3-21-70

     “That’s only the second mistake I’ve ever made in my life.”

     It was my stock response when the kids in class delightedly pointed out a mistake I had made either on a handout or something I had chalked on the board.

     “What was the first one?” 

       I removed the plain silver band from my left ring finger, held it up to the light and read the inscription, “3-21-70.”  They laughed.  I laughed.  But down the hall, someone was not laughing.

     My classroom wasn’t Las Vegas.  What happened there didn’t stay there, I found out.

     One of the few in-services that I remember was a standup comedian who entertained the faculty from a dozen or more schools at a “Collaborative In-Service”.  Many of the schools in the area combined their resources and hired a high-powered consultant to come enhance our abilities to educate.  One time the great guru Madeline Hunter spent six hours sharing with us strategies for dignifying incorrect answers that students might give in the course of a class discussion.

     The standup comedian humorously stereotyped the various faculty members in the typical school.  I remember two of his descriptions, the shop teacher who was on the bottom rung of the faculty social ladder, who may not have dressed very well to come to work, for you never saw his “school” clothes because he always wore white coveralls to class.

     On the other end of the spectrum was the home-ec teacher.  She would always be so well coiffured and dressed that she resembled an iced cupcake or an ice cream cone.  Like a small boy who can’t resist sampling the icing, you wanted to leave a small imperfection on the home-ec teacher’s appearance.  She was the purveyor of good manners, the one whose frown let you know you had trespassed with some form of bad taste.

     It was funny because the stereotype was so accurate.  I don’t remember what he said about English teachers, or math, science, or social studies teachers, either, for that matter.  But I had firsthand knowledge of that frown, a frown that went around corners and up the stairs. 

     One time after I made my “second mistake” comment, the girls in the class chortled and one gleefully informed me that Mrs. **** said that was a very poor attitude to have towards marriage.  It seems in home-ec class they were doing a unit on marriage and family.  Something that came up in class prompted the girls to share with Mrs. **** my referring to my wedding ring to reveal my “first mistake.”  Mrs. **** did not hesitate to inform her class that viewing marriage as a mistake was certainly not a correct attitude, especially if one wished to succeed in marriage.

   I was amused and annoyed.  My gut reaction was to say my attitude towards marriage really wasn’t any of Mrs. ****’s business.  By some stroke of good luck, I managed to stifle my natural reaction.  Instead, I said something like, “Mrs. **** said that, did she?”

     The girls assured me that she had indeed emphatically stated that.  They leaned forward on the edge of their seats, waiting eagerly for me to react.  I saw they were trying to start a war between faculty members.  I saw a never-ending string of pointed comments between me and Mrs. **** ferried by the sophomore girls.  I wanted nothing to do with that, so I stifled myself.

     That incident fairly well ended my wedding ring act to detract attention from my grammatical errors.  Mrs. **** won that battle pretty easily.  I soon forgot the whole thing and probably would not have remembered it.

      But then the 21^st of March really did roll around. 

     At every faculty meeting, we were reminded to get into the hall as soon as we could after the dismissal bell chimed at the end of each class period.  Most of the discipline problems the principal had to handle occurred in the three minutes between classes when every student was in the hallway.  That’s when students sniped at each other and occasionally a fight broke out or someone was reduced to tears by an insult.   Faculty presence prevented many of those problems.

     I was standing by my door as usual between second and third hours.  I never noticed that the girls spirited a large bundle past me into my classroom.  Had they set up a decoy to distract me?  No matter.  They got past me without my notice.

     When the bell rang to start class, I entered the room to find on my desk, a rectangular cake, chocolate icing, with the inscription, “Happy Anniversary Mr. Ottem” in contrasting colored icing.   

    I was surprised and flattered.   I told them I was flattered that they had remembered my anniversary.  The girls were delighted. I avoided asking if they had treated Mrs. **** on her anniversary.  I skirted the reason why they remembered that day, too.  Make love, not war. 

      Of course, the students wanted to dig right in, but disciplinarian me insisted that we finish our work first and spoil our lunch second by enjoying the cake at the end of the hour, which we did.  We carefully cleaned up after the feast, for in those days it was against the rules to have refreshments in the classrooms.  No sense starting a war with the janitor.

