“Doctor,” Tiberius maneuvered his ward between us. “This is James.” I shook hands with each of them.

At a glance I could see that the boy had a sore thumb — to me it stuck out like a dangling participle. “What can I do for you, James?” I asked.

He looked at me, then at Tiberius who nodded encouragement, then back at me. “Hopefully, you can help me to better read and write words and do maths,” he said brightly. Or what I’m sure he thought was brightly anyway.

I offered my most reassuring smile and handed him a pad and pencil. “Write down this sentence for me,” I said. “You’re too kind to your two kids for their own good.” I observed the way he wrapped his fingers in a virtual strange-hold around the defenseless writing instrument — that explained the thumb. He stuck out his tongue at some apparently specific angle and hunched over the pad of paper as though protecting a small animal.

He only asked me to repeat the sentence once. That was a more encouraging sign than I had expected. When he finished scratching at the paper he handed it back to me. His eyes held expectations far out of proportion to his ability.

I examined the product of his efforts. “UR 2 KYND 2 UR 2 KIDZ 4 THERE OAN GUD LOL.” It was heartbreaking.

“That’s fine,” I handed the paper back to him. “Now, if you add up all the numbers in that sentence, what do you get?”

His tongue returned to its working position and then he muttered, “Two and two is four, and two is six, and four is ten, and one is…” He held out the paper again. “Eleven!” he announced.

A generation ago any doctor in my position would be arranging to have the boy sterilized. Back then the mottoes were, “Genetics yes, phonetics no,” and “If you can’t add, you can’t multiply.” In our more enlightened age, I am duty-bound to try and help him.

“Thank you, James. Tiberius and I need to step outside for just a moment, okay?” I unwrapped a lollipop and handed it to him. Part of me wanted to explain which end went in his hand and which in his mouth, but I figured that if there’s anything he can do on his own it is probably sucking.

I grabbed a clipboard and an IEP manual as Tiberius led the way to the now deserted reception area. “We know he needs some physical rehabilitation for the way he holds the pencil,” he began. “And remedial work in spelling and grammar… and the maths….”

“Dammit, Tib,” I hissed, “I’m a Doctor of Education, not a miracle worker!”

.

Follow Friday Flash Fiction on Twitter, Facebook, and FridayFlash.org

In honor of all those teachers and students returning to classrooms this fall here is an update of a story I published on another site a couple years ago.

I’m wondering what it would be like if we saw our teachers more like we see our doctors… young children would receive some basic instruction in numbers and letters like inoculations. Beyond that families [if they can afford it] would choose an education-care provider with whom they schedule regular check-ups. That provider may prescribe any number of lessons or refer patients to specialists. There would be emergency rooms and critical-care facilities when an individual becomes acutely aware of an educational shortcoming and they would receive intensive remediation. Best of all [really!], employers would routinely provide ignorance insurance [Blue Cross/Blue Shield might develop a Yellow Pencil/Red Pen division] to underwrite the cost of continuing education.

Johnny arrives fifteen minutes early for his appointment. He fills out [well, mostly fills out and most of that illegibly] three pages of forms and then sits in the waiting room. Thirty minutes later he is ushered into an examination room where he is given a pop quiz by an EdTech [Educational Technician].

“You have ten minutes,” says the EdTech, as she writes the time, date, and her name [let's say... Ms. Amy] in neat, block letters on a dry-erase board in front of Johnny.

“Miss,” Johnny raises his hand, “I don’t have a pencil.”

Ms. Amy hands Johnny a sharp #2 pencil [for which he will be billed $5.00] and with a sigh and slight shake of her head makes a note on his chart [his PERMANENT record...].

Johnny bends over the quiz paper and answers most of the questions [again, mostly illegibly] and embellishes the page with stray doodles. At ten minutes [timed to the second, of course] Amy reaches for the paper. “Time’s up!”

“Miss, do you count off for spelling?”

“Only when it’s wrong. The teacher will be with you shortly.” Amy leaves, placing Johnny’s chart and quiz in a plastic bin on the wall.

Johnny stares blankly at the wall and chews idly on the pencil. A few minutes later the teacher [let's call her Dr. Brennan] enters.

“Good morning, Johnny! Please sit up straight.”

