Generation (me)Pod

“It’s a generation that’s lacking in decency and honor.” That’s the ubiquitous complaint, the archetypal brand, the rite of passage for authenticity. It’s what every generation must be dubbed by its predecessors before it can be found legitimate and reckon-worthy. All ingenuous generations eventually earn their stripes, and after their day in the sun, every indecent and dishonorable generation must eventually grow up and pass the torch of disrepute to the next.

I’ve been joking around for the past few years that I’m getting old. I could afford to do this because I knew that it wasn’t really true. It’s when I start denying that I’m old, that’s when I’ll know I’m in trouble. Now, I’m not ready to start denying anything yet, but I’m finding recently that my claims of being an old man are less jocular and more credulous. And it’s not because my knees hurt when walking up stairs (although they do); and it’s not because I’m more ornery than I used to be (although I am); it’s not even because I think old crap is cooler than new crap (although it is). It’s because I’ve started to notice a significant chasm between my generation and the one I teach. It’s because I can sense my generation passing the torch. And now I find myself saying the same things I rolled my eyes to just ten years ago: “Teenagers today really are lacking in decency and honor.”

The line between right and wrong, which was well-defined and deeply rooted when I was growing up, is now blurry and shallow. Whereas my friends and I stood on the solid foundation of the absolute, kids today are floundering in an ocean of gray relativism. They don’t even realize when they’ve done wrong. It’s not that we didn’t mess up from time to time, but when we did, we were riddled with guilt and misgiving. Today there seems to be no remorse, no contrition, no penitence. No mea culpa.

I wish I could say that this simple desultory philippic was unprovoked, that it was merely the result of my objective observations. But it’s not. Unfortunately, it’s the result of a tremendous betrayal I suffered this week—a betrayal akin to Judas’ kiss or Ollie North’s weapons. My iPod was stolen. And it’s not just that it was stolen; things get stolen all the time. It’s that it was stolen by someone that I trust, someone that I love and care about, someone that I have worked my ass off for. It’s bothersome, and not just on a substantive level, but on a philosophical one. I don’t care about the iPod; it’s an iPod. A complex configuration of plastics, metals, and nano-technology. I don’t even care about the 5,000+ songs it contained; I can recover most, if not all, of them. I care that it was taken by one of my students and that all I have striven to teach over the past six and a half months seems to have been for naught. The irony is that if this student had come to me and asked if he or she could have my iPod, I would likely have given it to him or her, plus the shirt off my back.

In a futile attempt to recover my stolen iPod, I’ve posted fliers in my room and in the hallway, and I’ve been uselessly informing my classes and hopelessly beseeching them to keep their eyes and ears open and to report to me if they see or hear anything. Knowing that this new generation of miscreants is motivated only by personal gain, I’ve even offered a thirty-dollar reward for any information leading to its recovery.

As of yet, I still have my thirty dollars. But a very curious thing has happened: my students have expressed genuine concern for my plight. They seem more disheartened than me. Several have formed investigative search and seizure squads, tracking leads and interrogating potential criminals. Others have mentioned their intention to start up a collection to purchase me a new iPod. All of them seem to be disgusted by this obvious atrocity. And somehow, none of this computes in my old brain. In the course of a day, I went from refusing to believe in the immorality of this younger generation, to wholeheartedly believing it, to unbelieving it. It’s your basic paradigm reshift.

What I’ve failed to notice while carrying out my torch-passing duties, and what all previous generations have failed to notice, is that there is still a lot of remarkable good left over from my generation. (I hope the sarcasm of that statement is obvious.) Now, I’m not saying that there’s not something terribly wrong with the zeitgeist of our nation, or even of our world. I think there is. Why else would we have college campus rampages, planes flown into innocent buildings, and garbage dumpster babies? I think we can all agree that there is something terribly wrong. But it’s nothing new. The world has always been depraved. We simply see so many examples of the depravity today because there are so many more of us than ever before and there are so many more ways to spread the news of these depravations.

