MR. HAGEN'S CLASS

He was going with his family to Mexico for the holidays. It would be a three day road trip from Milwaukee to southern Mexico and he’d be gone the entire Christmas Break visiting grandma and grandpa. Thursday, the day before he was supposed to leave, I had him stay after school to discuss his make-up work. We talked about the trip and how jealous I was to be stuck in Milwaukee while he was going on a grand adventure. We looked at the big pull down map in our classroom and guessed at all the states he would be seeing. We collected an armful of books and maps to help him pass the time on the long ride. We found Highlites magazines for each of the states he would drive through and found activities he could enjoy with his little sister. We even sent along a disposable camera so that he could record his journey and share the adventure in pictures with his classmates when he returned. We had accumulated so many treasures for the trip that as he left he half joked that he hoped his parents ...

1. I believe that the creative process is a lot like passing a kidney stone – or a diamond – and that too many of us have forgotten how difficult it can be. 2. I believe that conformity and creativity cannot exist together. 3. I believe that our priorities are skewed – that we tend to value test scores more than the children they represent. 4. I believe that we give lip service to celebrating diversity while homogenizing the curriculum. 5. I believe we’re spending an inordinate amount of time testing, measuring and judging students when we should be instructing, guiding and even (heaven forbid!) inspiring them. 6. I believe that the most important things we do as teachers cannot be quantified. 7. I believe that collaboration should be encouraged but not coerced. The last time everyone was on the same page thinking the same thing at the same time was in Germany in the 1930’s. It didn’t turn out very well. 8. I believe that enthusiasm is as contagious as a yawn. Which woul...

The following stories were originally written for an audience of one. They are part of a personal journal I’ve been keeping for nearly twenty years. In high school I had an English teacher who required all of her students to keep a journal, and while I resented this intrusion into my private life, I reluctantly did what she asked. But instead of using the assignment as an opportunity for quiet reflection and introspection as she had intended, I used it to keep track of my latest successes at the local pool hall and the box score of bases stolen on the weekends with my high school sweetheart. The journal was a joke to me and would have most likely continued to remain a joke for the rest of the semester except that was the year that my father died. It seemed school didn’t matter to me anymore so I began to skip classes. My friends couldn’t relate to my experience, my girlfriend couldn’t either and I gradually began to withdraw from everyone. Over the course of the next several month...

Teacher? “I’m a teacher,” I told the world. “Great!” the world replied. “What do you teach?” asked the world in return. To tell the truth, I lied. I’ve no answers, only questions, Confusion the product for all my lessons. Try as I might the riddles have no end. I’m the problem, not the solution All I offer is mental pollution How much longer do I dare pretend?

HAVE YOU EVER BEEN HANDED A TRIANGULAR FLAG? YOU KNOW, THE KIND THEY GIVE TO THE MOURNING WIDOWS OF FALLEN HEROES? THE FLAG, FOLDED WITH PYTHAGOREAN PRECISION, AS IF DEATH WERE CONQUERED BY THE PERFECTION OF CREASES. BUT IT ISN’T CONQUERED, AND DEATH WINS OUT, AND ALL THAT’S LEFT IS SOME DAMNED TRIANGULAR FLAG . . .

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. I’d hoped for a clean separation, not another soul stealing, gut wound of a break-up. Not like last time. This time I’d be strong. She’d been unfaithful and I just wanted out. But nothing’s ever that easy . . . Her mother called me that night. Late. Terri had slit her wrists. I rushed over and found her wound up tight sitting on her basement stairs crying hysterically. Her mother had managed to clean up the wounds and wrapped them in white gauze. The bleeding had stopped by the time I got there but the parallel lines of the razor’s edge left me feeling faint; like I was the one losing blood. It seemed like we sat on the stairs forever in the semi-darkness of the basement; the only light seeping through the half closed door above us. I could hear her mother going through her own private hell talking loudly to someone on the phone: “. . . she’s only doing it for attention . . . if she’d really wanted to do herself in she would have cut deepe...

An hour into the wilderness the dawn silence was broken by a noise from the valley below. Still shrouded in Autumn mist, the foothills I’d recently traversed were hidden in a cloud. While I sat on the hiking trail setting up my camera and focusing on a dew covered spider’s web I heard the noise again. Sitting motionless I craned my neck to identify the sound. This was one of those times when I wished I’d better understood the woods I so much loved to wander. For all I knew it could have been a wolverine - or a wildebeest. There it was again. Louder this time. Whatever was making the noise was following the trail I was on. It almost sounded like the staccato call of a loon, but it wasn’t. I was convinced it had to be an exotic bird of some sort when it crested the nearest hill and ran through the fog toward me. It was only then that I could identify the call: laughter. It was the laughter of a little boy riding on his father’s shoulders as they ran through the forest at dawn. I w...

