9. Student Exploitation

Originally posted 11/15/2006

Have you read the blogs that appeared before this one?  That's what I figured.  Now go back and read them.  For once do as you're told!

All right.  Now we're ready. Let’s spend a few moments talking about the exploitation of children – specifically, the voluntary exploitation of school children by those entrusted with their education - teachers.

In the eleven years I spent as a student in the Brooklyn public schools and the five as a teacher in the same system, not once did I hear a parent complain that the in-class assignment his or her child was doing – for free, and willingly – was demeaning or degrading. And there was never a shortage of volunteers, even for the most menial of ‘jobs.’

Come on, did you know anyone who ever complained?

The reason: every class job had its perks.

I don’t remember class presidents prior to the fourth grade, but from that point on until I got into junior high school we always had a boy president – not that it really mattered because the president didn’t do squat. Every year the boys would decide who they wanted as president and then proceed to nominate at least two girls.

Duh!

It was simple. Boys voted for the only boy; girls split their vote between the two or more girl candidates. There was no platform; no promises; but lots of patronage. (More about patronage later.)

Who knew then that we were being prepared for the real world?

Every year the same drill, with the same inevitable outcome.

But the real power in elementary school went to the class monitor – the rat, the stoolie who would stand up in front of the room when the teacher left. When the teacher returned, the monitor would report all the miscreants. A federal law now protects whistle-blowers and I’ll bet Congress had these class monitors in mind when it drafted the law.

Aside from these high-visability jobs there were dozens of lower-level assignments.

What future career opportunity was washing the blackboard or cleaning the erasers going to provide for Norman when he ‘got out’? OK, walking up and down the aisles with the waste basket might lead to a lucrative civil servant position, but the others?

It starts in grade school, probably around the fourth or fifth grade. 

Anything is better than sitting a whole day in Miss O’Neill’s class – even cleaning the erasers would be a welcome respite. Even if it meant going into the basement surrounded by the giant boilers that made those weird sounds, like what you’d imagine a boiler would sound like just before it explodes. They’d find parts of you scattered in a three-block radius. But, the most miraculous thing is that when they found your hand it would still be clutching a clean chalkboard eraser. For years afterward, neighborhood people, especially the old-timers, would still be talking how that kid what got hisself blown up could clean an eraser and they’d shake their heads muttering that kids nowadays don’t know the meaning of clean erasers.

There were two ways to clean erasers: The purists would take them outside and clap them against the wall. It was a cushy job in September.  Go outside near the auditorium, clap them erasers silly against the wall for maybe an hour until Miss O'Neill sent a search party out looking for me

Three rules for outside eraser clapping:
1. Stand upwind of the clapping or resign yourself to a coughing fit like you wouldn't believe.  You're gonna feel like your eyeballs are falling out.  
2. This is no time to show your literary creativity by clapping the eraser in the form of certain words you've recently learned from that sixth grader who lived on the other side Clarkson Avenue who spelled everything phonetically (This invariably would lead to some second grader's mother coming up to school and registering a complaint.  It didn't take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out who the miscreant was.)
3. Pick a wall that can't be seen from your classroom or the principal's office.
NOTE:The replacement monitor learned quickly not only to stand upwind but also out of the sight line of the principal's office

Regardless of your philosophical leanings, when it got colder it meant using the eraser vacuum in the basement which shared space with three of the largest pieces of machinery I had ever seen.  The Indian Head nuclear reactor was based on the same design, but because of space limitations it could not match in size or output what was residing in the school basement and in cold weather those babies worked overtime. I seemed to be the only one concerned about all those needles on the gauges pointing in the red zone.

The Avant garde eraser cleaners embraced modern science and used the vacuum in the basement. The two groups never saw eye-to-eye on the best method. The first Spring day and the chance to be outside usually ended the discussion in favor of the purists. I imagine the discussion died a natural death with the advent of whiteboards and dry markers.

In any case, eraser cleaning was probably at the bottom of the in-class job hierarchy.

At the polar extreme was being in the color guard for assembly (Do kids still go to assembly? Do schools still have auditoriums?). And even that job had its hierarchy. Carrying the American flag trumped all other flags. If you had that assignment, you had it made; you were destined for great things in life. When you walked the halls, kids would stand aside and let you pass.

Unless, you trip on the stairs, or sneeze, or… once you make it to center stage holding the flag with both hands and there you are in front of the entire school, and I mean everyone, and right in the middle of the Pledge of Allegiance, right at that point where everyone is saying that stuff for Richard Stanz - whoever he was - you realize that your fly is open. The snickering starts with the boys in your own class and then quickly engulfs the girls sitting in Row F. It’s the little kids who are the least cool. They have to point. It’s the pointing that really gets to you.

And, all of a sudden, clapping erasers against the side of the building in twenty degree weather does not sound like such a bad job – when you finally return to school.

My wife was an elementary school teacher – in the same school I attended as a student. (I like to tell people that she was my fifth grade teacher.  That garners some interesting responses!) She keeps in touch with a class she had more than thirty-five years ago and two of them remember being in the color guard – that it was the single best thing that happened to them in elementary school.)

