Author Archives: magistrak

the ablative of sportsmanship

My high school science  class was taught by a joyless woman with short hair, glasses and beady eyes. We called her the mad scientist.   I postulated that a microbe had landed in her terrarium one day and went wild. And there she was. The final product.

I recall my sense of hopelessness in that class. I just had no idea what to do.  Latin grammar is for many of my students what earth science was for me. BORING. I warn them.

“YO!  BORING STUFF STRAIGHT AHEAD. LISTEN UP.  PROP YOUR EYELIDS OPEN.”

The brain starts to gel. You lose the first couple of sentences, and then suddenly you wake up to someone saying

“ But the passive infinitive endings in third conjugation “

Or maybe  “ So would this be the ablative of agent or the ablative of  instrument?”

You, dear reader, if Latin was never inflicted on you ( Did I  really just say that? Shame on me) are possibly wondering

“ What the hell is an ablative?”

Or  maybe, seeing the words conjugation and infinitive, you just skipped this whole paragraph. GET BACK HERE.  I promise that any grammar you read about here you can instantly forget.

SHORT BORING EXPLANATION:

See, in Latin, you can say things in pretty much any word order you want, and its going to mean the same thing all the time. Whereas, in English, if you take words John cooked Mary dinner and switch them around, maybe Mary is cooking dinner or the dinner cooked John.  However, because Latin puts a little code at the end of each word, the sentence will always be John cooked Mary dinner, even if the word order says  Mary dinner John cooked. The codes are called case endings, and ablative is the name of a case. There are lots of ablatives. Ablative of price, of time, accompaniment, means and instrument, comparison, agent, et cetera. WAKE UP.  Thank you. 

One day I presented the ablative of respect.  At that time, we had a school wide  character education project. Every month had a word for character:  integrity, honesty, compassion, loyalty, and so on.   When I came up with the ablative of respect, they just didn’t believe me. One girl gave a loud whoop of  laughter.

“ ABLATIVE OF RESPECT??   Whats next? The ablative of sportsmanship?”  (wait till she finds out about ethical datives)

Occasionally I say it out loud.

What do I do? I teach the grammatical complexities  of a language no one has spoken for several centuries.   So, what do you do?

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Swords or pistols? or a dictionary?

A  shy student   lost his shyness and  became aggressive in class, questioning me on points of fact every chance he got. I had occasionally  encountered this before. It was demoralizing and terrifying when you weren’t sure of what you were doing.

However, I pretty much knew what I was doing. Well,  in Latin, anyway.  Ok , I knew more than they did.  Alright,  I fake it pretty well.  When a kid asked why I didn’t know what a Latin word meant, I hauled out the BIG Merriam Webster English dictionary.

“ You know all the words in here, right?  Well, how about half?  Ten pages? Hey, isn’t English  your native tongue?  You don’t know all the words?”

But this kid challenged me on more than just word meanings. Sometimes it was grammar, mythology,or the time of day. It annoyed the other kids after awhile.  Finally one day I wrote my name and his on the board and sectioned it off like a score board, writing my name much larger, of course.

me him scores

Used this same technique on five year olds. Its very versatile.

He wasn’t the only one who challenged me. (the context in which I use the word challenge is not as in intellectually challenging. More like challenge to a duel. Swords or pistols?)  Another student corrected my pronunciation of a five syllable word, irrevocable.

There was a strained silence in the classroom.   I’m not omniscient. We looked the word up. We were both  wrong.

Often I was grilled on English vocabulary I taught them. They assumed that if they had never heard or read a word, it didn’t exist and I  had just made it up on the spot. So I offered,“You want to bet your grade on it?”

Some poor fool always took me up on it. Dictionaries were tossed through the air.  (My husband once argued with me on misanthrope.  I was right. He was wrong. There was no way to penalize him, though.)

I wrote thirty words on the board. Three of them I made up. They had to identify the fake words.

No one ever thought to actually look the words up.

( I had to check myself. You would be surprised at what is considered a word.)

Kerfuffle  is my favorite real word.  My favorite fake word  is arismatic.

 

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the happy little cow

Mostly what I remember about my high school years  was that I didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on in class. No idea in algebra, which I believe I had three times, no clue in earth science.  I was marginally more clued in Mechanical Drawing, and I did know what was going on English class. This is what I remember from Freshman English.