Book Test Cheater

     There was a knock at the door.  Book in hand, I moved to the door and opened it.   I don’t remember what I was trying to explain to the class, but room, students, everything became wall paper.

     Outside my door in the hallway, students talked while they rummaged in their lockers.  It was game day and those in the hallway were released early from class.  They were supposed to be quiet since classes were being held in the rooms up and down the hallway.

     Early-release game day meant that the game was out of town. Athletes had to leave during afternoon classes in order to get to the game on time.  They also dressed up on game day.

     I saw the neatly curled and arranged hair as she, head bowed, looked down at her polished dress shoes that almost touched as she stood there.  Her hands at her waist worried a wrinkled handkerchief.  Her knees, just visible below the hem of her skirt, alternated back and forth. 

     “Mr. Ottem, can I talk to you?”  I stepped far enough into the hallway to close the door, then backed until my heels nearly touched the door.  Almost without pause she continued. 

     “I cheated on a book test today.  I’m sorry.  It won’t ever happen again.”  The words poured out rapidly without hesitation.  Briefly she glanced up at me as she spoke, then back down again.  In the brief glance I saw not tears, but the pain and anguish that filled the eyes.

     At the end of her speech, she glanced up and waited briefly for me to speak.  I could say nothing. I had no words.  No clichés from previous experiences jumped to mind.  I was totally taken by surprise.   I smiled stupidly.  At least that kept my mouth from dropping open. 

     Then head still bowed, she abruptly turned and wove her way amidst her fellow students.  I watched her until she was out of sight around the hallway corner. 

     I didn’t have the luxury to stand in the hallway and reflect on what happened.  Even if I had come up with a proper reaction, I couldn’t follow her down the hall to talk to her.  There was the class I was trying to teach, the lesson to be completed.  The entire experience had to be tucked away for later rumination.

     Ruminate was all I ever did.  I had already graded the tests.  I knew she had failed it.  It was the first book test that I gave where I had changed the answer sequence from the original test.  It went to her class because it was the one I suspected had the most cheaters.  The trap worked.  About half of the class had gotten a zero on the 30-question test.

      As soon as I could, I revisited her answer sheet.  She didn’t get a zero on it.  She had erased some of the first few answers and replaced the wrong answers with correct ones.  I knew she had read some of the book, enough to know that the “cheat” answers were not correct. 

      What should I do?  Punish her because she had had the integrity to confess her crime?  Try to find out from her who was at the bottom of the scam?

     She had punished herself enough.  Being a cop was a part of teaching I disliked.  I had temporarily stopped yet another attempt to work the system. Would it do any good to find out who was the instigator? 

     Something else occurred to me.  I had always thought of her as a good person.  That was one reason her confession left me speechless.  But I didn’t respect her less because she cheated.  I respected her more. Because of the incident, I saw the depth of her honesty and self-respect.  She was a person who had set high standards for herself and would probably live up to them. She had the fortitude to face the person she had offended and admit her wrongdoing.  She was a good person, a person worth knowing.

       So I did nothing.  Way led onto way.  The year came to an end.  She did not take A-P English, the only class I taught for seniors.  She graduated and went to a junior college. 

      Since then I have met her a couple of times.  She acknowledged my greeting, but I had the impression that she really would prefer not to talk to me.  I think for her I have become a pain stimulus; the sight of me reminds her of a painful episode in her life that she would prefer to forget.

     So I found a person worth knowing and I lost her at the same time.  Someday, maybe I’ll be able to explain to her that things happen for a reason, that we learn more from our failures than from our successes, all those other clichés that apply.  Someday, maybe I will be able to understand all that myself.

     

       

Book Report

    To be an English teacher, you have to believe that knowing how to read is one of the most useful skills a person can have.  By reading you can learn anything, go anywhere, experience what it is like to be another human being, another creature even.

    So God invented book reports.  (In an attempt to buy time to finish reading before he had to hand in a report, Moses dashed those early stone pages to the ground.)

     The idea behind book reports was that each student would get independent practice at reading comprehension without the help of instructor and fellow students.  Each person could choose a subject in which she was interested.

