To be a Teacher

To say that Mr. Burkett was a bad teacher would be a lie.  To say that he was a good teacher would also be stretching the truth.  For the purposes of understanding who Mr. Burkett is, let’s just say that he was a young teacher and leave it at that. 

When he began to teach at my school in my senior year, he had just graduated college and this was his first teaching job.  We treated him as we did with all new teachers, respect and uncertainty.  Respect because he was our teacher and we knew by then how we were supposed to treat teachers.   Uncertainty because we didn’t know if he was going to be a good teacher and we didn’t know what he expected from us.  He had some trouble with the younger girls initially because with his baby face and neat brown hair, they found him cute.  Mr. Burkett once confessed to us that he never dressed down on Friday because he would look too much like a student.  And, to be perfectly frank, he would have.  But he seemed to have managed to keep his distance from the girls crushing on him and managed to dissuade them.

Mr. Burkett taught us consumer math.  This class is basically only meant for seniors to try to help them once they graduate and they are trying to survive in the real world.  We are meant to learn how to budget, equations to figure out interest in a bank account and on a car.  One of our projects was to choose a car to buy and plan everything out for it, including what we wanted in it and the insurance.  Then we were to calculate how much we should save buying it up front rather than in payments.  Two of the students of my class picked Lamborghini's.  They have to lie about their age while trying to "order" it online because they wouldn't sell it to people under thirty.  Then they calculated that they could by a whole new car with the money saved from buying it straight up.  We were a small class confined to less than half the classroom so that we weren't too spread out.

At first the class was fine and was like any other teacher.  But like any other class, our class liked to push the boundaries to see how far we could go.  Once we found the boundaries, we would normally be fine and this year was the year our class was at its best but we still had to push.  The problem arose when we didn’t get much resistance at all or anything pushing back.  So we kept pushing until we were comfortable where we were and were uncomfortable going any further.  He would later explain that he felt uncomfortable being our teacher because he was so close to our age.  I can only hope that he had learned for our class which quickly became a joke.  I graduated with a hundred in consumer math.  Partially because of the Bible trivia questions that were our extra credit and partly because he had all of the equations already on the tests.  Though I didn’t talk during the tests, the rest of the class did.  Tests became almost a group effort with them asking and answering questions while he watched on in a kind of shock, I guess.  They wouldn’t give each other answers per say but they might as well have.  My older brother would later talk about how useful that class is and I could honestly say that I learned nothing. 

The other classes seemed to be fine with him and to be learning plenty.  He went all out trying to get them new and interesting information to teach them and us.  He even confessed to us once that if we were any other class, we would have never gotten away with what we did.

Another problem that he may have had was that Mr. Burkett fancied himself more a biblical scholar than he really was.  Mr. Burkett may have a mostly good Christian but the problem arose when he thought of himself that way.  One day, he talked to us about how he believed that the Nephilim in Genesis built the pyramids.  It didn’t take too long for another girl in the class to point out that the Nephilim were killed in the flood and she didn’t think that the pyramids would have survived that.  It was a good point that he accepted and moved on.  Another day though, he was explaining about how Jesus was against the Catholic church which was around since before Jesus was born and opposed him.  When he kept arguing with us about it, two girls just got up and walked out of the classroom to ask another teacher that we knew knew her stuff to ask when it was formed.  By the time that they came back, we had already sufficiently convinced him of his error but it was still a check mark in our books.  It also didn’t help that the Bible extra credit questions he thought were hard, I always either already knew them or knew where to find them and it took a few minutes to answer them every time.  It became commonplace and almost encouraged for us to correct him in class when he was wrong about something in class.  I even got praise once we left the class room when I corrected on something that he got wrong.

At the beginning of the year, Mr. Burkett tried to act really proper with us and the way that he, a married man, avoided saying the word sex, I think I can say we all found a bit cute but more funny.  Two of the girls made it their life’s mission to get him to say that word sex and they succeeded.  Unfortunately, it unleashed the flood gates and he began to preach sermons to us about once a week about sex.  Which, with him being our teacher quickly became uncomfortable.

