I work on about 80 percent of school days, and park next to the above van on about 80 percent of those days. I think Ron's guy is there as often as I am. There are around 500 kids in the school, ranging in age from 5 to 11, so it's probably not surprising that plumbing events are common as spilt milk in the cafeteria, especially considering that supervision tends to be light in the rest rooms—the boys might be more culpable, and elementary education is a female dominated profession. More than once have I been recruited, while strolling down the hall, to check up on Aiden or Avery or Juan or Jamal, who has been about his business in there for a suspiciously long period of time. Usually I end up playing the part of the home plate umpire breaking up a confab on the mound, which in this case is sometimes a wet one, though I don't investigate. That's for Ron, the sewer rat.
I have to say that these mostly 30ish women teaching in the school are doing the lord's work. My boss, for example, seems to be kind of a utility all-star. Just one of her tasks is evidently to fill in at a moment's notice when another teacher doesn't make it to school in the morning. Kids can manipulate subs, but they don't conduct their experiments on her: more like, there's a new drill sergeant on base and she's known to be tougher than the regular one (to say nothing of knowing all the lessons for every day in every grade, and the name of every kid in the school, their test scores, the language they speak at home, the family background if it's notable, the teachers they've had in prior grades, the trend of their academic performance, probably the number of ribbons they won on track & field day). She might think I'm better at my job than I am, because her attendance at tutoring sessions changes everything. Suddenly the kids are well behaved and I can teach instead of just try to impose a semblance of order. If someone's attention wanders, she doesn't say a thing, just aims an irritated look in their direction and the behavior ceases. To mortals, she possesses a super power, and no doubt I'm fooling myself to think that she might not know that I just get to borrow it when she's around.
Her "office" is an unused classroom she shares with me and a bunch of others. Her "desk" is a table top that has an area roughly twice that of her chrome book. She's about 30, has a master's degree, and probably earns less than people I used to work with who were perplexed by 5th-grade story problems such as
If Mike owns a one-third interest in a parcel of real estate, and he conveys one-fifth interest to Jim, who also has a one-third interest, how much interest does Mike now own? And how about Jim?
Yet these stumped colleagues of mine went through the schools before there was a crisis triggered by "woke" ideology, the teachers' union, etc., etc., blah, blah, whine, whimper, triple exclamation points. I'm not buying it. If teachers could "indoctrinate" and "groom" kids, they'd take a spare moment to groom them in the proper use of the apostrophe, too. This complaint concerning "the youth of today" goes back centuries and yet somehow the world keeps creaking along—maybe in part because some people, instead of freaking out about same-sex greeting cards for sale at Target, throw themselves into important and challenging work that's grossly undervalued by the vaunted market.
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