I was never in the color guard. No, really! It wasn’t me. I swear!

I was a crossing guard. Yup, with the white belt and the AAA badge. Even then, I was into the ‘power thing.’ Hey, there are limited options open to an eleven-year old to impress the girlss. (Do they still have crossing guards?)

By the sixth grade I had long forsaken the eraser monitor job for a job second only to the color guard. I was an AV monitor – before it became a dorky thing. Teacher calls the principal's office for a phonoraph or a film strip projector. (Explain that to your kids!).  My job was to schlepp the equipment to the teacher requesting it and set it up.  Often I would volunteer to operate the projector which required turning a knob at the teacher's nod.  As long as the film didn't break, the job was a no-brainer. That bought me at least another half hour before I had to return to my own classoom.

Come to think of it, there was probably more prestige attached to that job than to the aforementioned color guard. In the name-recogntion hierarchy first came the school custodian, and then a tie for second place between the principal and the AV kid, with the latter often winning.

There were other neat jobs in the classroom. Fofr example, being the window shade monitor took somewhat of an anal retentive personality. Who else would be so exacting in their lives to line up all the shades? Howard Gold was. I swear that if the shades were off by more than a quarter inch it was a lot. Those shades were the envy of every teacher in the school. 

It was a cool job which often required team cooperation with the window monitor. Shade monitors aspired to be window monitors - a logical promotion. We're talking about those massive windows in the 200-series schools built in the 30's - the ones which required a long window pole.

I'm sure there was some law, even then, that prohibited a student from opening a window, let alone with a pole, but in my school there was no teacher willing to risk the embarrassment caused by what was sure to follow if she tried to open the window.  Better to risk censure by the principal than the snickering of an entire class.

All class activity would stop while the monitor carefully removed the twenty-foot pole from its brass mooring and carefully placed the hook in the brass loop on the window. Well, maybe not always carefully. We would wait in anticipation for the gentle sound of the brass hook – some twenty feet in the air as it ever-so-gently penetrated the window glass. Sometimes we would be disappointed; but more often than not Warren would not disappoint us. And the response was always the same: Warren’s same and unimaginative curse, Miss O’ Neill’s questioning of his intelligence and eyesight, the cheering from his fellow classmates and later on, the occasional transfer of cash from one unhappy student-bettor to a happier one. You would think Warren would have given up the pole – or handed it down or whatever. He made it through the entire fifth grade with that job and the next year when Miss Reilly asked who wanted the job he got it, based on his prior work experience – with the same results.

Come on! You all have seen those little holes or the cracks in the center panes of glass in those large windows. How do you think they got there?

Knowing Warren’s shortcomings in the spatial relationship area, I obsessed over that pole not being firmly engaged in its mooring and coming crashing down on some hapless student – mainly me. I figured you could be in seat one in row one and still get whacked. Maybe it was better to sit in row six- near the windows. That way you wouldn’t get the full force of the pole – and especially the hook. I thought I was alone in my fear until I noticed other kids – in fact the whole class would be mentally figuring the trajectory of that flying pole. Even Miss O”Neill, who would get out of her high chair in the corner (Remember those?) put her rubber-tipped pointer down and walk toward the back and give a reassuring tug on the pole to verify that it was safe.

If there was one job which might prepare a student for a lucrative civil service career, it was the basket monitor - the kid who would walk up and down each aisle with a basket for the kids to throw their trash away.  How much trash can an elementary school student generate to require a frequent visit from the basket monitor? (Fast forward a couple of years and one of the first things I learned as a new teacher that my observation by the assistant principal would have a statement that at the beginning of the class I had a kid walk down each aisle with the waste basket.  That and the fact that the window shades were all lined up no doubt propelled me into the good graces of the Assistant Principal.)

One step up from basket monitor was the wardrobe monitor, whose job it was to close the wardrobe doors after all coats had been hung up. (This is for the folks who went to a ‘200 series’ elementary school where all the sliding wardrobe doors were connected, so if you closed one door, all of them would close at the same time.) 

One of my tasks as a Director of Human Resources is to deal with job enrichment – how can management and employees make the job more interesting, thus keeping the employee more involved and, hopefully, more productive.

Hell, this ain’t nothing new. Way back in the fifth grade Harold had learned to make the wardrobe monitor’s job more interesting and enjoyable – much to the consternation of the girls he would periodically lock in the wardrobe. This, too, was a gateway to another civil service career as a New York City subway conductor. Midway through the year Harold learned a vital lesson about job security – a stigma that he no doubt carried with him throughout his work life. He was fired!

Harold, let Marcia out of the closet.

Years later, I wondered how much critical learning I missed as a result of all the time spent outside the classroom on 'official class business.'  No doubt it was the sole reason I did not get into Harvard.  At least the waste basket monitor did his job in the classroom.

Six years in the school - seven if you count kindergarten - and that's all I remember about it.  That, and the bench outside the principal's office, but that's another story.