Evil Origins: A Horror & Dark Fantasy Collection (115 page)

All
true metalheads have seen Metallica at least once in their lives. While I
thought the band was hungrier when I saw them three years prior, on Van Halen’s
Monsters of Rock
tour, the
Black Album
tour in 1991 will go down
as the loudest show I have ever attended. I don’t know the number of tractor
trailers they brought on tour or how many stacks of amplifiers were on stage,
but I can tell you that I seriously thought Kirk’s feedback made me deaf. I
spent the next week yelling at people, and I’m thankful that my ears still work
today. I can safely say that this show marked a transition for me, a moment in
time when seeing the performance became more important than seeing the cleavage
at the performance.

1992

1992
was another vintage year of concerts for me. Let’s see, what happened in 1992. 
I was born in 1971, carry the four. . . .Hmm. Not sure why the
glut of parties in 1992, but it did seem to be another blur of live
entertainment from the jammy sweetness of the Allman Brothers Band to the
metal/rap hybrid tour of Public Enemy and Anthrax. I got a pick from Scott Ian
at the Anthrax show and citation for public intoxication from the Pittsburgh
Police at the Allman Brothers show. The Skid Row concert was fairly forgettable
except for the blistering opening set of a then up-and-coming band by the name
of Pantera.

I
find it necessary to break out the Lollapalooza show from the rest I attended
that year. The sets by Lush, Jesus & the Mary Chain, Ministry, Red Hot
Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, Ice Cube, and Soundgarden were some of the most
eclectic and amazing I’ve ever seen. Pearl Jam stole the show as
Ten
was
breaking in the summer of 1992. I went with my trusty concert-going buddy Jeff
and his slowly deteriorating Datsun 210. This time, we brought along a real,
live woman. It was a first for us but not happenstance. And no, we did not drug
her or pay her to come along. In a way, I feel a bit guilty, because I ditched
Jeff for the majority of this show to hang with the girl. She had long, dark
hair and a wicked smile. I remember her standing underneath the water mist
station, running her hands through her hair as other men stumbled into each
other trying to catch a glimpse. I still have the shirt that I wore that day,
and whenever I wear it now I mention Lollapalooza ’92, and we both chuckle
while our kids give us strange looks.

An Interview with Don

“Master
craftsman” is a term used to describe brewers, or carpenters, but not teachers.
However, this term fits Don perfectly. He began his career at a private school
in northern New Jersey in 1973. Don has been teaching science and coaching
there ever since. His no-bullshit style is something that had a great
impression on me as a new teacher in 1994. He garners the respect of his students
without trying to buddy up to them. The athletic teams that Don coaches are
notorious overachievers. In my last season as his assistant lacrosse coach in
1999, he guided a group of seventh- and eighth-grade boys to an undefeated
season. If you think that’s hard for professionals to do, you should see how
hard it is for twelve-year-olds.

Don
is charismatic and engaging. He demands that others pull their weight and
brings out the best in those around him. While serving as the school’s athletic
director and middle school science teacher, Don is also a husband, father,
Harley Davidson enthusiast, and member of a local blues band featuring another
long-time teacher at the school.

While
Don is reluctant to “preach,” I was able to capture his thoughts on a mild March
evening.

J.: Who or what influenced
your teaching style?

DON: When I look back on
it, there were a lot of things that were influenced by my high school football
coaches. My high school football coaches were both guys that taught according
to who they were. They didn’t try to pretend to be someone else. They were
honest and different. One coach was very firm, and the other one was much more
compassionate and understanding. The two coaches went together well. I think I
always remembered that.

J.: How does that define
what kind of teacher you’ve become?

DON: My style, my
personality is firm but fair. I’m the guy that right away sets the tone, and
the kids respect it. A lot of people look at it as more of a fear factor, and I
don’t think that’s it at all. There is a seriousness of purpose with me. There
always was with my coach. By starting out that way, whenever you let down or
joke around with the kids, you can pull them closer and gain their respect at
the same time without becoming their buddy. So it’s a line, and I remember
coach being that way. A tremendous respect, yet a lot of fun when he was joking
around, and that’s where I come from.

