Evil Origins: A Horror & Dark Fantasy Collection (104 page)

***

Hypocrisy in
education is not as apparent or extreme as the examples of moderate Catholics
or boy-fucking priests, but it is just as damaging. One administrator would
routinely discuss her parenting style at lunch and during recess. She would
brag about the fact that her children never ate candy, that she baked with
sugar substitutes, and that they only ate natural foods grown in the South
American rainforest on hand-tilled land prepared by virgins. This same
administrator kept a huge bowl of candy on her desk and allowed students to
come by at any time and take it.

The use of cell
phones is another display of hypocrisy. Teachers continually whine about
students using them, and yet every day I see phones clipped to the belts of the
adults or, worse yet, hear them holding conversations while walking down the
hall.

Administrators
and school leaders preach about the need for balance in the lives of students.
They tell parents not to overschedule and to let kids have unstructured time.
You would be hard-pressed to find unstructured time in the school day.

Another
former colleague of mine never submitted his grades on time. Every single
marking period, the rest of the team waited a day, sometimes two days, until he
calculated and input the grade. We’d all laugh and snicker, but the problem was
real. The hypocrisy of this situation is that we would never permit this from
our students. This same teacher would complain about students who did not do
their homework or who turned it in late, but he did the same thing.

If modeling is
the most powerful form of teaching (it is), the ramifications of hypocrisy
reveal a tremendous gap in the system. Rules are in place to ensure an equal
and fair experience for all. Students and adults alike sniff out hypocritical
behavior if the rules are skirted or adjusted. Making an exception for every
rule is akin to not having the rules at all. Without a baseline standard to
measure expectations, the community drifts on an open sea of gray area.

***

“Every child is
unique, and every situation is different.”

This is the
mantra of private-school administrators who wish to cater to the desires of the
parent body. It allows them to skirt the rules or handbook in favor of
“individualized” education.

The spectrum of
discipline in schools today stretches from the purely unique consequence based
on a unique offense to the zero-tolerance punishment. Like most things in life,
neither extreme is healthy, and most schools fall somewhere towards the middle.

Public school
systems can be pigeon-holed at the zero-tolerance end of the spectrum. Because
teachers and administrators deal with unwieldy numbers of children and unknown
or absent parental support, they must function as judge, jury, and executioner.

On the website
run by Building Blocks for Youth, a factsheet lists the following disturbing
figures:

In
public schools, ‘zero tolerance’ means that students are quickly suspended or
expelled for breaking the law or violating school rules. These policies were
initiated on the federal level by the 1994 Gun-Free Schools Act, which
responded to several notorious school shootings across the country. The federal
law required states to kick out students who brought firearms to school.

Unfortunately, many states and school districts have
gone far beyond the federal Gun-Free Schools Act by enacting policies that
suspend or expel students for carrying virtually any object that could be considered
a weapon, illegal drugs, prescription drugs, and even some drugs available
over-the-counter. Some of the most troubling stories and trends have made
headlines:

Nationally, students have been subjected to
disciplinary action for bringing Midol or Advil to school, bringing a water
pistol to school, and taking a slurp of Listerine during school hours.—Education
Week, October 23, 1996.

In
Philadelphia public schools, 33 kindergartners were suspended in 2002 under a
tough new discipline policy.—The New York Times, December 14, 2002.

An
11-year-old died of asthma because his school’s zero tolerance policy prevented
him from carrying an inhaler.—The New York Times, November 19, 2002.

It is easy to
see how removing decision-making by the authority figures in schools creates
common-sense problems at the ground level. Seeing the world only as black or
white, right or wrong, robs a child of a chance to make a mistake and the
teachable moment when he does.

At the other
end, you will find situations of individualization that abound in private
schools. Without Board of Education mandates or state standards, independent
schools are free to create their own system of consequence or punishment, as
long as it falls within constitutional rights. This approach is flawed as much
as zero tolerance because it assumes there is no black or white, right or wrong
behavior, only shades of gray.

Consider this:
Two students get into a dispute over a girl at a high school. The disagreement
spills out into the street after school. The antagonist in our scenario pushes
the other boy in the back while he is clearly looking to defuse the situation.
In a desperate attempt to engage, the antagonist picks up a brick and hits the
other kid over the head with it. The boy dies from the blow. Was the action
“wrong”?

A group of thugs
follow an eleven-year-old girl home from school. They corner her behind a set
of bleachers on an empty baseball diamond and gang-rape her. Was the action
“wrong”?

A high school
dropout now deals drugs in a rough part of town. He attempts to sell drugs to
elementary school children and has already been arrested for it twice. On one
afternoon, he manages to sell crack to a ten-year-old boy who then dies from an
overdose. Was the action “wrong”?

Where
is the gray area in these situations? Is there ever a situation when gang-rape
is not morally reprehensible? I am not suggesting that the details of the
situation not be explored. However, it becomes clear that there are clearly
“black and white” (this terminology has nothing to do with race, Rev. Sharpton)
issues. Educators who claim that everything is a shade of gray lack conviction.
They do not have the self-confidence and strength to take a stand on anything
and therefore claim that one cannot stand on anything.

***

In seventh grade
I had the biggest crush on Jackie Anderson. She had a cute face, great smile,
perfectly feathered hair (it was 1983, so cut me some slack), and woman-sized
knockers. I remember sitting on the phone for an hour, sometimes two, talking
to her about nothing. I would huddle in the basement with the phone cord
stretched as far into the corner as possible to prevent my brother from
eavesdropping on the conversation. I fantasized about touching Jackie’s boobs,
about what it would be like to squeeze them. I imagined walking to soccer
practice hand in hand and having the rest of the team gawk at us. I pictured
her cheering me on, her developed breasts bouncing up and down as I made saves
in the goal.

