Thirty-two Years in the Business . . . Day 873

When Jack took on his first teaching assignment, he never entertained the thought of becoming a school principal. To tell the truth, he had never really given much thought to even becoming a teacher until about five years prior to his first day of real, in-the-trenches teaching. He had aspirations of becoming a veterinarian when he first left high school. It was the money mostly. He thought that animal doctors had it pretty easy really – you know, stick a needle or two in a dog or a cat, deliver a calf, pull some porcupine quills out of a dog’s nose, put an old pet out of its misery, cut the nuts off a pig . . . wait . . . he had already done all that stuff by the time he was 17 and as he recalled, it really wasn’t that easy or much fun for that matter. Why a vet then? Well, his school advisor, being of little ambition and even less creativity, figured that because Jack was a good student, with high marks in the maths and sciences and because he had a farm background, he could quite easily navigate his way through the workload of Veterinary College. Jack was a gullible sort, so he believed it also. He believed it, that is, until university life got the better of him. He never did enter the College of Veterinary Medicine. Instead he gave up the sweet life of a university student to become a . . . farmer.

After several years of shoveling dusty barley and stinky pig shit and, in minus 40-degree winter days, trying to thaw out frozen water bowls and, during late nights delivering baby pigs and harvesting, he started to think that maybe university life wasn’t all that bad.

One fall, after harvest was finished, he packed up the shop, sold the house, and reenrolled in post-secondary school. His first thoughts were to continue with his high school advisor’s dream of becoming a veterinary doctor, but he soon abandoned that idea and came up with some ideas of his own. He enrolled in the College of Physical Education and studied the world of sports and athletics. He was young and strong as he could be, and his entire ration of spare time while he farmed had been spent on playing baseball and hockey and football. He had been a runner and a cycler and a tennis player. He skied all winter, every winter, and in the summertime he played more baseball. He loved sports.

So, when he signed up as a student of Physical Education, he was simply beside himself with joy when he found out that in every class he took, every example of every theoretical topic presented by every professor and coach, was a sports example. Every blackboard and whiteboard pointer used in every lecture hall and every locker room was a broken hockey stick or decapitated golf club or fractured badminton racquet. His instructors and professors were famous athletes and coaches. His classmates were players on the university teams. He was surrounded, no immersed, in sport and athletics every waking hour of the day. He even dreamed about sports at night, and when he found himself at home on rare occasions with no homework and no games to play, he watched hockey and baseball and football and Olympic games on television. His life could not have been any better. But, then came the inevitable. It was time to graduate. He so wanted to be a permanent fixture in the life of his college. He wanted to be a Phys. Ed. student forever, but the faculty and staff would not have any part of it so they bestowed him with a degree and handed him off like a football in a last-minute goal line stand and, he was gone.

He was gone to the next logical stop-off point which was the College of Education. The College of Education, where every example of every theoretical topic, presented by every professor and wannabe teacher, was an idealistic example drummed up in some ivory tower in some dream-world situation that happened in a cartoon-land school somewhere in a distant fantasy-kingdom. Every blackboard and whiteboard in every classroom and lecture theatre were actually not blackboards and whiteboards at all. They were electronic smartboards and state-of-the-art high-tech digital LED display screens, set up for cyber-fed interaction amongst the lecturer and her students who sat in space-age chairs with controls on armrest consoles. His instructors were famous educational authors with gazillions of research papers and books to their credit but with zero experience in a real classroom. Jack’s life could not have been any more dream-like and whimsical. When Jack graduated, he was of the idea that he would be teaching in a school in some far-away city in the clouds where students would be teleported into their desks and where they would nod their shiny little heads in wonder and amazement with every spoken word that came out of his mouth. He looked forward to his future on ‘easy-street’ and imagined how brilliant and magnificent his life would be after thirty years of teaching in such a school

And then he landed back on earth in his first teaching position.