I was chewing gum. The boy next to me was my next door neighbor. He had hardly spoken to me since we were best friends at the age of 5 and sailed  leaf boats in the gutter together. The English teacher was talking about Pippi Longstocking.  She caught my jaw moving.

“ You spit that gum out. You’re over there chewing  your cud like a happy little cow.”

David (my neighbor)  looked at me completely deadpan.  “Are you a happy little cow? Are you really a happy little cow?”   His first words to me since we were five. The last  until our twentieth reunion.

I have taught all my classes how to say laeta parva vacca sum.    I am a happy little cow. It commemorates that moment in English.

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walk through the underworld

Our induction ceremony (we can’t say initiation. ) was a symbolic trip through the underworld, beginning with a barefoot walk in the river Styx, a pan full of ice cubes and marshmallows.

There is an association manual with suggestions for the ceremony, including handing  the initiate ( oops, inductee) the eye of the Cyclops. A troublemaker mother organized the event.  Same mom who provided the blue eyeshadow.

What blue eyeshadow? Go back and read all the older posts right now or you’ll have them for breakfast.

“I wasn’t sure where I could get enough eyeballs for everyone, but I thought about a wholesale butcher shop”

Her son commented,“ Yeah, but when they take off the blindfold and see what they have in their hands they’ll freak out and throw it”

Me: “Wait a minute. Aren’t these like, Halloween candy gum eyeballs? We’re using REAL EYEBALLS?”

“Well, “  she said, “the manual  says eyeballs, and I’m not sure I can get enough. They must have sheep or cow eyeballs at a butcher shop”

I envisioned students screaming and hurling real eyeballs into my classroom walls and then the slime not being totally cleaned up.

( It sure wasn’t going to be me cleaning them up. Suppose they watched you while you scraped them off?) The eventual smell of rotting eyeballs….I couldn’t even look at a disembodied eyeball, much less go buy a bag of them and use them to torment adolescents.

I love this woman.

But we used plastic.

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The unexpected visit

The supervisor appeared in my room one day half way through the lesson.

He sat himself at my desk. I continued the lesson and handed him the textbook, open to the translation.   He motioned me over.  The classroom was originally a room for small study groups. It was very small, designed for only ten people.

He pointed to the textbook.

“Where is the teachers edition?” he asked rather loudly

“I don’t have one.”

“Why not?”  in a somewhat argumentative tone.

I didn’t know why not. I had never had a teacher’s edition of any book. No one had ever given me a catalog to order books. I just used what was there.

“ I never ordered one. I don’t even know if they have them for this book.”

He pointed to the story written in Latin.

“ Well, then,how do you know what this says?”

Pause.  Really long pause.

“Ummmm…because….. I’m the Latin teacher?”

He knew.  I was just making it up as I went along.

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The boss man

One year I helped break in a man new to his job as supervisor.   He took his job very seriously. His job description and duties read:

“ Assume all instructional personnel are in dire need of correction and supervision.  Show them the error of their ways using a patronizing tone of voice and body  language. Attempt to communicate via telepathy that you regard them as marginally more intelligent than heifers. (the staff is female) You may push them to the limit without fear of mass resignations because your district pays more money than any other within driving distance.”

Ok, I may have exaggerated a bit.

He entered my classroom one day in the middle of a lesson. Courtesy to a tenured teacher usually manifests itself by a little warning of the impending visit, but our guy was out to catch us in the act of incompetence by springing his leopard like self on us in alarming appearances. He stated  that he was justified in doing this because I was not tenured, even though I had documentation by the administration that stated otherwise.

We had this conversation in the hall one day.

“I have to observe all untenured teachers three times”  he told me.

“I’m tenured. I’ve been here five years.”

“No, because you’re part time it takes you six years.’

“Well, I have this paperwork here, and a contract, and right here it says tenured teacher. And in this correspondence between the union and the superintendent, it says here tenured teacher.”

 “No, I checked with the secretary at the board office. “

I was glad to hear that the secretary at the board office knew more than the president of the union and the superintendent. Obviously she was taking that class in school law that the two others had missed. Finally, I sicced the union president on him. I never saw the value in unions until I became a teacher. And now I’m a believer.

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Zeus is the best god

Every day I present a person from mythology.  Mythology is chock full of rape, incest, adultery, cannibalism, mutilation, betrayal,… you get the idea.  After awhile I started to think,

“ How can  I teach this stuff to kids? “  and then I would listen to a rap song.  Straightened my thinking right out.

