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Friday, August 17, 2007
  Bringing Up Backhoes
I have taken a teaching position in a rural (like, there's only one IGA in a 15 mile radius) middle school. While the job wasn't exactly what I wanted, it was an unanswered prayer (yeah, Garth Brooks). I am a resource teacher in Language Arts, Math, Civics, Life Science, and Study Skills. I am swimming, quite beautifully, in the massive amount of content that I once knew but have since forgotten. Take the example of the eight steps of the scientific method. I can name them in 5 sec. You can't.

Beyond loving the fact that I will become a fucking wiz at Trivial Pursuit, I was hesitant about the type of students I would teach. I didn't want rural. I didn't want bosses and superintendents with severe accents. I didn't want kids who know what a backhoe is by age 4. Before beginning my job three weeks ago, I saw a news report about the mold situation at the elementary school that feeds into the middle school where I work. The one person the news casters decide is the best candidate to present a parent's perspective on the situation is a crazy-haired, toothless woman who stares blankly at the reporter and replies, "I didn't know there was a mold problem. I haven't seen it." Ug, I thought. I have to deal with parents like this! Parents who don't know about mold overtaking their child's school!

Since then, I've come to realize how incorrectly I (and A. County, in which I reside) have perceived F. County, in which I work. A lot of this comes from the media, from there being no reason for me to take a spin in F. County, from whatever other bad sources of information I've been lead to believe are good. The F. County residents and teachers and sheriff and store clerks are 100% awesome! In fact, I've never found a school administration so supportive of its staff and students and community. I even venture to suggest that I only want to ever work in rural schools because the community element is so pervasive and strong. On my first day, I met the sheriff, who is the brother of the assistant superintendent, who is married to the former assistant principal of the middle school, who now owns and runs the only teacher store in F. County. It's quite a web, but, I like this. It keeps you on your toes. It's similar to the close, Southern community in which I grew up. It's familiar, and something I haven't been a part of since I left TN.

My point: Yes, like, 60% of the students drew a rebel flag on their assignment notebook the first day of class, and I can't tell them that the south will never rise again, and, yes, there is a scarcity of paper in the copier room where the old copier jams 40% of the time so that it doesn't matter whether there's paper or not, but, I sense a kindness, an openness, and a welcome in them all.
 
Comments:
I can't tell them that the south will never rise again

Well, no, but you can remind them that the South was on the wrong side a losing issue and that's what happened and that insofar as it was about states' rights it was about states' rights to maintain a corrupt and immoral economic and political system that employed racial divisiveness to obscure the class disparities between whites, and that if the South had won the war the Confederacy today would be some backwoods third-world country, its citizens desperate to get across the Northern border to get a good-paying job and send remittances home to Bumfuck, Mississippi, or wherever, and that every time they drive on I-64, they should pull off on the shoulder, kiss the pavement, and thank the Lawd for the day that Honest Abe saved their sorry asses from political and economic self-destruction.

You can tell them that, right?

(Also, not to pick your nit, but unless you've moved in the last two weeks, you don't technically live in A. County.)
 
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