His first school was a Kindergarten to Grade 12 school located somewhere between the middle of nowhere and a few hundred miles in no particular direction from Timbuktu. The school itself had a student enrollment of several dozen and was located in a town with a population of only a couple dozen more than that. There weren’t enough teachers on staff to field a baseball team and even though the numbers of teachers may have supported it, since nobody had ever heard of basketball, a team for that sport was also out of the question.

Jack had actually been in towns like this before and, the school he grew up in was really not that much different than this one. However, his most recent and familiar training and experience had totally brainwashed him to such a degree that he forgot all about his small-town roots and his farm background and his love of sports. His expectations of this first-time teaching experience were that he would walk into a gilded, space-age classroom and espouse mathematical equations and chemical formulae that students would grasp easily because of the lucidity and articulation he deployed in his methodology. The students would then go on to play on the sports teams that he coached and they would win championships and trophies and then appear on local television to proclaim their success as being a direct result of the superior strategies and limitless efforts of their coach.

About 15 minutes into Jack’s first Biology class, he distinctly heard one of his students ask another student, “How do you spell NERD?”

Class sizes were small, so it was necessary to double grade and even triple-grade some of the students so that the teachers in the school could fit into a realistic ratio. Jack’s specialty was Physical Education. Unfortunately, this was not the specialty of many of the students in the school. Because most students had just spent some late hours driving trucks and combines on some of the nights before in order to bring in the harvest, they were not overly enthusiastic about learning the finer points of gymnastics, volleyball or social dance.

The harder the students in Jack’s first school tried to reel him in and love him, the harder Jack tried to make them into something they weren’t and, the less Jack showed of his true self. Really, the students had all the tools to do some amazing things, but Jack saw them only as roadblocks to him reaching the high ideals set out by his trainers in university. By Christmas of his first year, Jack was pretty much done. He spent most of his weekends driving to points as far away from the town and school as he could get, and then the rest of his weekend driving back to the school. At the end of each weekend, he would drive into town and past the school, hoping in earnest that it would maybe somehow be a pile of smoking and blackened rubble leftover from a five-alarm blaze that occurred while he was gone.

Over the Christmas vacation, Jack thought long and hard about handing in his resignation. He felt that teaching may not have been the path with heart that he thought it was. Then, one night he got a call from a parent who wanted to know if he could play on a curling team with him. Jack had done a lot of curling and had even taken a curling class in university that had subsequently groomed him to be part of some championship teams. He thought about it for a very short time and quickly responded in the affirmative. That call and that request and that decision and the resulting sequence of events that followed, were indeed the turning point in Jack’s teaching career.

On the first day of the curling bonspiel, Jack’s team won all three of their games. Jack’s shooting and tireless sweeping played a big part in the wins. His teammates were more than impressed with what he was able to do. The big thing though, was that the gallery for the games he played was full of his students from school. These students were in various stages of awe over his curling talents and of the very fact that this 'turkey' actually existed outside of the school building. His students were suitably impressed with the entertaining dance performance he took part in on the Saturday Banquet night at the tournament. Dance floor, table-tops, ice-surface, parking lot, streets – none of them were spared from Jack’s flying feet that evening. His students, and their parents, were also amazed that somebody that inebriated on one night and that hung-over the next day could curl the way he did and thus miraculously play a role in the winning of the weekend championship. Kids at school were literally asking him for autographs on Monday morning and wondering with great interest, if they would be learning the same dances in P.E. class that they had seen their teacher performing on Saturday evening at the Curling Banquet.

