Teachers

High school includes junior high, and there was a bit of social separation between the sixth and seventh grade kids and the ones in the final four. That is we kept to ourselves mostly even though we were on the same campus, used the same facilities, the gym and such. I don't remember if we could smoke then, we would have been thirteen or so, so probably not. That would have been permitted to the over sixteens. We had smoking areas where you could grab a smoke on the breaks, lunch and maybe a couple of fifteen minutes. When I did start smoking I'd hang out in the smoking area with the other smokers - a fair number of us then - and burn one. And gossip of course.

It probably wasn't until ninth grade that we could choose our subjects, outside of the mandatories. The last four years you had to do those to graduate. Four years of English of course, and some math and other stuff. But that was later. We would have had some science, history, math, social studies. And PE (gym) of course, unless you were a jock. If you were playing football or basketball you could skip gym. Couldn't skip the coaches though. They taught gym to the non-jocks and they despised us. One year we had an especially lazy coach and just played dodge ball about every day, which was pretty cool. Some of them took it seriously and we'd have to play softball or volleyball, one tried to teach us some golf. He liked golf, wanted to be a pro. Never did, screwed a few of the girls though. As did most of the coaches. And some of the teachers.

There don't seem to be any memorable teachers in those first two years. There was one English teacher, young one, just out of college, pretty, nice. She had one of those mail-order paperback deals, you send money in for paperbacks at fifty cents, maybe seventy-five for some. Once or twice a month she'd take orders, we'd give her the money and a week or two later we'd get our books. Still have some paperbacks in my library, used to write my name inside, Alex Morgan, 7-H. 7-H being the section I was in, in the seventh grade. They divided us up by our academic potential, as had been observed in the first six years. So I had straight-As (actually straight-Ss because they used S for satisfactory in the lower grades) they put me in the H section, and the other kids went in the M and K and something else. M was the largest (medium) and was split into two or three groups to keep the class sizes manageable, and K section was the ones that were marginally teachable, and that other group I forgot what is was the unteachables. What they call 'special ed' these days. There were just a handful, most of them what people called 'retarded' but didn't mean anything bad by it. They were just really slow and weren't going to get any faster. The word 'retard' became a perjorative later on, but then people were still using the enword, and most weren't being mean, just the way the south was. They integrated the schools a couple years earlier when I was in the sixth grade and so you'd get in trouble if you used it. Didn't have much trouble, there were a handful of each - black and white - that had some issues with it but it was handled with minimal problems.

Teachers, what did we have? There was the pretty seventh grade one I mentioned, she was probably the only one made an impression. Being young and pretty and nice. I guess seventh and eighth weren't very memorable. Lessee, I was twelve then. My birthday being in January I was a little older than average for my grade since you had to be six when school started in September so a fair number of my classmates were some younger. A couple of other events, one not connected with school, happened in those years.

In the eighth grade I came home from school one day and before anything else Mom said "Jerry is dead." Young as I was I knew a little about Vietnam, knew what had happened. Jerry was a second cousin on Mom's side but more like a big brother to me. Mom's family is pretty big, most of them had more kids than her four, and a lot of us lived in the area. And the large families meant there was considerable age differences between some of the relatives you palled around with. Jerry's folks lived close to Mom's parents and I was over there a lot, hunted and fished with Jerry, he taught me about cars. Had a '66 Chevelle SS, the 396 engine. Like a lot of young guys coming back from Vietnam he bought a new sports car. Good times, he got married to a real nice girl. Then a couple of years later he was sent back to Vienam again - leaving his pregnant wife behind - and this time he came back in a coffin.

I don't know and never asked if he volunteered for another tour. Once he re-enlisted he was fair game, I know guys that did three tours. The conscripts did their one and most got out when their time was up. He was interviewed by a local newspaper and said he believed 'we needed to win' and 'prevent the spread of communism'.