    Something there is that doesn’t love a rule, to paraphrase Mr. Frost.  That seeks, like water descending, the pin hole or rent in the fabric that will allow it to escape the container, to circumvent or nullify a rule.  Or is it to follow a higher rule, like the law of gravity?

      Suffice it to say that always there will be he (or she) who attempts to con the system, in this case, to find his way around reading a book.  They didn’t tell us in education classes that we would spend a lot of time trying to combat cheating.  The English teacher who wants to be able to look at himself in the mirror with some semblance of self-respect will have to deal with cheating on vocabulary tests and book reports.

      I was never very comfortable with the oral report because I always felt for the shy bashful one who hated standing up in front of the class giving a speech.  Then you never knew what sewage would flow from the mouth of certain characters in the room.

    So I depended on the written report.  It killed two birds—giving the student the chance to practice writing in addition to reading comprehension.  They were a pain and took time to grade, especially if I wasn’t familiar with the book being reported on.   I was still shaving using the mirror until colleague Joe relayed a tidbit of information to me.

     Students somehow think teachers are deaf. They self-incriminate at every turn, never in front of the one who will convict, but in front of any-and-everybody else.

     Maxine is charging $10 for a book report, Joe tells me.  What?  Yes, she reads the book (Maxine loved to read), writes the report, sells it to the cheater. 

     She has her rules.  The purchaser has to copy the report in his own hand and destroy the report—no selling it second hand.  Not only does that prevent duplicate reports being handed in by other students (a sure indication someone didn’t read the book).  It keeps the profit in Maxine’s purse.  (As Americans, you have to admire Maxine’s ingenuity and ambition to turn a buck or two with a beloved hobby.)   

     Joe turned to teaching late in life.  He did his student teaching in Nebraska.  His supervising teacher had a shelf full of books for which he had made tests.  The student had three weeks to read the book and then take the test to prove she had read the book.  Joe brought the system with him.  He persuaded me to adopt the system.

     The downside:  making the tests.  It takes a lot of time to make a valid check of comprehension.  The upside:  grading took little time.  Joe used short answer and completion questions.  I opted for multiple choice.

     One day after we had taken a book test, I was straightening chairs after everyone left.  Under a desk I found a slip of paper with numbers 1-30 and a letter beside each number.  A quick check showed that the pattern of numbers and letters matched the answers to the test we had just taken.  The water had found its way through the membrane.  The rule had been subverted.  Some earlier test-taker had copied the answers and had passed them on to another person or persons.

      I could:  make new tests (a lot of work), rearrange he questions, rearrange the correct answers.  I opted for option three.  With computers, it wasn’t too hard to change the answers around so that what was once correct answer “C” was changed to “A”, etc.  Before computers, the test had to be completely retyped.  Before Xerox established itself in the workroom, a new ditto master had to be typed and run through the spirit duplicator.  With computers and saved documents, it wasn’t too hard to change the answer sequence and print new copies.

    Then I had at least two different versions of each test with a different answer key.  I avoided labeling the test because that would make it easy for the cheater to figure out.  Each version had to look like every other version so the cheater would have trouble figuring out which cheat sheet to use.  I had to be able to identify which test key to use to grade each test.

     For many years I numbered each copy of every test so I could be sure nobody swiped one.  I asterisked the last test so I knew how many copies there were.  I made the even numbered tests one version, the odd-numbered another version.  The student put her test number on her answer sheet (if you mark on the test you are in trouble and I will know by the number on your answer sheet who marked on the test) and I would stack all the odd numbered answer sheets in one pile, the even numbered ones in another pile and could grade with the correct answer key.

     Life got a little easier when the library subscribed to a service that provided books AND tests for each title.  I had my own books with tests recommended for students headed for college.  If a student found a book impossible to read, she could, with my permission, substitute another book from the library’s many choices.  I also allowed extra credit for reading books off the library list.  (I had a fair-sized extra credit list with my own tests, too.)

      The library tests were taken and graded on computer.  Each test was ten multiple choice questions.  There were several questions for each book, but only ten were used.  Each time you brought the test up, you got different questions, so that prevented cheating by passing answers to another “reader”. 

