I had taught school for two years in the middle of Nowhere, Nebraska, when I interviewed for a new job at a bigger school on the outskirts of Omaha. I had the interview on a Friday afternoon after a full day of teaching and a fifty-minute drive. I was exhausted and probably looked that way.
I got the job for the following school year. That meant I could stay in my Omaha apartment, where I’d moved to after a gnarly winter alone in a farmhouse on a lonely highway.
The head of the English department at my new school wished me well as she handed me the six textbooks I’d need for the six different subjects I’d be teaching. It was so much work I could barely keep up with the next day’s lesson plans. I had a 7th High class for two periods (reading and Language Arts), an 8th Middle class and an 8th Low class. The kids were clumped together by ability, and I could write an entire memoir just about that first year.
The English department head told me during those first prep days before the year began that she could look at my class rosters and point out all the bad kids.
“No thanks,” I said. “I’d rather find out for myself.”
She looked offended that I had turned down her offer. But why would I want to label a kid before I’d even met them?
The second time we clashed was when I built a classroom library by buying books at garage sales and stocking an entire bookcase with Judy Blume, Paula Danziger, S.E. Hinton, joke books, and sports books with the 8th Low kid in mind. Some of them had never read an entire book.
“Susan, I heard you have Forever in your classroom library,” she said. “I don’t think you should let the kids read that book.”
Forever by Judy Blume talked about doing it, as in having sex. I’d learned from my kids in Nebraska that some of them were indeed doing it, when I asked a girl to go to the board and she flatly refused. After class, another girl came up to me and said, “Miss Middleton, don’t you know that she’s pregnant? She doesn’t want the other kids to know.”
“The kids have to ask their parents first before they can check out the book,” I told the department head.
We both knew that the kids could totally lie about that.
The English department head looked at me and walked away. She surely thought I was impossible.
Almost every kid in 8 Low checked out Forever. Some of them even finished it.
The high school Spanish teacher was married and leaving in January since her husband was getting transferred. I applied for the job, which meant I’d be moving to the high school and my middle school job would need to be filled. By that time, I was teaching two double periods of English and an introduction to Spanish class, plus a study hall.
The Department head went to the principal and complained that if I got the high school job, her 8th grade daughter wouldn’t get to have my Spanish class, and would he please not let me be hired away to the high school? Did I mention that her husband taught at the high school, so the family had some sway with the administration?
I didn’t get the job. The woman who did only stayed for a year and a half and then moved on or was let go, not sure which. I was asked to apply again for the high school job, but by then, I was nearly engaged and heading to California the following year, so I declined.
These memories came back to me on a walk around the reservoir with my friend who substitute teaches a few days each week, and somehow we got talking about labels on kids.
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 