Teaching for dummies

When I got my first teaching job over 20 years ago, I was given the typical first-year schedule: Six classes of the "dumb" kids. No school makes the mistake of entrusting the education of the smart kids to some know-nothing recent college graduate. Administrators, for the most part, are no dummies, and they'll do whatever they need to do to ensure that the smart kids' parents are satisfied. Theoretically, all parents have an equal stake in a public high school, but no one with a fully working "reality" lobe can dispute the fact that the brains' parents get first priority when it comes to a school's decision making. So the college-bound kids get the smarter, older, better teachers and the nogoodniks get the likes of a 23-year old me. And that's perfectly fair. This is the United States of America, a capitalist beacon, not Marxylvania.

While I made more than my share of the usual first-year teacher mistakes, my biggest fuckup followed me for the next six or seven years. (No, I'm not referring to that nagging bout of chlamydia I got from that tramp in seventh period. I got that shit cleared up in a matter of weeks thanks to a little penicillin.) The mistake I made involved my kids' performance on the big state writing test we had in those days. Our state was years ahead of this No Child Left Behind bullshit, for we had a series of state tests that students had to pass in order to get a diploma. Granted, these tests weren't exactly the LSATs, but they were pretty difficult for the lower half of the student population, or, as I called them, "these dumb fuckers in my classes."

Standing in front of six classes of derelicts who excel at making a teacher's life miserable is stressful enough. Doing this as a 23-year-old greenhorn compounds this stress. Throw in the pressure of having to get these150 mouthbreathers to pass a two-day writing test and you have the recipe for a future alcoholic. (Combine ingredients, mix well, let simmer for several years, add gin and vermouth and serve with three Advil.)

How did I fuck things up so badly for myself? The school would have been ecstatic if I had gotten 75 percent of these kids to pass the test. When the results came in that April, only six out of my 150 kids had failed the test. Huzzahs abounded. An olive wreath was placed upon my head. Men twenty years my senior whispered in wide-eyed wonder when I walked by. Paths cleared in the teachers lounge when I entered. Phrases such as "miracle worker" and "smoke and mirrors" were bandied about. Blow jobs were proffered and accepted. (Thanks again, Mr. Stevens. You were a great superintendent.) Why was this stunning success a mistake? Because I was then stuck with the lowest level students for the next six or seven years.

I had gained a reputation of being one of the county's so-called experts on teaching this bordering-on-retarded student. People were sent to observe my techniques, to pick my brain, to try to pick up some of my classroom magic by osmosis, as if just being in my presence might help them teach these future felons and baby-making machines. Of course, I had no idea in hell what I was doing. I think it all boiled down to me being a crude, lowlife moron myself and the kids related and didn't feel threatened.

Since I was stuck with these kids year after year, I took the advice of the old maxim about what to do when life hands you lemons. I made ... no, not lemonade. I made those squiggly little lemon peels and used them as the twists in my nightly trio of martinis. It didn't take me long to figure out that my status as the "B" level king carried a number of advantages, which I could parlay into making my job easier. I saw the teachers of the smart kids going crazy with issues of their own, issues I never encountered. When I stepped back and looked at my situation, I realized that teaching the dumb kids, despite all the negatives, was the best gig in teaching. Let me explain the advantages:

First of all, as you can see in the example described above, any success, no matter how meaningless, gets magnified to mythic proportions. "Oh my God! You got that kid to use periods? You really are magic personified!" "How did you get Thor to stop dragging his knuckles when he walks down the halls? All hail King Bitters" "Wait a minute. You're telling me that Russell sat in his seat for over four straight minutes yesterday? And you hadn't shot him with a tranquilizer dart? Unzip thy pants, O Captain, my Captain, and prepare to be fellated!" (That was Mr. Stevens, of course.) While the honors level teachers were catching hell for stagnant SAT scores, I was being heralded for getting kids to write essays that were more than one side of a page long.

Which brings me to another advantage of teaching kids of this ilk. While the honors teachers were spending two to three hours per night grading well-written papers, my nights were free to drink, watch sports, and ... drink. Unless the students' work related to the big writing test, most of the time I wouldn't grade it at all. I might have given it a cursory glance before tossing it in the trash. These kids not only didn't ask for their work back, they didn't even remember doing it. On those rare occasions when I did grade a set of papers and return them to the kids, I was usually met with questions like, "What's this? When did we do it? And why is my paper covered with all this red ink?"

They would never read the comments I wrote, comments that were painstakingly written while trying not to let condensation from my chilled martini glass drip onto their stellar classwork. They might glance at the grade, but as long as it was above a 59 percent, they didn't give a rat's ass about any helpful teacher comments, comments such as, "You might want to try making some kind of fucking point in this paragraph." So my evening free time was doubled. Instead of spending hours correcting that day's work and then concocting an engaging wing-ding of a lesson plan for the next day, all I had to do was type up some more busywork that would go from my typewriter to the ditto machine to the student desk to my hands to the trash bin. To be safe, I'd always make sure I buried it beneath some other papers when I trashed it, because there was always that one kid who cared a little too much, and if he saw his classwork in my garbage can, I would have been forced to come up with a believable lie right there on the spot. That's hard to do with a vodka hangover.