“Good morning, Dr. Brennan.”

She flips quickly through his chart, frowning at the pop quiz results and stealing a side-long glance at the pencil wedged again in his teeth. Johnny notices and guiltily drops the pencil to his lap.

“It’s not time for your regular check-up, Johnny. What’s up?”

“It’s the maths.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“It’s just all of it. I was looking at my bank statement last week…”

Problem with balance, Dr. Brennan notes in his chart.

“…and I was trying to subtract all the checks I wrote…”

Doesn’t know the difference.

“…and I just got all confused…”

Thank God he’s not multiplying — oops, that’s for another visit!

Dr. Brennan flips back a few pages in the chart. “I see we’ve treated you for this before.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“I gave you three sample problems and a workbook?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Did you finish them?”

“Well, mostly. But then I had to work overtime for a few days and my car broke down and I slept late and my Mom didn’t wake me up and –”

Dr. Brennan holds up a hand. “I get the picture. We can repeat the treatment, but it won’t do any good if you don’t complete it. I hesitate to send you to a specialist… since it wasn’t a failure of the treatment but your failure to follow instructions it falls under the pre-existing conditions exemption clause and your insurance won’t cover it.”

“How much will it cost?”

Test for comprehension of irony during follow-up she noted… “A private tutor can easily run $300 an hour; group sessions can be arranged for as little as $100 an hour, but there might be as many as six people in the group.”

“Six people at a time! How can one tutor help six people at a time?”

“Well, obviously you’ll get less individual attention, but they’ve been very successful even with severe cases. They are highly-trained professionals, after all”

“Doesn’t matter. I can’t afford either of those, especially if insurance isn’t going to cover it.”

There may be hope for you after all….

“Can I have another workbook?”

“Do you mean, ‘May I have another workbook, please?’”

“Yes, ma’am. May I have another workbook, please?”

“Promise me you’ll finish it and schedule a follow-up appointment in… let’s say two weeks.”

“I promise.”

“Okay, Johnny. Ms. Amy will be back in just a moment. She will give you the workbook and schedule your follow-up. And here…” she holds out a jar of candy.

“A lollipop. Thanks, Dr. Brennan!”

You can call it that. I call it a sucker…. “Bye, Johnny. See you in two weeks.”

.

.

.

Follow Friday Flash Fiction on Twitter, Facebook, and Mad Utopia

As I turned to leave I heard another clerk chime in, “I bet we could sell their souls.” And they both laughed.

“I always knew y’all were evil,” I called over my shoulder as I exited the building.

[I almost typed "I existed the building" in the sentence above. That reminds me -- don't ask why, it's just the way my brain [doesn't] work — that every time I approach a building with a sign declaring “Entrance” over the front door I think that if I ever build my dream house I will put a sign over the front door that says “Enchant” instead.]

Granted, this is not much of a story but I got a chuckle out of it. Plus, one of the media specialists sent us an email today alerting us to Literacy Week [which is next week] and gave me an idea for a Friday Flash that I now have planned for this week. Overall, I think that’s the most I have ever gotten out of our media center….

And here’s a final thought: going green is all the rage in certain circles these days. At the bottom of the email referenced above is this handy green tip, “Do you really need to print this email?” And I’m thinking, “Shoot, most of the time I don’t even need to read your emails.”

I garnered three new followers on Twitter this weekend. I have blocked two of them because they link directly to porn sites. [I am not philosophically opposed to porn. It's just not what I publish in this space nor will I promote it here.] I’m guessing I picked them up because I had the word “erotica” in my Friday Flash title and the tweets promoting it. And I’m guessing I’ll have to block a couple more when I publish this post. ~Tim 14 December 2009

Here’s the old post with updates:

Let me tell you about the time my website was labeled “pornography”. [And it was not last month when I got all crude and rude on a couple posts. In fact, it predates my blog by a few years.]

The school district where I work has only been hosting websites for teachers for about a year or two. Those of us that were ahead of that curve were on our own. So for a while I used some of the space provided for personal pages by my ISP to post information for my classes. I registered a domain name and had the URL forward to my pages.