Zeus has a lot of women, goddesses, nymphs, mortals, willing or unwilling. He is the MAN,to the hormone filled skins of teenage boys.  I assigned presentations on the Greek gods. A big red haired freckled boy got up.

“Zeus is the BEST god.”

He thought for a moment. His catholic upbringing kicked in.

“Except for Jesus.”

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The apology

I used to teach French to kindergarten through 4th grade. None of them knew my name, I was just The French Lady. This was my teaching technique:

“You guys won’t remember anything I teach you. ”

“Oh yeah? We will so!”

“Nope, you won’t. I’ll prove it to you.  If you remember these four words, you get a point. If you forget them, I get a point.”      Then I made the scoreboard.

me you guys scoreThis generally put them into a feeding frenzy. If any classmate had dared to forget a word they would have lynched him.  Every point I got took up the whole board. I made their  points  tiny dots on the board. If they started to win, I would say,

“You know, I really hate kids.”

“Oh yeah? Then why are you here teaching kids? You don’t hate us. You LOVE us!”

I first heard my dad say this to my daughter when she was four years old, and I was appalled.

“Why should I give you lunch? I don’t even like you.”    She didn’t even bother to look up from her book.

” Yes you do Pop Pop. You love  me lots and lots.”

So I tried it.  The kids don’t believe me either.

One day a first grade class got very rowdy.( I’m sure I had nothing to do with that at all)  The teacher was mortified and made every child make me a card with an apology.  One card said this:

im sorry but thas all

Thas  it.  Thas all I’m getting.

Ten years later a student stayed after class to talk to me and mentioned where she had gone to grammar school. It was where I taught ten years ago. And then it hit me. “Did you have really blonde hair and a ponytail?”

It was her.  And I still had the card.  Which I of course brought to class and told this story to her mortification every chance I got.

THAS ALL FOLKS.

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the duck caper

One day a French teacher decided to kidnap the German  class mascot, a tiger striped wooden yellow and black  duck. Yes, I was wondering the same thing.  Who knows?  German, its like a cult. They don’t need a reason.

Anyway, a substitute teacher told us  the duck  was  in French class. So at the end of the day, my kids trooped down to her class with a diversion, leftover cake, and in the confusion we snatched the duck and ran like hell.

Now, the duck isn’t little. At least four feet long.

tiger striped wooden duck with roman helmetWe sent a picture of the duck to the Germans with a message:  ” We have the duck. Send ten thousand deuche marks.” Yes, the duck is wearing a Roman helmet.

We then hid the duck as carefully as one can hide a four foot tiger striped duck in a classroom. We then sent another photo of us all gloating over the duck.

The substitute teacher, in a moment of sadistic glee, did not tell the French teacher who stole the duck. The French teacher walked around frantically, no doubt  muttering      “Oh, merde! He’s going to  kill me!”  meaning, no doubt, the German teacher.

While I was out of my class for ONE period, SOMEONE came in, found the duck and absconded with it.

The Spanish teachers all acted totally innocent, like they hadn’t seen anyone running out of my room and down the hall with a four foot tiger striped duck in tow. Right.  Channel 6 news would have shown up for a shot of  people running down a hall with a contraband duck.

This incident clarified for me a glaring lacuna among my possessions. I do not have the equivalent of  the duck. So I set my students to making a Trojan Horse.  And its bigger and taller than the duck.  The problem was at the end of the year when I had to do something with the horse.  My husband looked at the horse and said, ” Just what are we going to do with that?

horse looking out windowHe looks out the window, waiting for the day he does battle with the duck.

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more memories from a juvenile delinquent

Back in the day ( what does that mean, anyway? ten years ago? five hundred ? my childhood?)  everyone had to buy their own padlock for their lockers, they weren’t  built into the locker like they are nowadays.

We  (me and  my partner in crime, Scuz )hatched a new plan. We casually stood around and talked to our friends while they were unlocking their lockers and memorized the combinations. We got about ten locker combinations.

We came in really early and switched them. Some of them we put on backwards so that the numbers were facing the locker. You would have to get down on your knees and try to lift the lock up to see the combination and then it still  wouldn’t open.  We also selected people who all didn’t know each other.

And this time, as a protective measure, we selected people that didn’t know me or didn’t know Scuz, so we would not be targeted as the obvious perpetrators.

This one was a victory. We were never suspected.

Well, we were never accused, anyway.

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