But the world has also been terribly good. Day to day, I see far more good than I do evil. It’s just that I like to obsess over the evil and ignore the good. I had left my iPod in the same place, out in the open, for the entire year. I made it no secret that it was there and most of my students knew that it was there. I never thought it worth mentioning all those days that it was left unstolen. But according to the assessment made of this latest generation, that it is lacking in decency and honor, I should be far more amazed that my iPod survived even one day, let alone half a year. Now, I don’t want to buck the system, so I’ll continue muttering my disapproval of subsequent generations, no doubt becoming more and more vocal with each one, until my own dies out. But shame on me if I ever begin thinking that my generation was anything less than indecent and dishonorable.

That Takes Talent

There are reasons why teachers don’t normally use the public access bathrooms at school. Most of those reasons should be somewhat obvious. I don’t have any problem being in close proximity to teenagers, as long as it’s in the classroom or the hallway or the cafeteria or library or even at sporting events from time to time. After all, the job description demands, or at least implies, it. All normalcy, however, vanishes once inside the bathroom. There’s something about dropping trow, even three inches of trow, around teenage boys that feels innately creepy. Besides that, they’re incredibly foul and fetid creatures. And I don’t just mean the words that come out of their mouths, that I can usually handle. But only about one in nine will wash his hands when done excreting, and even fewer will flush down said excrement.

The hand-washing thing I can kind of get; it takes time, and when you’ve got seven minutes of traveling time, there is precious little of it to be spent wasted on something as banal as wetting, soaping, rinsing, and drying of hands. I get it, and am even guilty of it myself occasionally (but mostly because I don’t like getting wet). But what I don’t get is why they don’t flush. That action takes approximately half a second to perform. And if you’re good, and have perfected the walk-away-flush technique, then it doesn’t take any time at all. This technology is too good to waste. What’s odd is that I’ve even noticed this behavior from grown men. I’ve been in bathrooms lined with urinals and commodes—twenty or more—and not a one will be free of human waste. I know women don’t do this: I’ve asked them.

So like I said before, I don’t normally use the student bathrooms. I try to make sure that I do my business in the teachers’ lounge restroom at lunch. It’s a lovely single-seater with an exhaust fan, a framed poster reprint of Monet’s Lily Pond on the wall, and a door that locks. You’ll notice I use the word restroom here; this is the one room in the entire school that I can enjoy any sort of rest and peace. Once or twice I’ve spent my entire conference period just resting here. Regrettably, most days I only get to spend a minute and a half in this holy of holies—the post-lunch micturition (that means to pee).

Tragically, there are days when I’m neglected even that short respite, usually due to forgetfulness (how does one forget to pee?) or poor planning. There have been a good number of days that I have gone from 6:30 in the morning to 3:45 in the afternoon without having gone to the bathroom. If I don’t go during lunch, then I’ve doomed myself to three and a half more hours of urethrian torture. “What’s the big deal,” you ask; “why not just go?” Well, do you have any idea what would happen if I were to leave 30 sixteen-year-olds unattended for even a minute and a half? Probably nothing. Most likely they would patiently await my return.

(I’m saying this straight-faced—no ironic sarcasm. I really think it would be fine. But in the unlikely scenario that I leave the room to take a whiz, and that Weston has just this morning learned that his girlfriend Summer has unwittingly cheated on him with his identical twin brother Easton, and that all three are in the class, and that Weston just happens to be carrying a pocket knife on his person, and that he has spent the entire day waiting to shell out his vengeance on Easton, and that after a volley of several heated exchanges between the doppelgangers, Weston plunges across the room, knife in hand, aimed directly at the cheating heart of the other half of his mother’s split egg, only to be intercepted by the faithful heart of Summer, who earnestly believes she’s protecting her boyfriend Weston, and as she gurgles her final dying devotion to the love of her young life, she is mistakenly clutching the hand of Easton—that perfidious parasitic paramour—and that her last words are all a worthless lie…well, that would be bad. Someone could lose a job over something like that. So I stay, and I persevere.)