After that, Mr. Burkett didn’t really hesitate to tell us how he felt about many things.  For example, he didn’t like it when girls wore skirts in class because of how the desks are and such.  Of course, in a class of five girls and one boy, we were all looking at him in horror.  It, of course, didn’t help that I and another girl were wearing skirts that day.  Considering that girls in sports had to wear skirts on the day of away games and girls had to dress up when giving speeches, it wasn't rare to have someone wearing a skirt on any given day.  I had never been so grateful before in my life it have a guy sitting in front of me in class.  One of the girls from then on brought a jacket with her to class to cover her legs up whenever she wearing a skirt.  Another one tried to cross her legs as many times as she could in an effort to show less.  When our one chaperone for our senior trip got sick and wasn’t able to go, we discussed what to do in his class before it began.  Mr. Burkett felt the need to point out that though he would like to help, he was married and he didn’t think that his wife would like it if he went on this trip with us and that it would be too much of a temptation to see a bunch of attractive girls in their bathing suits.  We were sufficiently horrified and, if we had ever even contemplated it, were convinced that having him along was a bad idea.

Even after graduating, some of the girls avoid him if at all possible.  One of my friends accidentally pulled up to a produce booth he was working at as a summer job and promptly sped off once she saw it was him.  It was partially because of the fact that he managed to creep us out with some of the insight into the male mind that he gave us, but it was also probably because she didn't want to get in a long conversation with him about whatever he chose to speak about.

 Though Mr. Burkett told us that he was married, we sometimes had a hard time believing it.  One time, we would all swear, he told us that his wife wears only skirts.  Another time he told us that she most definitely did not.  That one possible slip of the tongue gave as leave to make it a yearlong joke to the point that even when we met his wife, we had made up a story about him being in witness protection and she was his handler.

What happened, I think, was that the lines of teacher and student were blurred in that class.  We found out later that he had been having troubles with his wife and we may have become a group of almost friends that he could talk to and joke with.  But the problem was, that even with how close he was in age to us, we never stopped viewing him as our teacher.  He may not have even been fully prepared in college to take on students so close to his age.  The next year he left because he needed more money.  With his wife only able to find a substitute teaching position, they needed more than our school could give.  Other brand new teachers just out of college didn’t have the problems that he did.  Once he matures more, I think that he could be a pretty good teacher.  He just wasn’t for us.

School Days

The narrator in this story is talking about his school days.  Though he can remember some things that he enjoyed at school, this story seems to be primarily about how he was mistreated at school and how the headmaster and mistress seemed to ingrain within him and the others a sense of inferiority and would discipline them for things that they didn’t understand so that they would feel guilty over something they hadn’t done or something that was misunderstood. 

One thing that struck out to me was his sense of continual hunger there and how it was accepted in his time that they should be hungry.  Though my school by no means starved us, as we grew older, the lunch portions were often not large enough.  Students got the same portions from kindergarten up until we graduated.  While one grilled cheese sandwich, a bowl of tomato soup, and a small side something else may be enough for the younger students, it quickly failed to completely fill us up.  In ninth through twelfth grade, you were last ones eating and could sometimes mooch leftovers.  But for everyone else, it was common to order extra food or to have money on hand to buy snacks.  Though we were often frustrated with this, it was accepted as normal and the older students had worked around it.

It wasn’t until after he left the school that he realized that not everything that they said was law and they were not always right.  The one boy, Horne, was expelled and they were horrified for him and afraid for himself, sure that he was now going to fail.  Instead, when they saw him next, he looked better and healthier than any of them.  Horne even seemed glad to be gone and going to a different school.  Still, he was looked upon with fear and pity.  They still expected to be punished for his supposed crimes.

Circle

Everyday moves in circles.  You wake up, go to work, go home, relax and sleep again only to start again.  Even Sundays and Saturdays where you may not have to go to work, you still do about the same thing every day.  Every once in a while, something disturbs your circle, your routine.  For example, right now, I am sick and I have been planning my day since I woke up specifically to work around my illness and to bring to most comfort to myself.  I am planning on taking a glass of tea to class with me to drink since I am expected to talk in it and I have about ten packets of Kleenex in my book bag.  I am also planning on buying some cough drops from the campus store.

This story examines the concept of life moving in circles.  In the first section he talks about a circus and two performers.  The older woman is standing in the middle and controls the horse as it prances around in a circle.  The young woman comes in does tricks on the horse after talking to the other woman who may be her mother.  What she did while riding on the horse in the circle was fantastic but the author saw it as a one time thing.  Yes, she can do it now, but eventually she will be the other woman in the center, not moving as she guided the horse along.