Which brings me to another advantage of teaching the dolts. They were easy to lie to. Sure, most of them had an ample supply of canny street smarts, but when they were in that school building and facing a horseshit teacher in a cheap tie and chalk-stained Dockers, they knew they had met their match in any battle of lies, half-truths and obfuscations. Had I ever gotten busted throwing away their work, I could have begun a circuitous explanation about how and why that work had to be trashed, and by the second "furthermore" or the third "albeit," the poor sap who aspired to work himself out of the dumb classes would realize that he had no chance of keeping up with my well-crafted string of meaningless doublespeak. He would leave the room confident that I had a damn good reason for throwing away his 40 attempts at proper apostrophe placement.

Even if he intended to complain to someone higher up, I had no worries. When it comes to kids like these, their complaints about teachers carried little or no weight. These kids were known as chronic gripers anyway, so if they went to someone with a complaint other than "She tried to make me eat her pussy for 20 more points," no one would have taken them very seriously. If this kid told a principal that I just tossed his work into the trash, the principal would have said something like, "Well, I'm sure you're mistaken, or Mr. Bitters no doubt had a reason, albeit a questionable one, and furthermore ..." The dolt would be reminded of his lack of status in the school, and I would be reminded of why I kept teaching the dolts.

But since I felt a little bad for him, because after all, he did actually care, I made sure to fudge his grade on his report card, which was yet another cookie when it came to teaching the great unwashed: the ease of grading. These kids didn't meticulously keep track of their grades. They didn't compete with anyone. They didn't worry about future college applications. They had one concern: Am I passing, and if not, tell me what the fuck I can do to get my grade up. While I never spitefully gave a jerky kid an undeserved lower grade, I often inflated the grades of kids I liked, or who worked hard, or who laughed extra hard at my bad jokes, or who needed that B in order to be eligible to score touchdowns on Friday night. I'm not the only one who participated in this allegedly unscrupulous grade inflation. One summer, the head football coach called me and asked if we could change 240-pound right tackle Tommy's grade from a D to a B. I told the coach I was insulted. Not by the request, but by the fact that he thought he actually had to call to ask me. The grade got changed and Tommy was knocking defensive tackles up and down the football field that fall.

I knew we wouldn't get ratted out, because that's one more advantage of teaching the EEG flatliners. They didn't talk about their English class at home as long as they were getting that passing grade. I could show movies with 37 F-words, three tit shots and one artistically filmed heroin injection scene, and not one kid would let this information slip once he got home, a home that almost certainly did not include "dinner table conversation" anyway. Even if a kid was asked, for the first time in his life, "What did your dumb ass do in school today?", he wouldn't blow the whistle on me and tell them that he did 45 minutes of the most mindless busywork imaginable or watch an R-rated sex-heavy movie while Mr. Bitters nursed a hangover and did two crosswords at his desk. Chances are he wouldn't remember as far back as 12:30 that afternoon anyway. And on those rare occasions when we did something interesting, like read that Joyce Carol Oates story with all the sexual innuendo and foul language that they just loved, they might tell their half-listening parents that they read a "good story about this dude who tries to get this girl to get in his car so that he can take her our for ... a milkshake." Milkshake meaning pussy, of course.

Even if a kid had spilled the beans on me in those days, I don't think a parent would have complained. They were just so damn grateful that I was passing their kid and somehow getting him through that bear of a writing test. Not that I talked to that many parents back then. Another plus when it came to teaching the "Losers of the IQ Lottery" was that parent contact was kept to a minimum. Back To School Night, or Open House, or Meet the Teacher, or Let's Both Put on a Pathetically Transparent Act of Mutual Caring, or whatever it's called where you live, was a breeze when I taught those kids. I got about three or four parents for each class, and even though I was 15-20 years younger than they were, I still sensed that they were a bit intimidated. And grateful. So I would sit in front of the room in my cheap tie and wrinkled Dockers and run my mouth for the entire time in a successful attempt to prohibit any difficult parent questions. Still, some caring parent would occasionally hit me with an unexpected query that packed a "Holy shit, this woman knows what's going on" wallop. However, I was usually able to deflect her challenging question with an eloquent answer about why some work isn't graded, or why there's so little homework, or why her son seems to have already seen so many of the half dozen movies she would bring home every Friday night from Blockbuster. I won't bore you with the entire answer, but it would sound something like, "...blah blah blah blah albeit part of our enhanced curricular guidelines, and furthermore ..."

Ned Bitters teaches high school and dreams of one day seeing one of his former students on stage at a strip club. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.