We didn't know much back then, just what the newspapers and TV told us. I would have gone when I was eighteen, if they'd called me. Mom and Dad had no use for draft-dodgers and protesters and would have disowned me if I didn't go. Dad was in WWII and an uncle went to Korea and we didn't question authority. I do have a soft spot for Nixon, since he shut it down before they got around to me.

Anyway Jerry was KIA a couple of months before the end of his tour, and his son never knew his father. Trish - the nice girl he left a widow - eventually married again and moved away. I would eventually enlist in the Air Force, but that was a ways off.

In the eighth grade we got a bit of a shock. Kid my age in the M section (most of he guys I hung with were in M) shot hisself. Seemed the most normal kid in the world, never seemed to have any problems, seemed pretty happy. One Monday morning first thing everybody talking about Kenny shootin' hisself. Put a .410 under his chin and... if done properly you know how that goes. Nobody had any idea why, no note, didn't say anything before. He had an older brother, two or three years, he had no idea.

Thirty or forty years later they'd have grief counselors and such come in and make sure everybody gets through it. Back then life went on and nobody else did theirself in. I liked Kenny, was seriously bummed. I get bummed if I hear about anyone doing that, even someone I didn't know. But we didn't need professionals, we talked to our families and friends and people at church as much as it needed to be talked about. A few years later a girl got decapitated by an errant backhoe - one of those backward-tractor types driving along the road as she passed it swerved the wrong way and took the top off her car, and her - and we all survived that. Including her cousin who was in the car. She was from an upper class family, the kind that most of the H section kids were, and someone of other built a nice memorial with a fountain and pool with bronze lily pads. Twenty or so years later I walked around the campus one moonlit night and checked out the memorial. The pool was there but the plaque that told what it was about and the lily pads that the water came out of weren't there, maybe fell off, and the fountain wasn't running anyway. Okey-dokey.

One memorable teacher dropped in for one year. We didn't get a lot of new ones, most of them pretty much made a career of it. This fellow showed up, ostensibly to teach history. He was from Chicago, and drove a red MG. What he did was immmediately being attempting to indoctrinate us. The rich are oppressing the poor and the poor need to rise up and hang them. He talked about the local rich folks on Hamilton Avenue hanging from the trees on Hamilton. Hamilton being an old upper class area, the really rich ones lived in some new developments. I guess he realized that in an H section class most of the students were the children of rich people, maybe that was the idea.

Some of the kids schmoozed with him and his wife (also a teacher) at their house and drank booze and probably did drugs, that was becomg a thing about then. They had some black kids over a lot (the population was still segregated as in all the black people lived in one section) and I guess he was improving the integration process. Not that we didn't already hang with kids of other colors on our own if that was how things went. Had a Japanese kid (adopted by Caucasians) in our class for a few years, there were a few Hispanics, we all got along good. But he was more about trying to stir things up, talking about oppression and how capitalism bad communism good.

Twin Falls was still reasonably sane then and the husband and wife teachers from Chicago had a one year contract and it wasn't renewed. Probably he as a little over the top for those days. We were still a little young, and the teachers that awaited us beginning in our sophomore year were a little more subtle.

History and English were the main ones, that long ago turning people into communists and perverts in math and science wasn't considered necessary. And it was subtle, and the teachers seemed to be sincere. Deluded but sincere. English was a matter of reading selected books - Emerson and Thoreau, Faulkner, Lewis, not much Shakespeare. I liked Shakespeare and had already read most of it by the time I got to junior high. Seems all we got was comedies, Twelfth Night I remember, nothing serious. No, come to think of it we did MacBeth. I didn't care for the comedies, Julius Caeser and Romeo and Juliet were a couple of my favorites. Did the Byron-Keats-Shelley thing, I believe that was a combination of the three in a book made for teaching. Liked Byron a lot, interesting guy.

I don't know that the M section did, didn't think to ask. I didn't notice them reading the books we did, maybe the curriculum was different for the lesser intellects. Sometimes I wouldn't have minded being a lesser mind.

