Notes From The Education Underground: The TeachWonk Diaries

Another Brick...
It's been a loud Monday down at Taft Junior High School. (Contrast with Garrison Keiller's "It's been a quiet day in Lake Woebegon.") When the end of the day finally rolled around, I felt like one of those World War II bombers that you see on those old war movies. You know the ones, they have three of four engines all shot-up and smoking, and the last engine is still running, but not all of its cylinders are firing. The crew has already thrown away its 'chutes in order to lighten the aircraft, so "bailing out" is not an option.

Invariably, the bullet-spattered plane comes in for a "belly-landing." That's how it often feels to be a public school teacher in the United States.

But unlike the movies, this plane has to be patched-up and ready to fly a mission the very next day. In fact the bombers are expected fly five successful missions each week.

The mission itself is to penetrate the fog of resistance that the typical junior high school age kid has to doing productive school work. It can be fun to think of behavior problems as enemy fighters, zooming in to try to shoot you and your mission down.

There will be a formation 2-4 "fighters" in a typical junior high school class of 35 students. By the time they get to junior high school, the typical "fighter" has quite a bit of combat experience flying against bombers. Most will have shot down a few.

The rest of the kids enjoy watching the daily duels between the slow and lumbering teacher (bomber) vs. fast, loud and obnoxious discipline-problem kids. (fighters) After the last period of the day, each type of aircraft returns to its base (home) for refit and refuel. They will resume the contest the next day.

What can be done to disarm the fighters, and put the focus back on the mission? That will depend on what kind of friendly fighter escort that the government provides. One can think of "friendly fighters" as the school's administration. Their job is to protect the bombers from the enemy fighters. If the "friendlies" are effective, few (if any) bombers or enemy fighters get shot-up, and the mission is successfully completed. And if the friendly fighter escort is absent or ineffective, then the mission does not get accomplished, planes get damaged, and resources are wasted.

At William Taft Junior High School, our friendly fighter escort must be having navigational problems, because they don't seem to know where the enemy fighters are. The bombers are doing a lot of belly-landings each week.