“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. Continue reading “Drowning in the Classroom”