Herein lies the biggest beef I have with my profession: When Nature calls I can’t answer it. Like other humans, I have relatively little control over when and where this call happens, but unlike other humans, I have to just pucker and squeeze, no doubt doing irreparable damage to bladder and bowels. Actually, this isn’t really my biggest beef with teaching; it’s merely a symptom of the true big beef. The true big beef is that at every turn, my adulthood is stripped away from me. I can’t pee when I want to; I can’t have a mid-day beer when I want to; I sure as hell can’t swear when I want to; and I have to eat my lunch (which only ever gets as good as mini-corndogs and fries) in 27 minutes.

And now this week…this is the week I have lunch duty, which means that I get to eat my lunch in the hallway so I can stop kids from doing whatever it is they’re not supposed to be doing. Basically this means that I throw mini-corndogs and fries at band geeks making out in the stairwell. Can you picture it? A grown-ass man, sitting in a chair, his Salisbury steak in his lap, wondering what his life has come to.

Well, needless to say, this week I have not gotten my 90 seconds of sanctuaried rest and have been forced to hang with the boys between the last and next to last classes of the day. And here’s where this story finally comes to a head. Two days ago, while waiting for either a urinal or a commode to be vacated, I noticed that one of my students was at the urinal. He appeared to be holding up and looking at some object while doing his thing. The object was blocked from my view, but I assumed it had to be a cell phone and that he was text messaging a friend. Now I’m not normally one of those guys who tries to initiate conversation mid-stream; in fact, I’m usually pretty put off by guys who do try that sort of thing. But I ignored my better judgment and asserted, “Hey, that takes talent.” As he turned his upper torso around toward me, I gazed past his puzzled face and noticed that the thing he was holding was a bottle of water. Apparently he was reading the contents label or the nutritional facts or the explanation of how a reverse osmosis purification process means that “when you’re drinking our water, all you taste is the water.” Eventually we met eyes, and he said, puzzled look still on his face, “What? Peein’?”

Like I say—there are reasons why teachers don’t normally use the public access bathrooms. And sometimes it’s our own damn fault.

Humping y Joto

Almost three months passed before I heard anything out of Carlos. He would sit at his desk and listen, or not listen, work, or not work. I didn't call on him in class because I feared language acquisition might be a cause for his taciturnity. A better teacher probably would have found a way to meet with Carlos one-on-one at some point during that three-month stretch. I think the fact that I've started a blog for the sole intention of publicly ridiculing my students is proof enough that I am not a better teacher.

So anyway, three months--half of August, September, October, half of November. Nothing. Not a word. Then we began a vocabulary unit on homonyms. Those are words that sound alike but are spelled differently and have different meanings (ex., affect/effect, elicit/illicit, compliment/complement, etc.). Or maybe they're homophones; I've never been real sure of the difference. The important thing is that none of the kids questioned me on this conundrum, and that's really what matters most--maintaining a perception of competence.

I gave the students an assignment in which they had to take a homonym pair and do the following things: 1) write an original sentence properly using both homonyms (for some reason teachers think that boldface italics create some sort of desired emphasis), 2) devise (come up with) a mnemonic device (memory trick) that will aid you and others in distinguishing (telling the difference) between the two (yes, I do have to define everything), and 3) find a picture, either from a magazine or the internets (none of them get that allusion (reference)), that goes along with your homonym pair. They were to complete the assignment on a computer sheet of paper (Is there a better name than "computer sheet of paper"? I feel like an idiot when I say that, but I don't know any other thing to call it.) so that they could show their memory tricks to the other students with the use of a nifty device called a document camera. It projects whatever is placed beneath it on to the big screen. (This explanation of the document camera was probably superfluous. They're new to me, but I'm sure most adults with "real" jobs have been using them for years.) This way the students would essentially be teaching their words to the class. I think it's called "peer instruction"; it's a pretty advanced teaching method. Of course, you're probably already starting to see the flaw in this approach. I saw it too, and I knew it would happen sooner or later. I just didn't expect it to come from quiet little Carlos.

