“I became a scientist,” he said.
“I became a science teacher,” I said.
“I’m going to tell my mom I was so smart.”
Ms. Bell came by and told people how to turn in their papers. “I want you to put them in the bin, but facedown, and like this, so they’re facing in the opposite direction.”
Tabitha, who’d returned from the nurse, was holding her hand up.
Norman said, “It looks like it’s inflamed.”
“It was the popcorn,” said Tabitha. “I put my hand in the bag of popcorn. Troy said it’s Newman’s Own, so it shouldn’t have sunflower. The only other things I’m allergic to are coconut and nickel. Like pants buttons.”
“Wait a minute,” said Troy, chagrined. “One was movie theater popcorn and the other was Newman’s.”
“So you don’t even know what you’re feeding me?” said Tabitha.
“No,” said Troy.
Tabitha shook her head. “That’s an hour of doing nothing.”
“Troy almost killed Tabitha,” said Norman.
“What if I, like, lost the use of my hand?” said Tabitha. “How bad would you feel?”
“I would feel terrible,” said Troy.
“I’d be waving around a stump for the rest of my life.”
“Come on back in, guys,” Ms. Bell called. “All the way in, close the door! Back away!” She passed around some jellybeans.
“I don’t know, am I going to die from this?” said Tabitha.
“There should be no coconut in them,” said Ms. Bell.
“Green apple!” said Ryan.
Tabitha popped a jellybean in her mouth. “This is like piña colada,” she said.
I asked Ms. Bell how long she’d been teaching at the high school.
“This is my first year,” she said, chewing a bean. Before that she’d done Job Corps and alternative ed with Sylvan Learning. Teaching at Lasswell High School was much easier than Sylvan, she said. “With alternative ed, you’d be lucky if you can get two out of the ten to work. They don’t care. They don’t want to be there. Education’s not their priority.”
I gave Drew a wave and drove home. Day Seven, done.
DAY EIGHT. Friday, March 28, 2014
LASSWELL HIGH SCHOOL, ED TECH
HE’S JUST A HAIRY PERSON
FRIDAY WAS A DIM, RAINY, SLUSHY DAY, and Beth again had me working as an ed tech at the high school. US History was my first class, taught by a Mr. Boxer, a confident, goateed man of fifty with an iron throat—he had the loudest, carrying-est teaching voice of anyone I’d heard so far. Mr. Boxer’s students were working in groups on the same project that Mr. Domus’s students were working on: antebellum reform movements. They’d been given a choice of five topics to investigate—temperance, abolition, women’s rights, education, or religious reform—and they had to use three primary-source documents in their presentation. “A question came up in the other class in terms of what do I mean by documents,” Mr. Boxer said. “So I want to take a look real quick—I figured by this point in time you guys knew what primary-source documents were, because somewhere along the way somebody should have showed you those, like in third grade.” He chuckled. “Apparently that hasn’t happened yet.”
He stopped to take attendance, and then continued. Wow, his voice was loud—maybe that was really the secret. “MKAY,” he said, putting some text from the Yale library website up on the overhead projector. “Let’s take a quick look at this, just to make sure that you can find three documents that pertain to what you’re talking about. Things like books that somebody would have written at the time.” He began reading from the screen. “Determining what is a primary source can be tricky, and in no case is this more apparent than with books and pamphlets. From one vantage point, books are the quintessential secondary sources. But sometimes, because they’re written by people who lived at the time, they can be primary sources. NEWSPAPER ACCOUNTS—if you can find something from a newspaper at that time. Government documents would count as a primary source. Manuscripts. Diaries, those sorts of things.”
