Drowning in the Classroom

“Rodney Verdin! Get your carcass to the office. Your soul may belong to God but your body belongs to Mr. Hebert. Get your chew down here boy!”

Principal’s announcement at Grand Caillou School. Winter 1980

Had kind and most skilled veteran teachers not come to my rescue, I would have quit teaching in a matter of weeks. Two years later in the classroom across from mine, three different teachers did quit in the same number of weeks, one right after the other. A fourth was hired but never showed up, most likely getting the same sort of warnings Mary gave me.  The fifth, a Nichols State football lineman built like Arnold Schwarzenegger, finally stuck and we became friends.

I’m not even sure if Emma Trosclair, my first savior, was a college graduate. The racist system bigots called “separate but equal” where she began her teaching career was anything but equal and didn’t require a four-year degree for teacher certification. When forced to integrate its schools, Louisiana granted black teachers already certified in the segregated system the same credentials white teachers had, but then tried to limit people of color to “work with their own kind” as much as possible. As you might imagine, Grand Caillou school had a high percentage of minority teachers, many of them exceptional.

Our school was also utilized frequently as a dumping ground for teachers who fouled up in other district schools and for others who were completely inexperienced, untrained and totally unqualified. Yes, people like me. I was sent to sink or swim and nearly drowned in a sea of chalk dust and paper scraps many, many times in just a few short weeks. Emma knew this when she tossed the first life preserver in my direction. She also began teaching me the strokes I needed to survive on my own.

I do know Emma was a master teacher even if she didn’t have a bunch of degrees and all the other bells and whistles often demanded today. Like many black people I was blessed to know and grew close to in Louisiana and Texas, Emma had her own set of grammar rules and pronunciation standards that some stupid people think indicates ignorance, but I learned was just a different language, as distinctive and interesting as the bayou version of French most of my bilingual students spoke, although their French wasn’t quite like the French Mary spoke fluently, again, another fascinating facet of a most intricate human matrix with thousands of permutations.

I learned the French difference taking a group of my Houmas kids to New Orleans one evening a few years after I finally earned the right to call myself a teacher. Mary and the kids spoke excitedly in French I still didn’t much understand but Mary loved to speak when the opportunity presented itself. Equally enchanted, the student athletes I coached were delighted to use their language with Mrs. Brown, something they couldn’t do as much with me but always wanted to share.

Halfway into the conversation I saw a most perplexed look on Mary’s face and later discovered the word she knew as “liver” in her French version was the same one the Houmas kids used for diarrhea. I was glad they weren’t sharing recipes.

My French lessons began the day Mary learned where I was assigned to teach.

“Grand Caillou School?” she said with great concern washing over her face. “The cops are down there every week!” I didn’t find that to be true, but her lessons in swamp vulgarity were put to use on day one when a student told me to kiss his ass in words he didn’t think I’d understand. The word “ass” in Cajun French is pronounced “chew” which I soon heard the principal use over the intercom when he broadcast the message I used in the introduction. I grew to enormously enjoy Mr. Hebert’s announcements, so long as they were not directed at me as some actually were.

I was in the teachers’ lounge when Mr. Hebert made his carcass and soul broadcast and halfway into swallowing a big gulp of soda, which then shot out of my nose when I burst into laughter. “I can’t believe he just said that” I remarked to no one in particular, and was promptly told about a better announcement the previous principal made.

According to several teachers who’d been at the school for over a decade, the principal before Mr. Hebert was even more colorful. The background involved the administrator who ordered a teacher not to let a particularly troublesome student go to the bathroom during class time because the student repeatedly vandalized it. For some unknown reason, teacher ignored the directive, and the principal again caught the student writing “fuk this school” on the bathroom wall. Enraged, the principal dragged the student to his office and grabbed the intercom mic to announce: “Miss Boudreaux! Meet me in the boys’ bathroom. I’ve got something here I want to show you.” Fortunately, I had already put down my Coke bottle for that one.

I’m sure many today with lofty noses upturned will decry the “lack of professionalism” and they might have a right to think so, but the informality was part of a culture where you said things plainly without ornamentation and often with deliberate humor. Many times the method was very effective at getting a given message across. In my first few months, Mr. Hebert was most instructive with this approach. Eventually, I grew to like the man after understanding how dedicated he was to the school and community, but initially thought he was dangerously crazy.

Greater understanding came from knowledge of Mr. Hebert’s relationship with our head custodian who still stands as one of the best I ever knew, a tireless worker who treated the school and its students with enormous respect and care. This is most high praise because I’ve known many outstanding custodians. In Mr. Pete’s case, like most Houmas his age, he was denied the opportunity to gain any sort of formal education, and consequently couldn’t read or write. Technically, he should not have been a head custodian according to the rules of the time. Mr. Hebert, however, had own “down the bayou rules” and knew Mr. Pete was invaluable and did a fantastic job. Consequently, without telling his superiors in town, Mr. Hebert did all of Mr. Pete’s required paper work, and we were all blessed that he did. Unfortunately, my contributions had yet to come remotely close to Mr. Pete’s level.