Anyway, that story about Jack had to be told, so that the rest of the story could also be told. Jack stayed on as a teacher at his first school for a number of years after that. He got to coach some really good teams, in lots of different sports. His students took part in science fairs and they went on field trips and many of them went to university themselves and some even became teachers. He took part in lots of community events and made many good friends for life. Which is all very good. One day during one of his classes in the fourth year of his tenure at that particular school, a student approached him about the possibility of organizing a whole-school event that would then qualify them to enter a big contest and possibly win some amazing prizes for the school. In order to be eligible to enter the contest, the activity concocted would have to somehow include every last student and teacher in the school. The contest winner, it appeared, would be the group with the most members taking part in the most outrageous activity over the longest period of time. Combinations of these three criteria would be considered by the judges, in an attempt to come up with a winner.

Jack and the student used every spare minute they had to deliberate over what activities should be included in the event. They eventually came upon the idea to divide the student and teacher population of the school into three separate teams and assign each team a color. The color would not only be the name of the team, but would also be the color of clothing each member would have to wear on the day of the activity. The event itself, it had been decided, would be a relay race of sorts. The race would, for example, start with blindfolded kindergarten students, carrying fresh eggs on spoons while attempting to weave their way through a gopher-hole riddled playground. These tiny students would then hand off the baton to Grade-one kids who would have to climb into a burlap sack and hop across the prairie, eventually passing the torch to some Grade-two students who would in turn perform some other weird task before relinquishing the baton to the next Grade and so on and so on. The final members of each team would be senior students who would have to run from the school to the downtown area and find one of the local business owners, whose name had been drawn without prior notice, and then spontaneously convince that person to relent to being kidnapped and brought back to the school, right down main street, hands tied, and blindfolded while standing on a scooter board supported and pushed (and / or pulled) by a group of Grade Eleven and Twelve students. The whole activity was very well planned and organized by both Jack himself and a committee of student helpers led by that one particular student who found much more joy in the planning of this activity than he had ever found in the regular classroom.

Now, time to rewind. Shortly after the initial idea of the whole-school activity and the early planning stages, the school itself underwent a performance audit, conducted at the request of the Superintendent of Education, and administered by a small group of independent and non-partisan individuals from one of the nearby universities. Students, teachers, parents, board members and other individuals from within the community were required to fill in questionnaires and submit to interviews by members of the audit team. After a week of interviews and questions, the team presented their findings and recommendations to the Superintendent and to the Board of Directors. Suggestions were made regarding the ongoing focuses of the school over a period of the next five years. One of the most surprising of all the recommendations made by the audit team was that, our boy Jack should indeed be promoted to the position of school principal, and that promotion should happen at the soonest possible opportunity. Two days later, the Superintendent and the Chairperson for the School Board invited Jack to attend a hush-hush sort of meeting, where Jack was offered the position of principal. After some gentle nudging by his superiors and some heavy thinking on his part, he accepted. Jack would assume the position one week from that day, which would be the upcoming Friday – which, as circumstance would have it, also be the day on which the school’s most outrageous group activity would be taking place. Jack didn’t really think about any of that at the time. He was thinking more about making plans for how he would handle the transfer of responsibilities within his school. He never really made the connection between the already-planned timing of the activity and his first day as principal.

On the next Friday, Jack walked to school in the morning, thinking about how that day he would be sitting in the principal’s office – as the principal – and how things would be different as far as his teaching load would be. He was also excited about the school activity that would be taking place that afternoon. He had some final things to set up and some equipment to lay out in place for the event. All of his morning classes were used, with the help of his senior students, to put boxes of supplies at strategic points here and there throughout the entire school yard. Hurdles and burlap bags and heavy wooden skis were placed around the running track. Chairs and blindfolds were left on the runway of the jumping pits. Scooter boards were propped up beside the main front entrance of the school.

At 1:00 pm, the relay race started. Every one of the 123 students in the school was outside running around wildly, screaming excitedly, alongside every one of the 10 teachers in the school who were also running around wildly, screaming excitedly. The team batons were exchanged at various points, here and there around the outside of the school. First, the Blue Team was in the lead. Then the Red. The Yellow team took over for awhile but fell behind shortly after that, only to end up leading at the conclusion of the day.