Mrs. Gather
fucked me over. Royally. The hideous she-beast prowled our seventh-grade
classroom with a black hood and scythe. She wore bright blue eye shadow and
blistering red lipstick that made her look like a painted pig. Mrs. Gather’s
thin, wispy hair sat coiffed on the top of her head like rusty steel wool. She
spoke with a smoker’s rasp and never, ever smiled.

As we sat in
math class doing stupid shit like multiplication tables (with computers and
calculators, why the fuck are we still teaching multiplication tables?), I
began to daydream about Jackie. She sat across the room with the profile of an
angel. I could not focus and had to place a book in my lap to conceal the
excitement. Jackie would look in my direction with an awkward smile as she
tried not to draw attention to the fact that I was drooling over her.

I decided
against following Mrs. Gather’s instructions and turned to a clean piece of
paper in my Trapper Keeper. Although I cannot remember exactly what I wrote to
Jackie, it probably went something like this:

No
doubt this stirred the heat in her pubescent loins. I slid the math worksheet
aside and doubled over the writing to give it a more classic look. The other
sheep sat in perfectly straight and saintly rows, dutifully moving through the
math exercise in a flock. The small hand on the clock crept towards the twelve
as it brought us closer to lunch. I decided that Jackie would get the note
today, right after class.

I began to spin
the events in my head the way I saw them unfolding. I would walk up to Jackie
at recess right after lunch. She would be bouncing a red rubber ball, probably
the same one that stung the side of my face during our last dodgeball game (the
1980s, prior to the long-term damaging effects of dodgeball and its subsequent
banishment to the infernal fires of recess hell). Her friends would be
whispering and giggling as I walked towards her. My Wrangler corduroys swooshed
with the sound of love as I approached, my Izod polo shirt collar upturned like
a bad-ass.

“Yo, Jackie,” I
would say, cooler than Sly in
Rocky I
.

“Hey,” she would
say back, without the sing-songy intonation of modern hip-hoppers.

Jackie’s friends
would flutter, chirp, and look longingly on the scene as I reached out for her
hand. I could see myself placing the note in her palm after I had folded it
neatly into the shape of three triangles, the universal form of the love note.

“J., I have to
tell you that I so want to be going with you. You are super awesome.”

“I know, baby.”

“What did you
say?”

“I said, ‘I
know, baby,’” I replied.

“If you call me
‘baby’ one more time, Sister Carol will take the paddle to your backside.”

Mrs. Gather
towered over my desk as she glared at me through her painted face. I could see
tiny beads of sweat breaking out on her forehead and at the top of her manly
sideburns. Her lip quivered underneath the fine line of moustache hair that
would need waxing soon.

“Stop your
daydreaming and hand it to me.”

I tried to play
dumb, but I had a feeling she had been standing next to me for a long time. I
had no hope of hiding the note or pretending it was classwork. The rest of the
kids snickered, and I remember Jackie looking down at the floor. I do not know
if she wanted to avoid the carnage that was about to take place or if she had
no interest in me. Probably the latter.

“My math?”

Gather’s eyes
bore down at me with the vengeance of a thousand Holy Spirits. St. Bernadette
herself, the patron saint of our parish and school, bellowed from the bowels of
hell.

“Hand it to me,
now,” she replied. The word “now” came out like a cross between a wounded
Bassett hound and a Barry White chorus.

I had no
retreat. I had no escape. I had to hand Gather the love note. All the kids
would know as soon as they saw the official love note fold, and most would
recognize the big J in “Jackie” that I had scrawled on the top of it. I was
doomed.

Mrs. Gather then
did something beyond human. She reached low in her rotten soul and received
inspiration from Lucifer. A grin split her face and made her red lips look like
the opening of a vicious wound. A wrinkly hand spotted with brown liver marks
and fine white hair reached down and clamped on the love note like a set of
talons. I winced. The class froze.

“I see that this
is not the exercise we’ve been working on. Perhaps the rest of the class would
like to see what has kept your attention away from our lesson?”

At that moment I
knew what was about to happen. I hung on to the top of the desk the same way
you do at the top of a roller coaster, fearing the plunge into the abyss.

Gather held the
note up to her beady eyes and strutted down the row towards the front bulletin
board. The teachers used the wall space near the door for permission slips and
important notices as the class had to pass it multiple times every day. Nine.
Nine times each day, to be exact. Her wide ass swung around the desk while her
left arm reached out for a push pin sitting on top of the teacher desk. With
the motion of the executioner’s blade, she slammed her fist into the cork board
and stabbed the top of the note with the push pin.

“There. That
should dispel any need for you to conceal your work during math class. Are
there any other distractions that need brought to my attention?”

For the briefest
moment, I imagined the entire class rushing her and tearing the old, bitter
woman to pieces with bare hands. As quickly as it came, the feeling passed, and
the second hand on the clock cracked with each movement. Every second that it
moved me closer to the lunch bell felt like a death by a thousand cuts. Kids
stopped paying attention to Gather, and she knew it. I swear I saw her fucking
smile at me. I buried my head in my hands and waited for the inevitable. And
for the record, Jesus did not come to my rescue. All the little fuckers crowded
the bulletin board to read my love note to Jackie. We were both humiliated, and
the incident left no hope for our burgeoning tween romance.