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 reckage 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 lflesh 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.
"MissusGates read to your self .....,Shakespeare's
`Macbeth'and the Midsummer Night' s Dream and Little
Women and Gulliver Travels and Moby Dick 'If
sicknessandsometimesdeathiscontagious thensois
optimismandenthusiasm ndloveandspiritand
traditionarecontagious. (“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 on the other side of the Continent.... the Big Apple, September 27, 2010
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