Substituting

9.

My first assignment as a substitute teacher was to an all black 5th grade class which met on the auditorium stage of a school in the Bayview district. Right away, I noticed something was different. My voice came from a place of confidence deep in my viscera, not nervously from my upper chest. At the first sign of trouble, I wrote down the names of the defiant children, brought them to the office at the first recess, and called their parents. I had no more trouble from the class.

The principal complimented me on how I handled the children. I still hadn’t developed good judgment with regards to authority and still had a self-destructive streak, so I told her all about the racist principal that had fired me from McKinley. I never heard from her or got assigned to that school again.

I developed a bag of tricks that were infallible for the first day or so of an assignment. I would stand in front of the class without saying a word and write on the board : “He Hitz small children.”

Then I would in my mind divide the class into teams. Ideally, there would be two teams, but three or four by rows also worked. Still without saying a word, I would make a grid using roman numerals and give out points to the teams that were sitting with their hands folded waiting for instructions. At the end of the day I would give out packs of M&Ms to the winning teams. I would give points for right answers, as well as good behavior. I would also cheat as much as needed to keep the teams tied. The best days were those in which everyone won.

Usually I ignored the teacher’s lesson plan – if there was one (there often wasn’t). My favorite and most effective initial lesson would go like this: I’d take out a checkerboard and a few pennies. “Who here would like to make some money?” I would ask. Of course everyone’s hand shot up. “Okay. Suppose you put one penny on the first square of the checkerboard.” I’d demonstrate. “Then suppose you doubled that penny on the next square and kept doubling the number of pennies all the way to the 64th square. How much money would you have on the last square of the checkerboard? Take a guess. If you guess right, you can have all the money.” Then I would go around the classroom writing the students’ names on the board and their guess. This way, no one would try to fool me by giving a fake name, or mixing up the names the way classes loved to do when they had substitutes. Of course, most students would guess $1.28. Some of the smarter ones might get up to $256 or even $512 which is the highest guess I ever got. Once I’d recorded all their guesses, I passed out paper and had the class calculate the number. I reviewed how they could either add the numbers together or multiply by 2. “The student who gets the closest will get some of the money.” The students went to work, and my morning was covered. The correct answer is of course 2 to the 64th power, divided by 100. Or $184,467,440,737,095,516.16 or 184 quadrillion dollars. No student ever came close, either guessing or calculating. By lunch time, I would give them the answer and give the person with the highest guess and the highest calculation each a dime, “some of the money.”

I also carried with me some movies I had stolen from the district’s film library. One was a Disney educational moving called “It’s About Time,” an hour long feature that explained relativity and anything else you wanted to know about time, a subject of continuing fascination to me.

The other movie was also an hour long Disney feature called “The Sea” which I would show if I had a multiple day assignment and had a chance to present my unit on water. I would introduce this unit by asking the class to name everything they knew about water, giving a point to whichever team for each answer. I would write the answers on the board. When we finally got to the fact that water is used to put out fires, I showed them my experiment, one I remembered from my basement laboratory at Pine Lake. With great drama, I fetched a glass of water, drank a sip to prove it was water, and then poured it on a mound of sodium peroxide, an innocuous-looking cream colored crystalline powder that burst into flame. It also filled the room with some fairly noxious fumes, but I had made my exciting point about how preconceptions can be deceiving.

I had one more trick which served me well in most schools, and that was to play a Folkways record made by Langston Hughes in 1955 called “The Glory of Negro History.” The format was a dramatized history, a pageant, and black students in 1969 were especially riveted. When possible, I would scour the school for headsets and hook them together so that each student could listen on his/her own headphones.
One time I played this record for a 3rd grade at one of the rare assignments I received to a predominantly white school in the avenues, and had them write their thoughts about it. The principal observed the lesson and called me into the office afterward, questioning whether such an activity was appropriate for young children. As proof of her point, she pointed out one of the students’ written response: “I think I would like to be a slave,” the student had written.

“You can see, she didn’t understand the lesson,” the principal said.

I didn’t know what to say, but I understood the child perfectly, because I had at times felt the same way myself. There is a purity of innocence in the slave experience, a righteousness of victimhood that guilt-ridden whites can only dream about. It was being part of a cause which was incontrovertibly just. And, given that this was 1969, it was about having the power of the civil rights movement at your back.

Nowadays, you sometimes hear people, black people in particular, wax nostalgic for their schools before they were integrated. It is no doubt generally true in the south that the segregated black schools with their committed black teachers served black students better than the “integrated” schools that replaced them. Many whites left those schools and most of the black teachers were simply fired, at least in the early days. But the segregated schools in San Francisco in 1969 were something else.

Going to Hunter’s Point in those days was like entering a war zone, complete with the smell of burning flesh from the meat processing plants in the neighborhood. There were few black teachers. Some of these were both sympathetic to the students and able to control their classrooms sufficiently that real learning occurred. About two thirds of teachers were in control of their classes, but this was a task most of them accomplished by giving students busy work: easy dittos that required little more from the students than coloring skills. Meanwhile, students roamed the halls and left the school grounds regularly. Little effort was made to contact the parents.

Some of the “liberal” reforms that were gaining popularity at the time – open classrooms, individualized learning, learning stations – backfired disastrously when implemented in the “ghetto” schools, as they were known. A classic example was the Sullivan Readers, a self-paced phonics instruction program. Each student worked in their own book. Most of the exercises were fill-in-the-blanks. In order that students would get immediate feedback on their work, the answers were right on the page, concealed by a “slider” which the student controlled. Students became experts at manipulating that slider so that they could find the answer without actually reading the question or revealing to anyone watching that they were peeking at the answers.

At one school near Candlestick Park, my reputation preceded me. While a group of teachers were sitting around the lunchroom, the vice-principal, a shrill Filipina, pointed me out. “Watch out for that one,” she said. “He goes to the parents,” as if it were a crime equivalent to child molesting.

Meanwhile, that spring, Sasha got pregnant. I was excited about becoming a father, and built the baby a rather elegant cradle out of redwood, even though I am not the handiest carpenter on the planet. I enjoyed the LaMaze classes, and to this day use the relaxation chant we learned there to put myself to sleep: “Loose feet, loose ankles, loose calves, loose thighs…” etc. up each vertebrate of the spine, through the cerebrum and back down to the jaw.