlie,"
said Missus Gates to
her
real four year old son. "We have to
go to his next
class;
it's his last period and then we can go home.
Nice
meeting
you, Mr. Farnham, it was nice talking to you."
3000
miles aoross th e other side of ou r
Continent.... the Big Apple, February
23, 2013 revised
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