The main commie teachers were history. We had one English teacher that was, but she was a solidly credentialled crackpot anyway. A government teacher I had for goverment one year and history the next, or the other way around. Pretty bright woman I suppose, her husband had a government job, years later I was at an election party at the bank I worked for, she and her husband always atttended. The night the returns came in and Ronaldus Magnus became president she was quite distressed, just couldn't understand how people could be so foolish. Nice people but delusional.

Coaches were required to teach some classes, don't know if it was a state law or local policy, probably required from higher up or they wouldn't have done. They got some of their quota in teaching driver's ed but there wasn't enough driver's ed to go around. PE (gym) probably counted. So there was some actual teaching had to be done. I had one biology teacher that actually had a degree in biology and was pretty decent at it, but he was just an assistant coach and didn't stick around long.

Bob Wilson taught science, I don't know if he had any credentials or not. He didn't have any sense but was a pretty good basketball coach. Twin Falls won some regional championship or other one year and the players picked him up and ran around the gym with him on their shoulders. Had a crewcut, smoked cigars, screwed some of the girl students. He wasn't the only one. Our basic science book, whatever it was, general stuff, one of the kids in my class was a gearhead, later built engines for a minor league NASCAR team, was barely in the H class. Bright enough but not real bookish.

So one day the subject was something having to do with matter and energy being different forms of the same thing - don't know if that's the way is is now - and that matter can not be created or destroyed. So Wesley the gearhead asks Coach Wilson (we always called him Coach) "Coach, if you could destroy matter, would it throw the earth off balance?" Bob thought a second and said "Yeah, probably."

Okey-dokey. Coach Bob didn't just screw the nubile girl students. Like most guys that were in a position to do so he nailed anything he could. Teachers of course. One of the teachers was married to a school board member who was big in local society. As they all were. When it got too noticeable he had the coach fired and told his wife to resign. She was the daughter of a doctor who was or had been on the school board. Peyton Place had nothing on Twin Falls.

If I start talking about teachers (mostly coaches) screwing students I won't get anything else done. But it was mostly coaches. One thing I wish is more of the teachers of the female persuasion had behaved that way. I can count on hand the female teachers that were banging the boys. And I wasn't one of the bangees but the most desirable one wasn't one I wanted to bang anyway. Good lookin' but evil. I'm pretty sure she was doing boys and girls both.

Albert Parsons was a geometry teacher, and I guess he knew his stuff. Not that there's much to know, I had to have two or three math electives and they were all easy. Alegebra I had some humorous moments but I'll get to that in a minute or two. Parsons was a lech for sure, tenth grade and the girls were just right. Actually I preferred them a couple of years older them but was pretty much stuck with my own age. But he had a new crop every year. Now that is... nevermind. OK, the girls that were qualified to get an A that way were all set. The boys were another matter, Mr. Parsons was no queer and I don't believe we had one in our class. But that year Mr. Parsons got interested in model railroading. He wanted to have a super massive setup and he let it be known that helping him out would get you fixed up grade-wise. I didn't think then what if one of the girls wanted to pay him off like that, maybe use her older brother's stuff, or pay some other way. We were in the tenth grade then and a good bit of student-screwing was going on.

Mr. Yarbrough was the speech teacher and ran the drama club. I didn't take speech and didn't participate in the theatrical activities. But Mr. Yarbrough palled around with Mr. Parsons and they were both liars of the first magnitude. Bullshitters we'd call them, it's not as if they expected anyone to believe them. I knew another pathological liar some years later and they are strange. Anyhow those two would get together with a bunch of us kids and start bullshitting. A lot of what they call urban legends these days, and even someone who didn't know would see pretty quick they were lying.

Mr. Parsons liked guns, which is kind of scary. He was he sponsor of the gun club, back then the National Guard would give the schools rifles, .22 bolt action heavy barrel target rifles and we'd shoot targets in the gym. The place wasn't even a hundred yards long so no big deal. Good for some kids that weren't exposed to guns to learn, not that there were many of those. Back then we had gun racks in our pickups and often had a gun or two in them in the school parking lot.