Somewhere into my third week I caught three kids cheating on a vocabulary test, and didn’t understand this was an issue I needed to deal with myself, a lesson Mr. Hebert promptly taught me.

“Mr. Hebert,” I announced at his doorway after being sure he wasn’t in another conference. “I caught these three boys cheating on a test.” At this early stage of my development, I stupidly ranked cheating as a major felony.

“Hmm. You mean to tell me these three birds cheated?” Mr. Hebert said in what I thought to be the beginnings of a severe reprimand.

Mr. Hebert rose from his chair behind a paper cluttered desk and looked at each boy sternly. Then he looked back at me with the same outward severity. ” Mr. Brown, are you absolutely sure about this?”

“Yes sir, I’m afraid so,” I replied, handing over the tests, all of having identical mistakes.

“Hmmm, lemme see here,” Mr. Hebert continued solemnly, looking over each test. “Yep, no mistake about it. This here’s cheating all right.”

I awaited a verdict, and got a handshake instead.

“Congratulations, Mr. Brown,” Mr. Hebert said warmly. “Used to be these outlaws didn’t care enough to cheat. You must be doing something right back there. Keep up the good work.”       I’m not sure who was more confused, but the lesson soon sank in for me, but not so much for my flock, one I still struggled with almost every second we were together.

Nor long after my first backhanded praise session, I watched another Mr. Hebert lesson, this time in the hallway.

We both reached the same doorway simultaneously one afternoon to find a boy swinging back and forth on the doorframe. Mr. Hebert looked up at the boy and said, “Son, don’t you know that darn doorframe is almost impossible to chew?” which left both the boy and me confused, perhaps the boy more so, as chew had another meaning just explained. Mr. Hebert promptly clarified his message.

“You know son, you keep doin’ that it’s gonna break,” he said to the door swinger. “Then the school board’s gonna make me make you pay for it, and boy, don’t ever spend good money on somthin’ you can’t eat!”

Emma was much gentler with her teaching, motherly a good descriptor of much of her methodology, and also desperately needed as much by me at the time as the kids I was supposed to teach but couldn’t.

Emma first entered my “professional” life when she knocked quietly on my classroom door one afternoon on the second week of my torture.

She smiled warmly, introduced herself, and said, “I thought you might like to try some of these activity sheets and puzzles. I know you probably don’t have a lot of materials yet, so I just wanted to help.”

She politely withdrew then, and I didn’t have time to look the material over until after school; I was too busy dodging projectiles and making hollow threats.

The first thing I noticed was how simple the reading activities and puzzles were as far as basic vocabulary went.  I almost dismissed them based on their simplicity, but decided to give them a try the following day.

Unlike my earlier efforts, this time about half the class actually did what I asked them to do. Even Marvin tried for a while, before turning his project into another fighter aircraft.

I didn’t know anything about reading disabilities or “teaching at frustration level” but Emma began to introduce these concepts using a homegrown vocabulary developed by working with children of poverty her whole life.

“You start them where they can and take then where they can’t,” she explained simply. She soon offered to “team teach” with me, but I was really just another student.

I watched amazed the first time Emma taught a group of her sixth graders and my last period class from hell seventh graders, marveling at her ability to direct my students in an orderly reading and vocabulary lesson. Up to this point, I doubted the parish sheriff toting a 12-gauge stood a chance of getting my kids to simply stay seated and quiet for the briefest of intervals.

At the first signs of trouble, Emma projected a grandmotherly frown at the most obvious instigator. “Now Marvin, you know Mrs. Trosclair doesn’t like it when you misbehave. Please tell me what the next sentence says.”

Marvin stumbled through, ” Joseph showed Mary the plant,” which, not coincidentally, was the most basic of sentences in the reading passage.

Her deeply dark face almost glowed as her frown transformed into a beautifully bright white enamel smile, the colors contrasting in sharp outline against unlined ebony skin not showing Emma’s almost 60 years. “That was wonderful Marvin. I love it when you read so well,” she said.

Marvin beamed like a man who’d just won the lottery.

I was spellbound, because not only had I been unable to get Marvin to read a single word, I’d instead become moderately proud my frequent attentions got him to refrain from calling just about everyone “fuck stick.”

“Find the baddest little boy you can and say something nice to him, even if it’s about his new shoes,” Emma counseled.  If you’re looking for teaching tips, this is one of the best I ever learned and used it frequently throughout my career, especially when I was mad enough to kill somebody.

In the next installment we’ll cover the time I deliberately dropped an eight-pound shotput on an eighth grader’s big toe, the matching grade and weight entirely coincidental. Had I been anywhere other than Grand Caillou School, I would have been fired and in most places probably arrested.