Mr. Domus came in. He’d had a problem in his class with a movie: after six minutes, it just stopped playing. “Should I try The Story of Us—see if that plays? It’s good.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Boxer. “They can still answer a few questions with it.” He continued. “ARTIFACTS.” The class had begun to chat. “GUYS, I’M TRYING TO HELP YOU HERE. Visual materials. Pictures, political cartoons, art—those are primary documents. Music from the time period. Somebody’s recording. Oral history. Those sorts of things are primary sources. Does that help you, in terms of what you are looking for? Mkay? You have to get your presentations ready for MONDAY—whichever one of the five that you’re working on. If you need help, let me know, I can come around. Your presentation can be a Keynote, it can be a poster, it can be an iMovie trailer, whatever you think it needs to be. It doesn’t need to be long. You’re just giving a little bit more information on one of those five reform movements. Are we all set? GO! You’ve got the block. You will not have time Monday to work on this. You had all block yesterday.”
The class got down to work, talking in low voices.
I walked over to a cluster of three upscale slacker dudes in dark T-shirts, Louis, Dolan, and Seth, who’d been squirting each other from a tiny canister of something. Louis was wiping his eye and sniffing. “So, guys, good morning,” I said in an almost-whisper.
“Hello,” said Seth, with an ironic smile.
“I’m filling in for Mrs. Brunelle, the ed tech person,” I said. “Tell me what she does.”
“She just kind of sits there,” said Dolan. “I don’t see that there’s a point to being an ed tech. The job must suck.”
I said, “It’s an interesting job because you get to see people squirt each other in the eye with—whatever that was. What was that?”
“Listerine!” said Louis, scrubbing at his face.
“That must have hurt,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Dolan. “He thought it was funny, so I sprayed him back.”
“How’s my eye?” said Louis, looking up at me.
“Looks okay, looks good. So what’s the reform that you’re doing?”
“We’re doing education,” said Seth.
“Education! That is crucial.” I suggested that they check out some of the primary sources on the Library of Congress website.
Louis turned to Dolan. “Why are you mad at me? You sprayed me like ten times worse!”
I asked them what they thought were some good primary sources to find out about education.
“Newspapers?” said Seth.
“Yes,” I said, “and diaries—teachers’ diaries, saying this was my agonizing day, students’ diaries. Students saying the conditions are appalling, there are no chairs, whatever. You could search for ‘primary sources education reform.’”
They looked away; they wanted me gone, and I couldn’t blame them. I got up and looked around. Somebody in the front of the room dropped the f-bomb.
“Hey, LANGUAGE,” said Mr. Boxer. “I don’t care about much, but I care about that one.”
I went over to Vera and Denise, two tough-looking young women, and introduced myself. I asked them if the ed tech normally talked to people.
“Not really,” said Vera.
“Why is she here, then?” I asked.
They shrugged. “It’s a job,” said Denise.
“What reform movement are you doing?”
“Women’s rights,” said Vera.
I tried to steer them to some primary-source documents about suffrage.
Louis and Dolan were still arguing about the spraying incident. “You’re not supposed to spray it all over the place!” said Louis. “You’re supposed to spray a little.”
“That’s exactly what I did,” said Dolan.
“I sprayed from here, dude. From here.”
Mr. Boxer put his pen down. “Guys, language! Stop! Jeez! Little bit unnecessary.” He went back to grading papers.
I overheard Michelle, the girl from biology, say, “Should we add that it took almost ninety years for them to get the rights that they wanted?”
Three-quarters of the class was discussing their chosen reform. They’d found some Internet sources and they were dutifully pasting political cartoons into Keynote slides. Mr. Boxer, doing the rounds, cautioned a student. “Be careful with education,” he said. “Make sure you go antebellum. Don’t do education reform today. We’ve seen what education reform looks like today—you’re the living, breathing experience of that. It’s gone well!” He laughed a fatalistic laugh. “Education didn’t need reforming, at all. It was pretty good. It was okay!”
Vera suppressed three sneezes.
Mr. Boxer glanced at the clock. “You’ve got twenty minutes, basically, to make sure you’ve got a Keynote ready for Monday.”
