7 a.m. – 9:30 a.m

1.

Highly primed educators have gathered at the X to attend a No Child Left Behind Conference. I know how excited—even anxious—this news makes you feel. The President of the United States of America has sanctioned and paid for this gathering. Think of the flitters and jitters that will enter your nerves upon learning that the Hiram and Myra Katz swimming pool and gym facility are available to you after 4 p.m.

2.

Millie Myers sits to my left, Jeff Ham to my right. Millie talks at excited, nearly breathless length about color-coding themes when writing sample compositions. Jeff, a math teacher from Gallup, a man with a big smashed-in lout’s nose, a sunblasted neck, a slow drawling manner, a 13 th century pageboy-in-a-tunic haircut—this Jeff drinks no less than 12 cups of coffee in 2 hours. He nods as Millie talks of the fun she had coloring in title pages with preschoolers. He nods. He nods. He nods.

3.

The facilitators enter: Two middle-aged women in power suits—with lapels and everything. One has a pink-glitter-stone butterfly button affixed to the left lapel of her power suit. Both wear strongly died hair and have heavy masculine features smoothed somewhat with pancake makeup. Lots of makeup. Peacock eye-shadow. Hellfire Red lips. Carole and Marty. No child will be left behind.

4.

There are some 25 people in the dim, arid, paisley-beige wallpapered room. They are all very goofy. They are all 50 to 60 years old. The educator elite. Millie laughs through her nose—snorts and snorkles, really, like a feral hog. Yeehaw.

5.

Later, hours later, as our eyes droop and we all wish it were 4 p.m. and the end of the meeting called, Jeff calls Millie a ‘finality hound’. I spruce it up a bit and say she’s a ‘closure-freak’. We’re at ease and joking, you see.

6.

Millie wears a jacket with hunting dogs embroidered on it.

7.

Ambient sounds:

… ‘the published end time’…

… grab your coffee and Poptarts and post-it notes’ …

… ‘I come from Greensberg, Indiana’ …

… ‘If the factory was good enough for my dad, then it’s good enough for me.’ ….

8.

A ’salmon-red’ agenda sheet. Lunch is from 11:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. I make these notes in the margins.

9.

The 4 A’s of Learning – with a diagram that cannot be represented here for lack of technological insight:

Awareness: the student is excited and enthusiastic

Automatic: this is where aware learning leads

Awkwardness: this is an educational moment that can lead to:

Avoidance

10.

My eyes admittedly glaze and are enclosed with a sluggish patina when Marty is talking about Level III Assessment and Analysis of the Classroom as a Learning System.

11.

‘The Baldridge Method’… ‘Affinity Diagrams’…. These are the hottest terms in the frontline trenches of Education.

12.

I was Tigerish in that den of teachers. I asked a lot of smart and concerned sounding questions. It was something of an accomplishment. I was always on the verge of snuffling.

13.

Ed had told me that these conferences and workshops were where all the money in education was to be found. A regular racket. That’s what he called it. But in a what must have been a chastened moment the following day, he said he thought I might pick up some useful tools.

9:30 a.m. – Lunch

1.

God, I wish the entire world could have been seated with me at the gray roundtable while Carole—silver buckles sounding on her boots—used the Dashboard of Your Car analogy (even drawing dials on a flipchart), as a means for us to gauge our progress in this workshop.

2.

Carole, all clad in pastels and rustling bristling skirts and high leather boots—her hair a shapeless snarling mass of bed-head locks barely combed down. She asks, ‘What are your expectations for deliverable outcomes?’

3.

Millie is wearing some kind of ivy-traced scarlet jacket underneath her hunting dog jacket. Millie wears glasses. Millie.

4.

We shuffle past the softly-lit consensograms taped to the foldable south wall. We place red-dot-stickers on the charts to indicate our levels of understanding. A scale between 10 and 100 quantifies our levels of understanding. I place all of my red dots on 10. Mischievous me. It’s because I know this is a mild racket. One chart reads: Your Understanding of the Impact of Alignment of Goals on the Classroom. 10. 10. 10.

5.

Marty, wrapped around in a charcoal and gray women’s power suit with black-lined lapels says, ‘Turn to page 50 in your red-dot book’. We’ve put red-dot-stickers on our workbooks too—in order to distinguish them from the blue-dot books.

6.

Maxine, having arrived late, panting in a very dignified way, joins our table. An elderly Navajo woman with blonde hair and a purple leisure suit. Her long, long nails are painted wickedly red. I find the whole thing to be devilish.

Lunch – Close

1.

The 25 or so teachers seated at round plastic gray tables are noticeably exhausted after lunch. Marty and Carole turn up the volume. They go into a whole barker at the carnival, preacher in the prayer tent kind of speech cadence. They could sell painted porcelain fawns on the shopping channel – such is the high mark of their enthusiasm. Their voices have become urgent and nasally, if you see what I’m saying.

2.

Marty, hands outreached, ‘You build a classroom culture through instilling core values and modeling good behavior.’

3.