      So that stopped cheating?  No.  The librarian had student assistants for every hour of the school day.  Students got an elective credit for working as a library assistant.  One brighter-than-average assistant found a way into the test program.  He brought up people who had read a book.  That person would take the test under someone else’s name.

     To stop that method of cheating, the librarian put the test program under lock and key and administered the test herself.  But we’re not done yet.

     When the student completed the computerized test, the program would grade the test.  The librarian would print out a copy of the test result which showed the student’s name and the title, author, number of points the book was worth (determined by length, reading difficulty, vocabulary, some other factors) and the number of correct answers out of ten.  The student brought me the copy to be filed and received either extra credit or substitute credit for an assigned book.  The computer kept a record of all the tests a student took over his four years in high school.  A student couldn’t get credit for reading a book a book more than once throughout her high school career.

     One bright energetic fellow worked pretty hard to duplicate that print-out with his computer.  He had the facts right, in the right order.  He couldn’t quite manage the company’s “letterhead” which appeared at the top of every test result.  His fraud was soon discovered.  Thereafter, the librarian personally signed each print out.  No library-lady’s signature, no credit.

     Then I retired.  Did the attempt to work the system end when I left?  I doubt it.

     Were my citizens more dishonest than most Americans?  I doubt it.  Something there is that doesn’t love a rule.  It seems human nature to try to get around a rule, to work the system.

     Just ask the IRS.  They could write a book. . . . 

                    

Rattlesnakes I Have Known

     The Ford pickup rolled ever so slowly across the flat farmyard.  Dad tried to stop the forward roll of the ’50 Ford pickup by pressing his hands on the driver-side door and pushing rearward, his legs angled toward the front of the pickup, his upper body slanted toward the pickup’s rear, every muscle straining.

     He had come rolling into the yard, stopped abruptly and jumped out in a hurry.  The door slammed.  The pickup either never came to a complete stop, or it started rolling forward on the gentle incline that was our farmyard.  Dad apparently forgot to leave the thing in gear.  He didn’t want to take the time to open the door, jump in and engage the transmission.  He was in a hurry.  It is an indelible picture in my mind.

    I was riding my tricycle in the yard.  I didn’t see the snake.  I was pretty close to it, too.

    The other mental image of that day is Dad again, this time with some kind of flexible metal tube raised in an arc over his head, about to come down on the rattlesnake.  The tube was a piece of exhaust pipe for a Maytag gas-powered washing machine.  He killed the snake by whacking it with the flexible exhaust pipe.

     The earliest washing machine in my memory was a white with red trim ringer machine powered by electricity.  The exhaust pipe must have been in the dead-metal pile near the shop.  It must have been the nearest thing for Dad to grab.  There would have been shovels and bars in the shop, or a gun or two on the back porch.  He must have been in a hurry.

     I don’t remember being removed from the scene, but I bet I was, before anything else happened.  I don’t have a clear picture of the snake or the disposal of its dead carcass.  From that time on, I have had a fear of snakes that I have never completely conquered.  It was my first experience with a rattlesnake.

     Most of my rattlesnake experiences happened in Kansas, in my front yard.   November of 2007, I came home from a day of helping a contractor tear off and replace shingles.  There he was, a rattlesnake stretched out in the driveway tracks.  Jesse the dog was visiting.  She spent the day in the pickup while I was on the roof.  She got a little more pickup time while I went into the house and grabbed the shotgun.  I let Jesse out after I had the snake safely interred.

    Sometime early in the 21^st century, the Goodwife and I were coming home in the old Buick we had bought from the church.  This snake was lying on the west edge of the driveway, about 30 yards south of the garage.   The Goodwife was driving.  She stopped and backed up.  I tried to convince her that I should get out and make sure it was a rattler.  But no, back and forth we went five or six times over the hapless critter.

     Finally, I said, “Do you think you killed it?”  Turned out not to be as facetious as I intended it.  I waited till we were safely garaged before I got out of the car.  I walked back to where the mangled snake lay. The rattle portion was pretty badly damaged.

    I put in a call to Brett.  He was one time a custodian at school.  He was also a taxidermist who made some spending money with his hobby.  His specialty was lifelike rattlesnakes coiled and ready to strike on pieces of weathered lumber.  He once brought a trailer out to the farm to take a load of weathered boards left over from the destruction of the old tin barn that went down to make room for the current red barn.  He also used some of the wood to make rustic picture frames.