“So, where were you conceived?” It’s a question I like to throw out during blind dates and other equally awkward romantic interludes. It’s supposed to conjure up images of our possible pasts - of the world as it existed before we came into it, the circumstances of our eventual arrival, etc. The goal is an imaginative answer that will reveal an introspective personality, someone who has thought about her own life, its beginnings and its possible trajectory. Unfortunately it usually fails miserably. “What the hell kind of question is that?” I don’t know . . . As for where I was conceived, I haven’t bothered to work it out - not the kind of question you dare ask yourself if you have a sensitive stomach. I know that I was born the youngest of six children and that at the time my mom was a waitress and my dad worked two jobs. We lived in low income housing on the city’s north side - five boys in one room. As for the larger world it was pretty much chaos. I was born in 1967 - the year of the...

(INCOMPLETE – ROUGH DRAFT FORM) ONE OF MY FAVORITE AUTHORS,  KAHLIL GIBRAN, WROTE, "ONLY ONCE HAVE I BEEN MADE MUTE. IT WAS WHEN A MAN ASKED ME, "WHO ARE YOU?" THIS STORY IS SUPPOSED TO BE MY BIOGRAPHY. BUT HOW DO YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF AND YOUR OWN EXPERIENCES? THAT STORY IS STILL BEING WRITTEN.  THIS CHAPTER IS PRESENTED AS IS - NO APOLOGIES. Teachers are a strange lot. Most appear as adult versions of the annoying kids we all knew when we were in grade school. You can almost imagine them as children with their extra fancy three ring binders and jumbo crayon boxes eagerly striving to earn the most gold stars in the class, all the while telling themselves that someday they would be in charge. Courteous, obedient, diligent, they weren’t necessarily the brightest kids in the class just the most obsequious: the perfect teacher’s pets. Most appear to have gone directly from high school to college to classroom without ever having to sully their hands in any field othe...

I got my first Christmas present early this year. It arrived  yesterday. It was from Jalissa. She came into school before the rest of the kids and said, “here, I’m tired of carrying this around,” and handed me a small red package taped so thoroughly I almost needed a machete to get it open. I said, “thank you Jalissa! Did you know that this is my first ever Christmas present from a student?” and I hugged her. Her cheeks were already rosy from the long walk to school, but they turned redder still as I thanked her. Jalissa has difficulty getting along with some of the other students, and she’s a busybody too - so I’m not as close to her as I am to some of the other students. But when she came in yesterday within minutes after I’d finished reading “Three Letters From Teddy,” she got the treatment I realized everyone needs this time of year. So what was it? The small red package from the rosy cheeked girl? It was a Christmas tree ornament with the inscription “A+ TEACHER” on it. ...

His reputation preceded him. I remember seeing him in the halls  when he was only in second grade getting screamed at daily, hearing his name repeated like it was on a loop tape recording while he stood and stared silently at his feet. His father bragged to the other teachers about being the head of a Milwaukee motorcycle gang. It was a tough family whose reputation in the neighborhood went back two generations. I conjured up images of wildmen on Harleys driving through the school if I dared to cross Bob, the ten year old boy with the mullet that I’d seen in trouble daily for the past two years. So when he ended up in my class this fall I was a little surprised to find that the child that had been branded a hellion at the age of seven was actually a decent kid. Of course he was a little behind academically and he didn’t demonstrate a whole lot of self control, but then again either did his new teacher. A few weeks after school started Bob mentioned that his parents were goi...

Her mother survived cancer, her father didn’t and now she clings to me as if I may be the next to go. At recess she follows me like a little auburn haired shadow and she would hang on my arm all day if I let her. I find myself having to push her away and then feeling like a jerk for not giving her something to lean on. She needs someone desperately and I’m just a teacher with an entire class to care for. I can’t devote all of my attention to Starr no matter how badly she needs me. For my birthday she handed me a small package about the size of a plumb delicately wrapped in tissue paper. She watched me nervously as I opened it. It was a rock with amber quartz crystals in it. Beautiful. I thanked her sincerely for the curious choice of gifts then asked her where she bought it. She told me that it had been her father’s, but that now she wanted me to have it. I said that I couldn’t accept something so special but she insisted. So my list of treasures has grown. Added to my family heirl...