Paperback Writer

For those of you who may not already know, back in another lifetime, I was an English teacher at a school for at-risk adolescents . This school was located in Maine in a place where the people who live in the middle of nowhere consider to be the middle of nowhere.

If you read the title of this  blog, you can probably guess why I needed to tell you where the school was located.

And, as working with kids is often unpredictable (wait, did I say often?  Because I meant always unpredictable), it sometimes produced some hi-larious stories.

This is one of them.

Our kids came from all over the United States and sometimes came from other countries too.  One student flew over from Jordan and had the misfortune of having to have his shoes confiscated by the airline.  We had a young lady from the Bahamas who, upon her arrival, expressed a concern that her designer jeans would get dirty on our trail work that day (they did).  We also had students from Germany and Thailand and they were the nerdiest little punks you could imagine.  And once, we had a student from Canada.

This student was at the program over the summer and, on the Fourth of July, was dismayed by all the American flags being flown all over the place.  Well, not dismayed really but it did spark something in him that prompted him to ask his parents to send him several Canadian flags and when they arrived, he proceeded to hang them all over the school.  They were in the school building and the main lodge and the dining hall and the dorms.  Everywhere the kid could hang one, he did.

So anyway, fast forward a bit.  I don’t remember how long but the Canadian student was gone but his flags remained.  This apparently confused one of my newer students as we had the following conversation during some down time:

Him:  Are Canadian schools all like this?

Me:  What?

Him:  Are all Canadian schools like this one?

Me:  I don’t know.  I’ve never been to a Canadian school.

Him:  But- but isn’t this a Canadian school?

Me:  Uh, no.

Him:  But aren’t we in Canada?

Me:  We’re in Maine.

Him:  And isn’t that a part of Canada?

Me:  No.  No, actually, Maine is a part of the United States.

Him:  Since when?

Me:  Since 1820, actually.

Him:  Really?

Me:  Yes, really.  Maine has been a state longer than your state has.

Him:  Really?

Me:  Yes, really.

Him:  Then what’s up with all the Canadian flags?

So I explained to him about our Canadian student and how the school came to be blanketed in maple leafs.  And then we promptly took a break from literature to learn a little bit about American geography.

Seemed the thing to do.

As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, I used to teach English. I taught at a program for at-risk adolescents, troubled teens, who had been removed from their regular schools for a variety of colorful reasons. They would come to us for an average of eight to ten weeks and work on their various issues. Three days a week they had school. The other four days were spent out in the field (year round) learning survival and leadership skills.

For a lot of kids, this was hell. These kids were generally the city kids, the ones for whom roughing it meant going without valet parking or room service or internet access, cell phones or their iPods. Internet access or cell phone reception at the school, located in the middle of nowhere in Western Maine, was a little hard to come by. (iPods were banned until a student reached a certain level.)

What wasn’t hard to come by was the wildlife. Deer, moose, bears, coyotes, even a mountain lion (I didn’t see that one personally…that was the social studies teacher) could be found everywhere. One day, a moose went walking right through the middle of campus, very close to the school building where one of our students (who happened to be doing a little detoxing at the time) thought he was hallucinating when he looked out the window and saw the moose looking back at him.

Another time, a group of students was out in the field and came across a big bull moose on the trail. The moose then proceeded to charge them. No one was hurt. Later that night, a bear visited their camp. The guides thought the kids were up to something but they weren’t. As I found out that following Monday, they were busy being scared to death.

“Melissa,” one of them told me. “I was so scared. I had to pee so bad.”

And on the occasion when a student would threaten to run away, I would mostly just say, “Just watch out for the bears” and the student would look from me to the emergency exit door and then sit back down.

City kids. They’re so easy.

But today’s story starts one sunny spring or summer afternoon when a student, Brad (please note, all student names have been changed), fresh out of the jungles of New York City, was sitting in a classroom, taking a make up exam for his school. We teachers were taking turns checking in on him and making sure he was getting his work done. When a significant amount of time had passed, Brad still hadn’t finished his assignment and I was forced to investigate.

“I can’t concentrate,” Brad said. “There’s this moose outside making all this noise and it’s bugging me.”

“There’s a what doing what?” I asked.

“A moose,” Brad said. “It’s outside and it’s bugging me.”

“Because it’s being loud and rowdy?”

“Yes. There it is again,” Brad said. “Can’t you hear it?”

Wanting to give Brad the benefit of the doubt, I went to the emergency exit door and opened it. I listened for the loud and rowdy moose. I didn’t hear it. But I did hear something.

A chainsaw.

When it started up again, I turned back to Brad and asked, “Is that what you were hearing?”

“Yes!” Brad said, feeling vindicated.

“Yeah, sweetie,” I said. “That’s not a moose.”

“It’s not?”

“No,” I said then. “That’s a chainsaw.”

“A chainsaw?”

“Yes. Not a moose.”

“Oh.”

“So how about you finish that test now?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Brad said. Now he sounded disappointed.

At least Brad knew in which country he was. One of my students didn’t. But that’s a story for another time. Happy Monday. Hope this story made you smile.

As some of you may know, I worked, for a time, as an English teacher at an alternative school/program for at-risk adolescents. These were teens who had trouble with a variety of things from drugs and alcohol to self esteem issues, attitude problems, skipping school, flunking out of school, whatever. One kid was sent because of “The Party” she threw at her parents’ house when her parents were out of town. I take it it was a very destructive party. Another was court ordered to our program because he stole cars. Ironically, he was not the student who then tried to steal my car. But, as always, when kids are involved in anything, you get some truly hi-larious stories out of it. Here are some of mine:

When I first started at the school, we used thematic units that changed every month. The first unit was ancient times, then medieval time and so on and so forth right up on through modern times. It was easy for me to find literature to fit each unit and when we hit medieval times, I was especially excited because well, because I’m pretty obsessed with the middle ages. I don’t know if you know that about me, but I am. Anyway, due to time restraints, I was having a class read a translation of Sir Gawain And the Green Knight. We would read it aloud in class because I quickly learned that assigning reading as homework was a waste of time because no one would do it or understand it if they did. So we read aloud. Every night, I would come home and prepare the next section, reading each line over carefully in order to be fully prepared for anything that might come up. Anyway, one day, the class was moving along at a fairly good clip and we actually managed to get ahead and started to read a section I had not fully vetted. One student was read and I was following along and happened to read a little further ahead and saw the line containing the phrases “gay cock” and “erect Arthur.” In my head I was say many not nice words. I contemplated running away before they got to that line, or banging my head against the table until my brains leaked out but I didn’t. I sat. I waited. The student reading reached the line I was dreading and stopped.

“Gay cock?” he said, barely getting it out as he was in the midst of a fit of giggles. Much like the rest of the class.

“Erect Arthur?” was next. Followed by more giggles.

So I turned it into a lesson on the evolution of the English language. A gay cock is a happy rooster, kids, and Erect Arthur just means he’s standing up straight. And a faggot (yep, that one followed.) is a bundle of sticks.

Needless to say, I never taught Sir Gawain and the Green Knight again.