The shorthand - and whatever else he taught - teacher was one we always figured liked boys, but I was told by some women he liked women pretty good too. He didn't do or attempt anything improper with students as far as anyone ever knew. Nice fellow, I didn't have any classes with him but he was always friendly with me the way teachers are with super smart students. Or maybe he did have bad intentions.

Miss Branch was the alegbra teacher, I and II. Took both to fill out the credits. She was about as humorless as a person can be, at least while doing her official duties. Don't know how she was off duty. A large woman, we made jokes about her as kids will do. You didn't fool around in her class. One day the kid that sat behind me up and lit a match, right there in alegbra class. Miss Branch's alegbra class. I smelled the smoke about the time Miss Branch, about five or six rows of desks away as I was near the back, staring balefully in my direction.

"Jeffrey," she said, "what ARE you doing?"

"I accidentally lit a match," Jeffrey squeaked. Jeffrey was the Japanese kid adopted by Caucasians. Jeffrey was a squirrely little fellow, not samurai material for sure.

While Miss Branch was considering a proper retribution a kid up near the front said "Now Jeffrey, put that match away and don't light it again."

The class erupted in laughter, and Miss Branch looked like she was about to let go herself and that was not gonna happen. She hastily exited the classroom. A few minutes later she returned and continued as if nothing had happened.

Had typing with Mrs. Crangle. Large black woman, not much more sense of humor than Mrs. Branch (wouldn't take much), but good teacher. Actually pretty nice but you have to be firm with high school kids and aren't all like me. Did 50 WPM on the old Underwood manuals they had, could do near a hundred on the IBM Selectric II. So taking the class was just checking a box. I sat on the back row and she would say at the beginning of a timed test "Feet flat on the flow, fangahs on the home keys. Get your greasy head off my wall" because I was always leaning back in my chair.

Chemistry was Miss Meredith. Young woman, yeah they called unmarried women Miss back them. Good looking, decent at chemistry I suppose, book-wise. I knew something about chemistry but don't want to digress into that just now. She was tight with some of the girls, there were five or six maybe, the special kids. Special as in the children of doctors, lawyers, bankers and other pominent citizens. I probably wouldn't have take the class since I already had my required hours. But that would have left me with just two or three classes for the senior year. Enough credits to graduate but it's a six or seven hour day, I forget which. Couldn't have three or four study halls, so I took chemistry and something else.

Anyway Miss Meredith and these handful of girls palled around, even hung out outside of school Something I noticed about that time was that teachers of any age had a tendency to become more childlike in their thinking and behavior. Actually it's likely that many of them never quite grew up. But being around children all day probably wasn't good for them. So they got together and talked about whatever they talked about, at school and elsewhere. Had them at her house a lot, some of the guys too, a couple or three anyway. Drank adult beverages and smoked pot with them. Don't know if she had sex with any - girls or boys. I suspect the boys wanted to. I would have wanted to except for her personality.

I was probably asking for it because I took a few days off, got Mom to write a note on some Fridays. Overdid it. She didn't like me already and I was getting 90s on the tests and ditching school. Actually I was doing it more because school had become pretty miserable by that time, being a hick and honor student and my autism (did I mention that yet?) made interaction dodgy. So I avoided interaction.

Anyway this girl I liked a lot, and she liked me, was a year behind me but was taking Miss Meredith's chemistry class. One day we had a test and I made ninety-something, and Miss Meredith did what they called 'grading on the curve'. I don't believe what she did fit the definition - the highest score got an A, the next one a B, and so on. So if the highest score was 95 that person or persons got an A, and if the next one was 90 the ones with 90 got a B. Maybe the teachers didn't understand the concept or they used it to penalize students. Pretty sure that was the case. I got an A or B, don't remember.

