After student-teaching in Caracas, Venezuela, and Des Moines, Iowa, at the local all-girls Catholic high school, I went to Spain for the summer to finish up my Spanish credits for my double Spanish-Elementary Ed degree, with a minor in teaching K-12.
Then I was off to my job in Ashland, Nebraska, population 2000. The principal called me to interview for the h.s. Spanish position, even though I had applied for the 3rd grade job. I got the high school job, probably because I was the only not-exactly applicant. They had no classroom for me, but set me up in the cavernous band room, with tables and chairs and a portable chalkboard on wheels.
Everything was going fine. Every morning a gifted kid came in to play the upright piano before the first bell. Soon I discovered he played by ear, without sheet music, and he could play anything. What a great way to start my day.
Then the band director, whose office was straight across from my makeshift classroom, decided to have some fun. He’d call in his band kids, one at a time, for some extra lessons: trumpet players, tuba players, clarinet. He decided to push me by leaving his office door open.
Have you ever tried to teach a class with a trumpet in your ear? I’d have to walk over to the office and pull the door shut myself. It became a game for him, and this was 1979. Women were still fighting for equal everything (surprised? Don’t be).
I eventually had to get the principal involved to get the band guy to shut his door.
Then Nebraska winter came. The band room was not well-insulated. A row of single-pane windows along the back wall didn’t help. We could hear the wind howling through the cracks in the construction.
One day it was so cold, I held class in the much warmer hallway. Kids sat along the lockers, still in their winter coats. We had our daily conversation warm-ups, and teachers down the hall with open doors complained. Someone sent a runner to tell us to be quiet, to which I said,” I am having class, so no, we can’t be quiet.” The principal tiptoed down to check it out. He opened the band door, felt the rush of cold and said, “Carry on.”
When it was time to sign contracts for the next year, he called me in and asked if I was planning on coming back. I said only if he found me a regular classroom with walls and heat. He said he would.
The next fall, the principal directed me to a small room behind the typing room, not big enough to be a regular classroom, but warm and cozy. The rural high school had class sizes around twenty kids, so it was good enough. Now, instead of the crappy band teacher, I had the elderly typing teacher shooting daggers at me every time I passed through her typing class in progress – clackity, clack, clack.
We were going to make piñatas. I had the kids blow up balloons and then put wet newspapers on them to start the papier maché. There was nowhere to put them to dry, so I hung them from the ceiling in bunches during my planning period.
The next day, the boys couldn’t stop tittering. Was my slip showing (we wore skirts and dresses back then)? Did I have something coming out of my nose? Then I saw it. I’d hung one bunch of two round balloons with one long balloon. It was papier maché porn, hanging from the ceiling.
Another day I asked a shy girl to go to the board to complete a sentence in Spanish, fill in the blank. She refused. I asked again. She shook her head. Why was she being defiant?
After class, her girlfriend hung back to tell me her friend was pregnant. I thanked her for the heads up, then tried to get my planning done while typewriters clacked on the other side of the glass wall.
At the end of the year, the boys picked up the P.E. teacher’s VW Beetle and turned it sideways in its spot in the parking lot. I feared for my own car, but it didn’t happen. However, younger kids threw rocks at my car with Iowa license plates.
After all, it was Nebraska.
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 