The first and only thing I and the other students saw was the above picture, which was probably the first and only thing you saw after opening this page. I knew I had a responsibility to maintain an air of professionalism and maturity, but I couldn't. All at once, before I even had a hope of stopping it, all my pent up juvenile lewdness escaped in one tremendous guffaw. I laughed my ass off. I laughed harder and longer than any of the students--till the tears came streaming down my face. Two solid minutes I laughed. Finally, once I regained the ability to speak, I asked Carlos what homonym that particular picture was supposed to be demonstrating. After three months, like a monk finally breaking his vow of silence, with a simple utterance of vocal ejaculation, all heads craning forward, thirsting for some transcendent vociferation from this modern-day prophet of gloom, I heard a word from Carlos: "meddle."

And that word was the proverbial cleft in the dike. (Not that kind of dike, Linsey.) Now, I can’t get the kid to shut up. He’s constantly blathering his personal take on passages of literature, offering up to the gods of written word his holy exegesis of these sacred texts. The only problem—he’s convinced that every character of every story is either a junkie, a lesbian (yes, that kind of lesbian, Linsey), or a midget. We recently read a Kate Chopin story entitled “Silk Stockings” about a woman (“little Mrs. Sommers”) who finds herself the unexpected owner of fifteen dollars, heads to the stores with the intention of buying new clothes for her children, but instead buys all manner of extravagances for herself, showing just the slightest of blushes when the girl behind the counter asks her if she would like to see their selection of silk hosiery. Carlos posited that Mrs. Sommers was a dwarfed, lesbian prostitute.

Recently I had the kids write a personal narrative about a time when they stood up for something they felt was right. The prompt seems innocent enough, but you’d be impressed with how easily sixteen year olds can foul up even the most innocent things. Over the past 2-3 weeks, I’ve read approximately 157 essays dealing with drugs, alcohol, sex, cheating (both of the classroom and the bedroom backseat variety), bullying, fighting, trespassing, dress code infringements, animal rescue attempts, and white-trash Christmases (okay, only one of those).

Carlos chose to write about the day he came across his friend getting beat up by a couple of pink-haired goth punks. Maybe only one of them had pink hair. I had told Carlos to try and include good voice (this is what English teachers call emotion in writing…sort of). So in his rough draft, when describing one of the goth punks, the pink-haired one I think, he used every high school boy’s favorite pejorative: fag. In the margin, I first complimented him on his great attempt at voice, and then I suggested that he find a different, less offensive word. I read Carlos’s final draft last night. Among the many changes he had made, I noticed that the word “fag” was now replaced with the word “joto.” I knew it was Spanish, but I didn’t know what it meant. Instinctively, I typed the word into Google. Somewhere in the .21 seconds it took for Google to seek out all 693,000 instances of the word “joto”on the World Wide Web, I realized I didn’t need to look up the word “joto.” I knew what the word “joto” meant. And so do you. It doesn’t mean quiet; not anymore.

Testing, Testing...

Okay, here goes. It's occurred to me recently that way too much funny crap happens in the course of my day as an educator, and most of it I don't (or can't) remember, even a few days later. So I've decided I need to start setting this crap down in writing. Sure, I could just keep a private record of these humorous anecdotes, but a key purpose in remembering these things is to entertain other people. Plus, blogs are hip right now. (At least that's what Wes told me.)

So we'll see how this goes. Chances are I'll be really into it for the first couple of weeks, neglecting my teaching responsibilities and/or need for sleep, and then I'll never bother with it again. But it could be a really fun two weeks. Enjoy.