Teacher announced what she had done and said it was because someone in the class talked to someone in another class that was taking the test later and that was cheating. I don't remember if my girl and I talked on that day, if we did we didn't talk about the test. But the teacher and some of her girlfriends looked at me when she said it, indicating that I was that someone. Maybe I should deliberately missed a few questions. One of the girls was one of the banker's kids (seems we had two or three) and her family expected her to get straight As. She had to work hard for it, and she and I were co-honor-grads. No bueno.

I somehow made it to the end of the year, and walking out of there for the last time was one of the best days of my life. Miss Meredith later married a state trooper. Normally I don't have much sympathy for cops whatever happens to them but...

What else? Had accounting with a lady in her forties, quite competent. Accounting is about as cut-and-dried as it gets, so socio-political attudes of the teacher or the students were irrelevant. She had a real cute daughter, still in junior high at the time. Wasn't bad looking herself.

English teachers were mostly older and were pretty much compromised by whatever communist indoctrination they got in the '50s. Had one, not sure if it was history or government, late thirties. Husband a very wealthy lawyer and owned a small chain of high-dollar women's wear shops. Co-owned, knew the kids of his partner, good kids. Smoked a fair amount of pot with one of them after graduation, him being a couple of years behind me. He showed me how to get a pound for a one-twenty-five and split in into lids, sixteen apiece, that's two-forty. Hundred and fifteen profit, hundred if you kept a lid for yourself. This was '76 or so, so five hundred today. Not bad, but I figured on something less risky and even more profitable.

Anyway she was pretty good-looking but had a copule of weird kids. The older one was a girl, skinny blonde and pretty fair-looking, little too much makeup. Brother a doper as they were called then, a near derelict. His sister didn't wear clothes in the house, once in a while somebody visiting would see her running around naked. Mom didn't have a problem with it - when her daughter went to college the streaking thing happened and she streaked through a McDonalds - mom said people didn't need to be ashamed of their bodies and hide them. I knew a few who should but... anyway I wouldn't have minded seeing her or her mom naked. Or both.

We had one, I had two classes with her - one was government and the other history - and she was pretty old. Some of the older ones were probably in that communist infiltration She didn't spew communism, was more subtle about it. She was pretty smart and knew her stuff but a hard-core democrat. Used to fall asleep in class, especially when watching a film and the lights were off. He husband was a civil servant, local office he held for years, nice enough fellow. After I graduated and worked at a local bank for a few years she and her husband would come to the election parties. The bank would invite a lot of local citizens to come up and have snacks and drinks - hard stuff was in the boardroom for select guests - while the election returns were announced on the local radio station.

It was the year Reagan was elected the first time, and there was a TV giving the national news. Poor old lady couldn't believe what was happening, how people could be do dumb. And she seemed pretty smart, good teacher, but it was all book-smart and not much real world. In the real world people were seriously hurting because of Carter's incompetence but in her closed world she couldn't see it.

Some years later I thought about it some when there was a kerfluffle of some sort involving the school. Something with extra-curricular stuff, someone's activity getting neglected in funding, something like that. I noticed that the teachers - they were average aged, thirties and forties - and the students talked the same way. Which is to say the teachers talked like teenagers. I had seen some of it with the young teachers fraternizing with students, the teachers behaved more like the kids. I figured there are some professions that should people should be time-limited. Teachers should take a break from teaching occasionally. Idunno, take a sabbatical or something. Spending most of their time with children some become childlike. Same with cops - it doesn't take long for any cop to get into the us-vs-them mindset - if you aren't a cop you're a potential adversary, no matter that ninety-plus percent of the population is completely law-abiding and would never be a threat.

Guess that should do it for school. I went to community college for a couple of years taking accounting and banking courses but enlisted in the Air Force and education got put on hold for a few years. By the time I got out you could buy your own computer and if you were real smart you could learn to code as they say today. Going back to college to learn a dying skill (I picked up COBOL and Fortran, RPG, when I had a roomie in the Air Force that worked in the data center) so I became a self-taught generalist and did pretty well.