     Brett decided it might be worth his time to take a look at the mangled snake.  I warned him that the rattles were damaged, but he said that was okay, he had lots of rattles.  He showed up about an hour after the execution.  I followed him out to the site.  He picked up a good size rock from the road and tossed it at the snake.  Never assume it’s dead, he warned.

     Sure enough, the rock landed by the snake, and faster than you can blink an eye, that snake did a 180, the head facing north as it lay “dead”, now facing south, and us.  We both backed up, but the snake held his position.

     I brought a gallon ice cream container, the closest thing I could come up with for the bucket Brett requested.  He got a stick about a yard long and very carefully ran it under the snake’s midsection.  Carefully he lifted the snake.  It held the same posture as it had on the ground.  I thought it might hank limply over the stick like a rope, but it came up still stretched out.

    Carefully, Brett let the snake tail first down into the pale.  He worked the upper body and head down until the snake was all curled up in the bucket.  Then very, very carefully, with his hands at about four and eight o’clock on the ice cream lid, he started it up from the ground beside the bucket, worked it slowly over the top of the bucket, keeping his hands out of the way as much as possible.  He got the lid on and snapped it firmly in place.

     “Now what, Brett?” I asked.  How you gonna get him out of there?”

     “I’ll put him in the freezer for four or five days.  Then he’ll be safe to handle.”  Brett said he could get up to $375 for a mounted rattler if he left it on display in the local gun shop during pheasant season.  

     One rattlesnake I almost thought was pretty.  Brett had begun working for K-Dot, the state highway folks and was out of town.  It was summer and I was in a hurry to get back to the farm.  I needed some kind of lumber for a project at the farm, and I knew right where to get the lumber.  It was under the overhang on the west side of the house. 

      I walked along the south side where the deck is now.  As I crossed the west sidewalk, I came to a sudden halt and slowly backed up.  About two paces in front of me, stretched out in the grass, was the rattler.  It was a hot summer day, but I was chilled.  As I sighted the rattler’s head over the bead on the 12 gauge, I saw that he really had a pretty pattern and a slightly different color than most of his breed.  Too bad Brett was out of town.

     I went about my business of getting lumber from the pile beneath the overhang, but I found it very difficult to back up.  I had to be eyeing where I stepped all the time.  In the back of my mind was the story in Huckleberry Finn where Huck coils the dead snake near Jim’s bedroll for a joke.  The dead snake’s mate came along and waited patiently by the corpse all day and bit poor old Jim when he went to crawl into bed.  A snake as pretty as the one I had just dispatched had to have a mate somewhere near.  (It never showed up, that I know of.)

      The case of the woodpile rattlesnake had a sort of gallows humor to it.  It was spring and I was cleaning up around the yard.  I was carrying remnants from the near the garage where I had used the table saw, across the driveway to the woodpile.  A bunny, one of a ubiquitous supply, lay twitching in the grass near the woodpile. 

    I didn’t think too much of the sight because of experiences I had a few times during the winter.  The first time I saw the “dead” adult bunny, I dug a hole in the road ditch near the driveway.  When I went with the shovel to pick up the “dead” bunny stretched out in the yard, he jumped up and took off running.

     The Goodwife didn’t entirely believe my story of an epileptic bunny, so after one or two more seizures, the bunny had one just outside in front of a west window.  I went inside and took the Goodwife to the window.  We watched for maybe five minutes.  The bunny sat up, shook his head a few times, and finally loped off.  My story was suitably corroborated.

     So when I saw the young bunny twitching in the grass by the woodpile, I just said to myself, “Hmm, epilepsy handed down to the next generation.  Another epileptic bunny.”  I turned with my armload of wood scraps to the pile I had been visiting all morning.  I stopped in midstep with the sudden hissing and rattling coming from near the pile.

      This one was a young snake, not very long, but apparently hungry, judging from the size of meal he had chosen, and apparently suitably poisonous.  He crawled under the woodpile where he could watch me.  I was afraid to take my eye off him because if he disappeared, I’d never be able to pick firewood off the pile without a ten foot pole.   I hollered until the Goodwife came to see what was the ruckus.  By the time she arrived on scene, the little bunny had ceased twitching.