During the Ritz cracker and Swiss cheese afternoon break, I draw a hat, a platter of freedom fried and a vagina using characters from the Hebrew alphabet that are written onto wall-hung paintings.

4.

There is no way I’ll be able to see you in London without eating you out from behind, making love to you every day, walking the canals and the old Roman oxcart lanes that lead to the River Thames.

5.

….Student, Stakeholder and Market Focus….

6.

….The Baldridge Method has led to more encouragement, support and reinforcement than any other self-guided educational system….

7.

Marty admits to being a recovering micromanager. Should I, in turn, confess to being an unrepentantly obsessive writer of micrographs? A writer of epic thumbnail novels? That kind of thing?

8.

I get ’sorted’ into the High School Focus Group. Now I’m at the front table—near enough to Marty to see that she has band-aids on her hand.

9.

Marty says, ‘These are non-negotiable requirements of the system.’

10.

I play Kamikaze—just to keep from nodding off. I ask a question, reminding everyone of my status as a Language Arts teacher and mentioning ’semantic ambiguities’ in the exercise we’ve completed. A real victory for humanity.

11.

….Standardized Design Project….

12.

I’m in a dullish stupor and it’s only 2:17 p.m. Interesting what behaviors we all agree should be compulsory. I’m not talking about Mosaic Law. I’m talking about attending No Child Left Behind conferences.

13.

….translate standards and benchmarks into student-friendly language…

14.

….daily appreciation announcements for teachers and students….

15.

‘Data’ and ‘rubric’ are also words gone all abuzz through the classrooms and administrative offices and education ministries throughout our purple-mountain-majesty land.

16.

….essential information…important information….nice to know….

17.

….Weekly quizzes on key concepts….

18.

What’s this? I’ve written something unintelligible on my agenda about ‘the intricacies of a folkloric goat’.

19.

To Jeff: ‘If your the Alpha, then I’m the Omega male…ha, ha, ha.’

20.

People all round are getting a rat-in-the-cage look. Carole says, ‘Is that a learning goal? No, that’s a process goal….’

21.

People are near to slumbering. Somnambulist Educators. Marty is doing a lot of shouting now—nasally Greenberg Indiana shouting. She runs her fingers through her hair and flips her bangs often. She writes, ‘School EPSS Goal: 100% of the 6 th Graders will achieve proficiency in reading scores.’ Then she asks the listless lot of us, ‘Now, what is the teacher’s part, the parent’s part, the administrator’s part, the student’s part and the custodian’s part in this number?’ And finally we are almost admonished. ‘You need to sell this goal! You need to publish and sell this goal!’

22.

….The way you practice is the way you play….

23.

S.M.A.R.T. goals.

Specific

Measurable

Aligned to Standards

Result-focused

Time-framed

Goals

24.

Should I tell them about Roland, whom I will be tutoring 6 hours a week, beginning in March? Roland, who wears a necklace of elks’ teeth and whose only completed assignment for me in two months of my knowing him has been a haiku poem in which ‘Bullets are my girfriend’. 14 year old Roland who is 2 inches taller than I, and who is given over to shouting in class?

25.

I’ll tell you about Roland. At his I.E.P. (individual education plan for those of you not current with educational acronyms) Roland looked at his hands and nodded his head in the negative for an hour. Cindy, the school psychologist told us—somehow—about how she worked as a bouncer for almost a year. ‘Yeah, in a bar for midgets,’ I said casually. Roland smiled at that at least.

25.

Roland’s grandmother, Agnes, was at that meeting. She had yellow smoker’s eyes, nicotine fingers, a smokers cough. She kept saying, ‘Thank you, dear,’ to me. She rasped and rheumed those words. She wore a high Spanish pompadour with little ringlets trailing along her weathered neck.

26.

Pollution in the pond! A sick and sagging frond! A drooping lily pad! Sharks and gators circle! Tins of meat on the gravelly bottom!

Epilogue

1.

I had an enchanted lunch with Roman who I haven’t seen from university days. Our eyes grew round to see one another in this room. He still is one of those Romeo-conquistador types, a big time Hispanic intellectual and a champion wrestler, but very soft-spoken and gentle. He’s moved to Grants New Mexico—to savor the cosmopolitan amenities, I joke. His headmistress is an extremely suave, middle-aged Navajo woman. We sit and eat spaghetti at the Tomato Cafe. Across from me is a woman who takes the oxygen tube out of her nose every time she drinks a glass of dry white wine. Rochelle, the waitress with a line of gold gloss down the bone of her nose, is instructed to bring out the driest. The woman across from me takes the oxygen tube out of her nose 3 times to drink as many glasses.

2.

If I have any literary talent, it is for writing in an absurdist-aggrandizement style. I don’t want to be guilty of frivolous characterization. Marty and Carole are clearly caring and devoted teachers. So is everyone in the room, no matter the slackness of our jaws at 3:30 p.m. I like teachers a lot. Salt of the earth. Salt of the earth. $alt of the earth.

This entry was posted on Thursday, 23 February 2006 at 0:01 and is filed under Micrograph.