MR. HAGEN'S CLASS

Long before someone introduced Bango the Milwaukee Bucks mascot to steroids and we all learned to “fear the deer,” there was another equally ferocious character terrorizing the city’s north side.  Now I'm not saying I grew up in a sketchy part of town but apparently my grade school mascot was a mouse. Behold “The Mouse’s Roar,” my school newspaper from spring of 1976. A word of advice for parents:  if you’re looking into schools for junior you may want to inquire about the mascot.  If it’s a mouse, vole, rat, or any other potentially Black Plague/hantavirus spreading mammal just move on.  Your kids will thank you for it. My high school mascot wasn't much better.  I attended Custer High School (now Barack Obama Academy) home of the Custer Indians.  The school wasn't actually named after George Armstrong Custer of the infamous Little Big Horn massacre.  It was named for a different Custer. I'm not sure what the Indians did to him. Apparent...

A young stranger to the Alps was making his first climb accompanied by two experienced guides. It was a steep, hazardous ascent. But he felt secure with one guide ahead and one following. For hours they climbed, and now, breathless, they reached for the rocks protruding through the snow above them - The Summit. The guide ahead wanted to let the stranger have the first glorious view of Heaven and Earth, and moved aside to let him go first. Forgetting the winds that blow across those Summit rocks, the man leaped to his feet. But the chief guide dragged him down. “On your knees, sir!”  he shouted. “You are never safe here except on your knees. . .” I swiped this from a book called “Illustrations for Preaching and Teaching.”  It was in a section about reverence and humility.

The Grapes of Wrath, The Old Man and the Sea, To Kill a Mockingbird.  These are just a few of the books everyone should read.  They're rites of passage.  In my elementary school classroom I had my own standbys.  I read Charlotte's Web aloud to my kids every year and it never got old.  Then there was the ridiculous Sideways Stories From Wayside School, Hatchet and my all time favorite kids book:  Stone Fox.   There was another book that I read with my students every year not because it was a great work of literature but because it had a hook.  Part of the challenge of teaching children is getting them to WANT to read.  To do that you have to appeal to their curiosity.  Generally speaking grade school age girls are more interested in reading than boys. That’s where the children’s classic “How to Eat Fried Worms” came in.  The title alone was enough to make the girls shriek and that’s all it took to get the boys to want to r...

In the hands of a truly talented person graffiti can be elevated to an art form.  My high school buddies were not artists and they didn't claim to be.  They didn't even call what they did graffiti, it was graffilthy and they took pride in their work. Their medium was black Sharpie marker, their canvas any surface in the school where they could scrawl the names of their favorite heavy metal bands without getting caught.   Somehow during senior year they managed to get their hands on a master key to the school that gave them access to the locked bathrooms in the shop wing where they could safely create their own Sistine chapels in Sharpie on the bathroom walls and stalls.  Metallica, Iron Maiden, Dio and Black Sabbath. Sistine chapel?  Maybe more like Neanderthal cave painting:  crude but effective. They hit their targets with such ferocity it fed rumors the perpetrators were a gang or even a satanic cult, but it was just a couple of stoned metalhea...

“She carries a map of the world in her pocket To remind her of places she'll never see, And quotes from all her lifelong Heroes of all the things she'll never be…” Juan W.

“So what do you want to be when you grow up?” It's a question I've asked literally hundreds of children during my career as a teacher with the public schools.  The usual answers included football player, basketball player, dancer, singer, doctor, astronaut, etc. If I fished long enough eventually some bright-eyed small person would invariably say, “I want to be a teacher just like you, Mr. Hagen!”  I have to confess that I always admired the certainty of the kids who thought they knew who they wanted to be - even if they changed their minds on the long road to adulthood. As for me, I never really knew what I wanted to be. I've been a cook, painter and  printer; a landscaper, furniture mover, truck washer and much, much more on my own long road to teaching. Every lawn mowed, floor mopped and dish washed helped me move.  Forward.  Maybe not always in a straight line but forward.   In all my years working in a classroom I never once heard a kid say ...

THAT'S MY GIRL I wake to watch the covers rise And the covers fall. A storm last night was raging wild But my angel slept right thru it all. That's my girl . . . A universe outside of my doorway But she's my world. I lie awake and watch the moonlight On the bedroom wall. A shadowplay of crosses sways in the night light but she doesn't see it at all. In peaceful dreams . . . In her own world . . . That's my girl. (Guitar solo) A chaos of curls On the pillow beside me A kiss on the cheek As I quietly head toward the door. My whole life . . . My whole world . . . That's my girl.

“When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in a manner so that when you die the world cries and you rejoice.”  --Native American Proverb  Kids nowadays have it so easy with their memes and tweets.  Back in the PG era (pre-google) if you wanted quotes you had to either read a book (which even then nobody bothered to do;-) or steal them from the Quotable Quotes section of Reader's Digest in your dentist’s waiting room.  Of course I was way too cool for that.  I don’t even know where those pages upstairs came from . . .

I found this poem in the garage today.  It'd been sitting in my briefcase since I quit teaching last fall.  It made me think of the Pope’s suggestion to our current president that Christians should be more concerned with building bridges than walls. “The Bridge Builder” A man going along a long highway Came at end of the evening Cold and gray, To a chasm vast and wide and steep, With water rolling cold and deep. The man he crossed in the twilight dim The sullen stream held no fears for him, But he turned when safe on the other side, And built a bridge to span the tide. “Old man,” said a fellow trav’ler near, “You’re wasting your strength With building here. Your journey will end with the ending day, You never again Will pass this way. You’ve crossed the chasm, deep and wide, Why build you this bridge At eventide?” The builder slowly lifted his head, “Good friend, in the path I’ve come,” he said, “There followeth...