It was unbeknownst and in the middle of all this hoopla, that a long, teal-green Mercury Marquis automobile pulled into a parking spot in front of the school. The engine of the vehicle was turned off. The sole occupant opened the driver side door and stepped out onto the hot and dusty late-May gravel below the side-walk leading to the main door of the school. The School Superintendent had arrived. He had come to the school unannounced, specifically to see how his newest school principal, Jack, was coping with all of the serious educational responsibilities associated with the first day of his new principalship. He walked through the front entrance into an eerily quiet and deserted hallway. The main office was empty. The principal’s chair was tucked in neatly under the large wooden desk. He wandered from room to room, looking for any sign of life. There was none to be found. The gymnasium was dark and silent. The superintendent made his way back to the main entrance and walked back out toward his parked car. As he reached for the car-door handle, the front doors of the school burst open and three Grade 12 students exploded outside, grabbed a scooter board and bolted past him heading north toward the downtown area.

“Where is everybody?” the Superintendent asked of the students as they sped away.

“We’re all out behind the school,” one of the kids shouted back while disappearing down main street.

The superintendent walked around the south-west end of the school and into the back playground. His first order of business was to deftly dodge a water balloon heading in his direction. There were students walking on stilts around the running track and little kids carrying eggs on spoons and dropping the eggs and watching them break on the hard dry prairie, and then crying. Some of the students were jumping into the long jump pits with eggs in their mouths and some were skiing across the prairie grass with other kids riding on the tails of their skis. There were tug-of-wars and frisbee tosses and three-legged races and obstacle courses. Every kid in the school was outside of the school on that hot, dry Friday afternoon in May and it seemed like every one of them was doing something different and totally chaotic. Each of them, all-the-while, was totally oblivious to the presence of the superintendent. As he watched, another three Grade 12 students whizzed by – Blue Team this time – in search of a scooter board. Jack was nowhere to be seen anywhere in the bedlam and mayhem. The superintendent walked back to the front of the school just in time to see the first trio of Grade 12 students return on the scene, pushing the mayor of the town on a scooter board, blindfolded and with hands tied, over the crest of main street and toward the school. All of them, including the mayor, were screaming as the scooter board zig-zagged dizzily from side to side. As the Yellow Team broke through the finish-line ribbon, the superintendent, no doubt second-guessed his decision to hand the reigns of the school over to Jack. A gust of wind blew in the superintendent’s direction. His comb-over, flapped up, out, and down the side of his face. He watched as the mayor of the town dismounted his ride and shook his bound hands with one of the ribbon-keepers at the finish line. That ribbon-keeper was Jack. No sooner had the mayor been untied and restored to full vision when the Bank Manager was the next to be dragged across the finish line by the Blue Team. He also shook Jack’s hand with great vigor and enthusiasm. The superintendent had seen enough. He got back into his car and drove off. The rest of the day’s activities went well and by the end of it all, everyone was able to say that they had had a lot of fun. Jack’s school didn’t win any prizes in the contest, but there were some great photos and some of the students who were never really great in school, got to shine in their own special way, proving to be the absolute best at organizing events and looking after everyone else in the process.

On the following Monday, the Superintendent of Schools came to visit again at Jack’s School. He entered the school, to once more find a quiet hallway. But this time there was a smiling and happy receptionist ready to greet him at the front desk. There were students and teachers in the classrooms. He found Jack in the gymnasium putting some students through a series of track and field drills.

Not wishing to disturb his lesson, he waved at Jack from the doorway and hollered, “How was your first day on Friday?”

“Awesome - really good!” said Jack as he signaled back with a thumb’s up.

The Superintendent nodded, turned and retraced his steps down the hallway. As he passed the administrative assistant in the front office he smiled at her and noted, “I guess I don’t have to worry about this school. The place seems to be in pretty good hands.”

She laughed and quizzed jokingly, “Do you mean my hands, or those of the new principal?”