October 11, 2008
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1 At the risk of sounding as though I'm boasting, I need to share a couple of more features to The Cathedral, a name I decided to bestow upon my new classroom. I've already talked of the high ceilings and large, cathedral window.
2 Even at YB, Peace 61 was the name of my portable, which had the more military handle P-6I. I always loved the funkiness of Peace 61. I loved that when you walked across the rather planky floor, that books might fall off shelves each time the floor would shift, which was usually with every other step.
3 I loved the fact that I could control the temperature pretty easily as opposed to anywhere in the Theatre building.
4 I loved that it was on a corner, and that it was the only room with a view on the entire campus. It looked out on the little park setting, with a green lawn, trees, and if there was ever a decent rain, a small, glistening lake.
5 But heaven forbid if a student would walk in after having stepped on wet grass on a rainy day. Or what years of mud and dirt being tramped into the room had done to the carpet. I never got the feeling that the custodians cleaned the carpets deep enough, and heaven forbid they should ever use carpet shampoo for summer purification.
6 I recall a few times in the last years when Trami would walk in early in the morning and say, "Hey H! Your room smells!"
7 This would naturally become a mortifying piece of news, because I had no idea if maybe my pants might have sat in the washer all night and acquired that sour smell, or if perhaps I had accidentally hit the wet grass, or exactly WHAT that meant, but you don't want to have a smelly room. Ever.
8 I would sheepishly ask, "What does it smell like?"
9 "I'm not sure. It smells like poop."
10
11 Now I don't know about you, but that's probably the very LAST thing you want to know about your room. No matter what. You just don't.
12 Trami would usually give me an out: "I think it's coming through the ventillation system. But it smells."
13 The irony about that is that I love being clean. I love having my nails short, and even when we would get on our hands and knees and scrub the Theatre, I would always have a not-so-hidden bottle of Pert shampoo in one of the sliding drawers in the boys' dressing room. I would constantly wash my hands throughout the day.
14 I'm not germ-conscious, mind you. I just like being clean, that's all. Playing guitar right after a shower is the best time to play guitar. If I ever play guitar, I like to wash my hands first, if possible. It was always an easy dash from Peace 61 to the boys' dressing room.
15 But I digress.
16 Each time Trami would report the poop smell, I would open the window all the way, another perk of Peace 61. I had all sort of screwballs marching into that room back in those days: stoners, leadership kids, goofballs, Love-Clubbers, jocks, drama dudes, and the list goes on, a virtual cross-section of everyone in the school. Who knows how that funk got in there except that it was a pretty high-traffic place?
17 We practiced dances out on the lawn at night, so I was always perplexed about what that smell was.
18 It usually calmed down, and I was usually pretty happy with the ventillation story, but man, you REALLY don't want that happening, especially when it is ongoing.
19 Opening both windows at each end of the room usually resulted in a fresh breeze sweeping through the place, and the foul and filthy air would whisk out the window, across the basketball courts, and hopefully to Coalinga, where nobody would know the difference.
19 And Peace 61 would once again be ready to entertain the stoners, leadership kids, goofballs, etc.
20 So the change from Peace 61 to The Cathedral is like moving from a shanty town to the Waldorf. You miss the earthiness of the park right outside the window, and the very fact that you have a window that opens, but everything else pales in comparison.
21 The desks are brand new, the carpet clean, the walls freshly painted, the central air absolutely perfect, and it has push-botton room shades that descend like the large screen in the Theatre. It has a small "smart cart" complete with a DVD-VHS, stereo speakers, and LCD projector, and a huge screen that pulls up like a window shade.
22 It also has sliding whiteboards, which I SHOULD have had when I moved to Peace 61. I was originally two doors down from Rocha, got moved to Peace 61 when the 300 building was being built, and was permanently removed from that building in a somewhat insulting fashion by Moser.
23 And it looks over the baseball and football fields, as well as the East Hills and mountains in the distance. I'm on the second floor.
24 On Friday I sat grading papers right after lunch, listening to some jazz, window shades up revealing the cumulous clouds and blue skies outside. I mused about how much I love the set-up, even remembering that on THREE different occasions this year, students walked in and said, "It smells nice in here!"
25 Revenge, they say, can be lusciously sweet.
26 But alas!
27 As Jerry Garcia would sing, when life looks like Easy Street there is danger at your door.
28 The bell rang for my final period of the day, a class with some awesomely mischievous but enjoyably goofy freshmen.
29 Freshmen don't walk into classrooms. They "bound" in, like fairies with enormous feet and smelly shoes. They dress like the seven dwarfs, with floppy clothes and big ears. Their smiles of braces and crooked teeth make them endearing to an Old Brown Shoe who has witnessed the scene many, many times.
30 Friday afternoon, the bounded in then, and amid the noise, poking, and idiocy came a voice that must have been sent from Heaven: "It smells nice in here!"
31 I looked over the top of my glasses and smiled. I knew the lesson was to be intimidating because I knew they hadn't done their reading. I was going to give them a quick warm-up assignment: answering a Comprehension Check at the end of the story.
32 That sobered them up pretty swiftly, and they KNEW they had a test later as well.
33 Weapons of Massive Instruction.
34 As the somber mood descended over the room, the students settled down, and I got up and silently swooped over them. It remained pretty quiet, and I had them, and they knew it.
35 Finally I walked past this one kid who always had a sly look on his face, and who was always thinking. I moved past him, helped a few kids with their fidgeting, and walked back to the front of the room.
36 The kid, whose name is Jonathan, called me over:
37 "Hey Mr. Harrington. Come here!"
38 I didn't say a word.I put on my best Paul Newman old-guy face. I glanced over my glasses. "Yes?"
39 "You smell like updaug."
40 This was horrid. Had he heard? He clipped me in the knees. I began to crumble. My entire universe began falling in . The Cathedral walls crumbled all around me. I hesitatingly looked with certain fear into his Neumanesque face.
41 "What's updaug?"
42
43 "Not much. Wassup wid u, dawg?" He broke into a huge smile, and I burst out laughing.
44 Sometimes, boy, I gottttta tellya. He had NO idea.
45 Or the beautiful part is, he probably did.
46 Humility comes to us in shades and masques.
47 Welcome to October.
48 Peace.
~H~
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