     She returned with shotgun and shell, and I dispatched the snake under the woodpile.  This time, neither bunny nor headless snake took off when I approached with the shovel to bear them to their grave.

     The most exciting rattlesnake story was also our first rattlesnake adventure at our rural Kansas home.  One of the advantages of moving out of town was the girls could have dogs.  I wouldn’t let them have a dog in town.  It wasn’t fair to have a dog penned up in a yard or dog run.  So we had two dogs who roamed free of fence or leash.

     It was fall, we had returned from Colorado to start the new school year, and I had plenty of yard work to catch up on after a summer of neglect.  One afternoon after school, I was running the lawn mower on the north side of the house.  The Goodwife came running around the east side of the house, obviously in great distress, yelling something I couldn’t hear over the roar of the lawn mower.

     When I shut the mower off, she informed me there was a rattlesnake in the front yard.  Then I could hear the dogs barking.  I came around the house to see a good sized rattlesnake coiled under the bush near the sidewalk in the front yard.  He was rattling furiously, his head swiveling back and forth to keep an eye on all the potentially harmful creatures in his vicinity.

     Licorice, the little black dog, was nervously running back and forth near the garage, a good, safe thirty feet away from the snake.  His bark had reached hysterical pitch.  The girls stood on the porch watching.  Iko, the hyper lab mix, was very uncharacteristically sitting on her haunches in the shadow of the house, watching the snake, barking occasionally.  She looked like a sunflower plucked from the earth about an hour ago and left in the sun.  Her leaves were all wilted and her usual vibrant joy of life had left her.

     Iko had “killed” a huge bull snake a few days earlier in the right-of-way that runs east of the yard and allows access to the pasture and the many utilities therein.  Apparently, the bull snake had grown accustomed to our traffic pattern of coming up the driveway and turning into the garage.  When a pickup towing a trailer full of horses came up the drive and didn’t turn into our garage, it ran its four axles over the snake stretched across the roadway.  Iko found the wounded snake and finished it off.  The rattlesnake had proved to be a more vigorous opponent. 

      I thought briefly of shovel or hoe.  Then I thought of the shotgun leaning in the corner of my closet, the box of shells on the floor near the butt.  That would be easier on both the snake and me.

     Having fetched the shotgun and shells, the Goodwife joined the gallery on the porch.  I circled around the snake, finding a path that would allow me to hit the snake and not the bush, nor spectators, nor any cattle in the nearby pasture.

     The shotgun blast provided the exclamation point to the uproar.  The headless snake went limp, its rattling ceased.  The dogs stopped barking.  A moment of silence ensued. 

      The danger of the snake over, its poisonous head blown into oblivion, our attention turned to Iko.  She was bleeding from the tongue

     The Goodwife put in a call to the local vet.  In his usual laconic style, the vet bluntly stated that if Iko was a big dog, she would survive, a little one, she would die.  Bleeding from the tongue didn’t mean she got bitten on the tongue.  The poison breaks down the capillary walls.  A bite anywhere on the muzzle would cause the tongue and nose to bleed because the capillaries are close to the surface in the tongue and mucous membranes.   He didn’t keep antivenin because it was $100 per dose and had a shelf life of 30 days.  Bring her in and he would give her an antibiotic and an antihistamine.

     So Iko, who loved to ride in the back of the pickup and would easily jump in anytime the tailgate was lowered, had to be helped into the pickup for a fifteen minute visit to the vet’s office.  By the next morning her energy had returned.  The only ill effects beyond the first night after the bite, was a swelling that affected first one jaw for a day, the other jaw on the second day, and her entire face on the third day. 

     By the fourth day everything was back to normal.  After that, any snake that crossed Iko’s path was a dead snake.  She would grab them behind the head where they couldn’t bite her and shake them with her powerful neck and jaws.  They would pop like a bull whip and they would be dead.         

      There would be no more snake problems as long as Iko was on the premises.

      In the annals of the earth, man and dog surpass the rattlesnake’s ability to kill.