J.: Being in the business
for as long as you’ve been in it, I’m sure you’ve seen trends come and go, or
educational fads. Which ones have come and gone, and which ones have stuck
around or become relevant?

DON: This is a complex
question because I can only speak to elementary school/middle school education.
I didn’t see a great deal of change where I work, but I do remember trends
during those times like the open classroom. It was my understanding that you
didn’t necessarily have any grade levels or formality of teaching specific
subject matter, but there was always opportunity for it. On a daily basis they
would pick up wherever something seemed to be appropriate. It’s not like they
would have history now or math now or English now or that type of thing. It
didn’t last very long, but there might be some of that still around.

Tracking
became very big before I started teaching. This was not just in math. For
instance, kids were put into groupings, so you essentially had kids that were
developmentally ahead all together and you had the kids in the middle all
together and those in the bottom all together. Now it’s really only seen in
certain subject matters, and it’s still being debated whether or not it works.

The
only trends that I saw in my years of teaching that I promoted were those in
technology. I’ve been teaching for thirty-seven years, and the kids at our
school have had laptops for the past eleven years. Within our school there just
weren’t a lot of trends that took place. There is still a lot of debate on
grouping within a school. Should schools be K-5 and then 6, 7, 8 or should the
model be one like ours, which is K-4 and then 5, 6 and then 7, 8? That is still
being debated as to what is the most appropriate way to group kids within the
institution. Trends are not something I pay that much attention to.

J.: How do you see the
craft of teaching changing over the next twenty to thirty years, or do you see
it changing? Are there certain things that will never change?

DON: I’ve seen a change
already with technology, and I think it’s going to change remarkably. It’s
inevitable that it’s going to change. I’ve always wanted to guide the kids. I
didn’t want to be the person that knew everything, and the kids ask the
questions and you answer the questions. I never wanted to be that way. I wanted
to ask them the questions and have them answer the questions. In the past, you
didn’t have the resources that you do now with the computer. There has to be
more emphasis placed on skill rather than knowledge. If you’re taking a history
course, you can find out about the people and those events in seconds, and
that’s true for science, too. Conceptually, you have to learn things, but I
think you can learn it through analysis and being interactive with the
computer. The teacher still has to be guiding in a way that the interactions
are going to be fruitful. That’s what I find myself doing in class. We can
cover topics so much more rapidly because we can get to information and we can
analyze information on a much broader, higher scale because of the laptop.
That’s what we’re doing much more now than ever before.

Although
I remember hearing that from my college days, that teachers were supposed to
teach kids how to think. Teaching kids how to think in 1973, when I first
started, was a whole lot different than it is today. Let’s face it. We really
have to understand that kids are growing up in a world that is so different and
changes much more rapidly, and the worst thing we can do is to judge it as good
or bad, comparing it to the way it was. One needs to identify the change,
embrace it, and find out the best way to use it.

With
the way the educational system is today, we’re not teaching kids how to be
happy but how to survive within a system. Education could change in a very
positive way. It will become more personalized. There will be 3D virtual
classrooms; this is already beginning now. The teacher can see the students,
and the students can see the teacher and each other in the same way they could
if they were in the room together. The kids in that classroom will be from
China, Japan, Germany, the Middle East, all over the world. The opportunities
will be extraordinary. Personalization will mean changing things, such as the
time that we teach. It won’t have to be the traditional eight o’clock to three
o’clock model. That will change for the better because our educational system
in the United States is set up for the working adults, not for the kids. Kids
are going to school at the wrong time. We know the best time for adolescents is
at night. I get emails from kids at night on a regular basis. It’s not a
question of right or wrong. They have chemicals in their brains that make it
tough for them to sleep. Personalization has already changed education in that
my students can now contact me in a more individualized and efficient manner at
any time. Just having students call on the phone, you don’t have any
documentation of what went on, and you don’t have time to ponder. I get emails
from kids, and I’ll ponder and think about it before replying. Learning can
take place anytime, and I couldn’t do that back before we had email. Twenty to
thirty years from now the opportunity for learning will expand dramatically,
and the options will be more personalized. This is common practice today in
higher education. Online degrees are everywhere, and many are strenuous and
legitimate. We’ll see the same kind of thing work its way down. There will be
other issues involving social interactions, but you face challenges with any
kind of system.