That worked well… until one day the filtering software the district used blocked access to my site. It was classified as pornography. Hmm. Well, I was angered a little and amused a lot. But URL forwarding was a trick often used by pornographic sites so you could have a link for PureAsTheDrivenSnow.com that actually links to RaunchyDebauchery.com. And since it wasn’t really practical for them to, you know, actually have a person look at every website that passes through our servers, the filtering software just blocked every site that was forwarded. And labeled it pornography.

[I just made up those domain names and figured I better check whether there are websites attached to them. As of this writing PureAsTheDrivenSnow.com is registered but does not have a site up and RaunchyDebauchery.com is not yet registered. Wow! Same as three years ago! ~TVS So if you're looking for the Christmas gift for the person that seems to have everything....]

I copied the section of the agreement with my ISP that expressly prohibits posting obscene material and emailed our district network administrator. The reply shocked me more than having my students see the big stop sign when they tried to get to my site. It was district policy not to unblock sites owned by teachers. I think they adopted the policy because a lot of people were using services like Geocities [remember Geocities?] that were full of banner ads over which you had very little control. But I wasn’t using Geocities for my class pages and I had no ads (or pornography) anywhere on my site. And shouldn’t we expect a site owned by a teacher to be among the most relevant of the sites we want our students to access?

Fortuitously, I also emailed the publisher of the software the district was using and they unblocked my site. The argument with district policy was moot for me then and it was a battle I was not inclined to fight just on principle. Eventually web hosting prices dropped low enough that I was willing to have a site devoted just to my classes so I don’t have to forward the URL any more. And thus ended My Extremely Brief, Unintentional, and Unprofitable [dammit] Ownership of a Pornographic Website.

I really like this:

Individuals may restrict what they themselves or their children read, but they must not call on governmental or public agencies to prevent others from reading or seeing that material.

from the Books Challenged in 2008-2009 publication.

Our school media specialist offered this little quiz matching quotes from challenged books.

If you are here on my site I’m reasonably certain that you read. This week, make sure you encourage everyone else to read too. OK?

Administrator: Good morning! How are you?
Me: Peachy!
Administrator: Oh, I wish I could say that.
Me (pausing a half-beat and then deciding what the hell): I wish I were telling the truth….

The first week of school is always stressful. You’ve heard the aphorism, “Make God Laugh. Make plans.“? If (s)he has a floor, (s)he is rolling on it and laughing his/her/its ass off this time every year. Still, we make plans. And then we show up and see what happens. And plans usually go out the window.

Overall, today went fairly well. So tomorrow I’ll show up again. And see what happens….

I ended the day feeling bone tired.

There is a specter over my shoulder — the ghost of school years past. Here is my impression of the way administrators plan things:

• There is a list of “this is how we always do it” notes
• They plan a day based on those notes
• They ask for suggestions on “how we can do better next time” notes
• They thank us profusely [though rarely convincingly] for our honest input
• The list of “this is how we always do it” notes NEVER gets revised
• So every year we have the SAME DAMN PROBLEMS

Maybe I’m just cynical….

First we show up.
Then we see what happens.

Whew! Now what am I going to do with all the rest of my prep time????

In an effort to support academic performance, cross-curricular and community connections, and a lifelong love of reading, [SWIT] proudly announces our 2009 “One Book, One [SWIT]” required summer reading title Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer. The book is a heart-pounding account of one family’s struggle to hold on to the most important resource of all—hope—in an increasingly desperate and unfamiliar time.
Every student in the school will be required to read Life as We Knew It. This is in addition to any summer reading assignment for specific programs or classes. A school-wide test will be given to every student during the first week of school; some ideas and questions to think about as you read are listed on the back of this letter. In addition, all content areas will use the book as a foundation for many activities, writings, and projects during the first few weeks of school.

While I appreciate the concept, imagine the difficulty in choosing one book for all our students in grades 9-12 (which easily spans ages 14-19) of widely varying abilities and interests. Frankly it is a task I would not want. And while they chose a highly rated, award-winning title it is one that I think is really terrible. Bad science. Bad fiction.

Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer

My review

rating: 1 of 5 stars
This book is just awful. Honestly, I don’t understand why it is so highly regarded and has won so many awards. I don’t believe the premise on which it is based and I don’t believe the way the characters act. It doesn’t even get the phases of the moon correct. Ugh!


View all my reviews.