Louis was still sniffing and hawking from the retributive Listerine squirt. I sat and read the assignment sheet. The students needed to spell out the breakdown/details of the particular reform. What initial steps were taken to implement this reform? What did the initial reform call for (nuts and bolts of this reform)? Why COULD this reform be effective? In addition to finding three primary sources, they had to come up with a bibliography. This presentation will be scored based on the Antebellum Reform Presentation and Project Rubric, the sheet said. I tried to look up some primary sources myself and got an error message from the school’s Wi-Fi network: “The website you have requested may contain content that is inappropriate and has been blocked by this system.”
The noise level began to rise. “REMEMBER, Monday these need to be done,” Mr. Boxer warned. “You’ll present then.”
He turned to me. “The next class would be more fun for you to sit in,” he said, in a normal conversational voice. “My AP US History class. We get to watch a little Cold War stuff today—a little duck and cover. My favorite video ever, with Bert the Turtle. It’s awesome. It’s the most unintentionally funny thing ever, the way they talk about how you can survive an attack.”
The class gathered at the door. “ENJOY YOUR WEEKEND, STAY OUT OF PRISON,” boomed Mr. Boxer.
I smiled. “You’ve got it down,” I said to him.
“Thanks. It’s a pretty good gig. Or at least it used to be a pretty good gig. Beats a real job, I guess.”
Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. Why six bongs? We got the message at two.
Ms. Accardo, the high-energy health teacher, was back teaching in her modular classroom after some training days. She passed out a packet on suicide prevention. I read a few of the warning signs on the first page. Hopelessness was a warning sign, the packet said, along with statements such as: Things will never get any better. There’s nothing anyone can do. I’ll always feel this way. How long does it take to bleed to death?
“All righty, then!” said Ms. Accardo. She took attendance. “You’re Jacob. You’re Wesley. And you’re—Maria? I’m not doing too bad when it comes to names. Okay, then. In this accordion pocket folder, if you have not yet passed in your anger management assessment, please do so. It’s going to come around the room. If you did, awesome! If you did it electronically and you want to submit it on Edmodo, do it! Via email, you may do that, too. Whichever one it is that you want to do, whether it’s electronically, a piece of paper, I don’t care. If you have a piece of paper, put it in the second slot. Cool beans? All right, then! Anyone have a pink highlighter?”
Maria handed Ms. Accardo a marker and she tried it out on the whiteboard.
“It looks more purple than pink,” she said, “so it’s not going to work for our purposes. And I’m UNPLUGGING the pencil sharpener. You’ll have to plug it in elsewhere if you need to sharpen a pencil in the meantime. Does anyone else need a folder, because your backpack is eating your things? There you go. You, too? Okay, anyone else need a packet, because your backpack’s hungry? You’re all good. All righty, then.”
She looked down at her notes and got very serious. “Everyone comes from different backgrounds, different experiences,” she said. “So it’s really important to be respectful to everyone that’s in the room. I personally lost a friend to suicide two years ago now. She had a lot of life events that were going on. She was suffering from depression. You know those commercials for medications that say, ‘If you experience suicidal thoughts, contact your doctor right away’? They’d JUST changed her meds! She had a migraine for three days. So: the migraine, the depression with the new meds, and she was a breast cancer survivor. She didn’t say anything to anybody. Her posts on Facebook were, ‘My head is killing me,’ but she was pretty positive. So—people may have friends or family, or maybe some symptoms within themselves. It’s important to be respectful of everyone. You especially are going to see it, and hear it, first, before us.”
Ms. Accardo said she was a mandatory reporter, meaning that she was required by law to report suicidal speech or behaviors. “If I suspect or know that someone is harming themselves, being harmed by someone else, or is going to harm someone else, I have to report any of those situations. It’s required. Have to. That said, if you find that someone is in need of assistance, you can still come to me and talk to me, if you’re comfortable with me. If you’re not comfortable with me, I would hope that you would find somebody who you are comfortable with.” Sometimes a student from an earlier year talked to her, she said. “Maybe you’re concerned ‘My friend will be so mad if I talk to you.’ In this case, it’s better to have an angry friend than a dead friend.”