The middle section seems to be talking about the south and the racial inequality that was there and was disturbed about how little signs there were about it because it was just so accepted that commonplace.  The final section turns to the fiddler crab and its spots that change with the tides for maximum camouflage from predators.  Even removed from its natural environment and put in a laboratory, the spots still changed as if to continue to camouflage itself.

Life has patterns and circles in it and sometimes the circles are reliable as the moon and the tides.  Other times, they change as you get older and as other things happen.   One just has to be ready for it.

Now as an Adult

In this story, a man takes his son to the lake that his father used to take him.  As a child, he had gone to the lake for all of August every year for a while.  Now that he has gone back with his own son for the first time, he can't help compare what was to what it's like now.  At times he as if he is his father and his son is him as a child and that nothing has changed.

Some things, like the dragonflies and the waves and even the bass seem to have remained the same and he has trouble differentiating between his son and himself.  He even at one point sees a man there with a cake of soap that had been there during his youth and was still there.

But things have also changed.  As they walk along to dinner with only two tracks, he remembered how there used to be three.  The third and middle one used to be for horses and was covered in horse crap.  Even the lake has changed a bit with the motorboats on them.  The motorboats from when he was young were quieter and only added to the ambiance.  Now they are louder.  Still, his son tries to master them like he did at his age.

Though many things have changed since he had been there, some things stayed the same.  No matter what, the lake was still an awesome place to spend some time.

A Day at Pause

I don't remember actually being told what had happened then.  That wasn't really what affected me that day.  It was my principal interrupting my class to talk to my teacher.  You see, that had never happened before, it was confusing and troubling to all of us, especially when they left the room to talk and left us alone.  We all knew that something had happened but we just didn't know what it was yet.
My mom had a man from church bring my older brother, Matthew, home early since that man was a teacher at school and already was leaving.  She knew that he, out of all of us, would react the worst.  Matthew has always been the most sensitive to things like that and had a tendency to worry himself sick.
Though the teachers told us what had happened and had us pray for the victims, I don't think that it really hit home to me until I actually saw some of the clips and pictures when we got home.  Andrew, my younger brother was eventually forbidden from watching the videos and seeing the pictures after he had begun to sob uncontrollably after looking through the Time magazine.
My Uncle Robin called because he worked in Washington DC and it had scared him.  We don't hear from him much and it was one of the only times that he had actually initialized the contact.  Though most of us are friends with him on facebook, we haven't actually heard much from in years.  But we can count on him to always come home to us when he feels that he needs protection or a refuge.
That day, I looked at the sky differently.  Flight 97 had probably flown somewhere overhead near where I went to school and lived.
That day stopped air travel, work, school, and many more things.  Even now people still pause today in remembrance of what happened.  It brought America to its knees for that short while just before we got up swinging. 
America as one, in the words of a famous song, cried out, "I get knocked down, but I get up again, you're never going keep me down."  We were shaken but we were not broken.

Athletes and Olympians

I loved how this piece began with his families view on athletics versus his.  Though his family viewed games as good but sports as going too far, he still wanted to be a professional athlete.  He then smoothly transitioned his yearning for fame due to his prowess at sports into watching sports of television.  The show, “Wide World of Sports” began to spread sports across the glove and it set up a standard for how sports are played and revered rather than a play-by-play description of it. 

When he begins to describe different athletes and why they were so famous, we ourselves began to see some of why athletes are so revered by people and how amazing it is the things that they do.   But he also gave little personal information about some Olympians that show their humanity.  Suleymanoglu was one athlete that caught my attention due to him lifting almost three times his body weight but more due to the fact that he smoked fifty cigarettes a day.

The part that he wrote about the some of the hidden aspects in sports made me laugh like how the world records in racewalking are mathematically impossible without breaking the rules.  When he said, “It’s time to clean up racewalking!” it was particularly funny because no one ever really thinks about how people cheat in racewalking.  The comment about how they widened the diameter of a table-tennis ball so that it would go slower and be able to see better really struck home how tv has changed sports.

This article was a really fun way to learn more about the Olympics before or afterwards