She put on a movie, made with the help of student actors, meant to illustrate various warning signs of suicide, one of which was the giving away of prized possessions. To someone who is seriously depressed, you’re not supposed to say, “Come on, it’s really not that bad.” Never say that everything will be all right. Don’t lie to cheer a person up. Avoid saying, “You’ll get through this, you always do.” Don’t try to guilt the suicidal person out of feeling suicidal by saying, “Just think how everyone would feel if you killed yourself.” Sometimes there’s nothing you can do or say that will help. “Remember, if somebody you know does take his own life, it was his choice, and his own responsibility. As much as you may have liked to help, as much as you may have tried to help, you’re definitely not the one to blame.” The movie ended.
“This is way bigger than yourself,” Ms. Accardo said. “People who are trained to respond can maybe more efficiently help. Give the support that you can to your friend, but get people in who can really do as they’ve been professionally trained to do.” Don’t minimize somebody’s feelings. Don’t have a huge party and invite all the depressed person’s friends. “‘Keg on me! Whooo!’ Yeah, how about we don’t? Because what happens to the decision-making process when you add drugs and alcohol? Poom, right out the window!”
Suicidal people can be agitated, restless, or irritated, she said. Their behavior may go through changes. She asked Jacob to read from the warning-signs sheet. He gave it his best shot. “Personality more withdrawn, tired, ape—”
“Apathetic.”
“Indecisive or boi—”
“Boisterous,” said Mrs. Accardo.
“Yes, boisterous. Talkative, outgoing. Behavior: can’t concentrate on school, work, routine tasks. Sleep pattern: oversleeping or insum—”
“Insomnia.”
“Insomnia, sometimes with early walking.”
“Waking,” Ms. Accardo corrected.
“No, that’s walking,” said Jacob.
“That’s waking,” said Ms. Accardo.
“Oh, that’s my bad!” Jacob continued to struggle through the long list, which even included Sudden improvement after a period of being down or withdrawn.
Everything seemed to be a warning sign for suicide. The last one was Getting into trouble with school, or with the law.
Haley, who had green bangs, told the class about prison inmates who made weapons out of toothbrushes by sharpening the handles, and Ms. Accardo said some prisoners were given “little silicone doodahs” with bristles that fit over a fingertip to keep them from making shanks. “Now you can brush your teeth all you want—there’s no stabbing with silicone!”
The class began chatting away about prison violence. Ms. Accardo cut it short. “Anyhoo,” she said. “Where it says more boisterous, talkative, and outgoing. Someone who epitomizes boisterous is Mr. Poulin. Hello! He’s right up there and cheery! You know Mr. Poulin. Now, if someone was suddenly boisterous! And talkative! And outgoing! And yay, I’m fine! Why would that be a bad thing? Why would this be a suicidal warning sign?”
“They’re trying to make people think everything’s okay,” said Ryan.
“Yes, sort of. It’s related. Sudden improvement after a period of being down and withdrawn. This is a HUGE DANGEROUS THING. They have made the decision that they are going to make a suicide attempt. Everything that has been weighing them down emotionally is now—ah! ‘You know what, Monday afternoon. It’s all over.’ They have a plan. They have a time. They have a date. Yay! This is a very bad thing. Because they know exactly when all of this depression and everything? Is ending for them. And it’s lifting. Do you see how really alarming this can be? So just being a boisterous yoo-hoo person is not a warning. But the flip of a switch is. Sometimes families go, Oh thank goodness, they’re back to their normal self!”
“No,” said the class.
“You really need to get on it, if that’s the case.” She told us about a Lifetime movie she’d seen about a suicidal person who had quit the soccer team. “Hindsight’s twenty-twenty,” she said. “Have you heard that?”
“No.”
She explained what it meant.
Maria said, “It’s a puzzle until someone does it, and then—oh.”
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