“You can go f--- your essay,”
Michael Skates informed me on my second Friday as a regular teacher at the high school toward which I had directed a great deal of volunteer energy from spring 1970 through my 1973 graduation from Southern Methodist University.
This was one of only two adverse experiences I had while teaching American and world history at Pinkston High School from November 1973 through May 1975. The other was when, while on hall duty, I called out a student named Cicero Curry for being in the hallways without a pass; Cicero opted for fisticuffs rather than oratory, slugging me on the chin and running away from the school forever.
This incident brought forward two main observations:
>>>>> Cicero’s pugilistic response was imminently understandable: At grade 10, he read, at best, at the grade 2 level;
and
>>>>> I found out I could take a punch.
As to Michael Skates, he was a student in my grade 10 American history class. He was one of those students with an ever-evident chip on his shoulder. His family life was messy. He read a bit better than Cicero, but only at about the grade 5 level. He bore all the markers of abuse from an American society perpetually inflicted with historical myopia; community and family life that were the product of that history; and schools that had for decades exacerbated a problem that only schools could solve.
Although I would in time selectively revive the essay portion of the tests I gave, for a while I took Michael’s implicit advice: As I went into the deep think as to how as a history teacher I could best develop reading and writing skills in my students that their elementary and junior high school teachers had neglected, for a few weeks I went with well-constructed multiple choice tests to give students a chance to show their particular levels of knowledge without traumatizing the nonreaders.
…………………………………………………………………
My two academic years at Pinkston continued my blissful experiences in the much less than blissful city of Dallas.
Despite my multi-year association with Pinkston, I had to wait a few months before getting the gig. No jobs in history or government were open at the time I began the application process. I devised what proved to be a winning, albeit highly unconventional, strategy of designating Pinkston as the only school at which I wanted to utilize my grades 7 through 12 certification. This conveyed a dedicated interest in this particular school setting but for a while l limited my options for employment in the Dallas Independent School District.
From the summers of my late years in high school and through my summertime returns to Houston during the SMU years, I built a thriving lawn care business, mostly mowing and trimming, in the Spring Branch-Memorial area of suburban Houston. Many people in this area would pay what I candidly considered outrageous prices for not having to mow their own lawns. I priced my services just below the prevailing professional rate; this found me charging for most lawns about twenty bucks a throw, quite a sum in the early 1970s, and considering that I was a working fool with as many as 25 lawns a week, I thrived economically while cultivating a world-class tan.
For a while during summer 1973, I attempted to build the same sort of business in Dallas.
Barbara, who still had her senior year at SMU ahead of her, and I had taken an apartment at Palm Gardens, a humble complex about three miles south of SMU, just north of Knox Avenue and about two miles from North (as in Old North, inner city, close to downtown) Dallas High School where I had done my student teaching, just a block from old-time nostalgic Highland Park Pharmacy and superb Highland Park Cafeteria, and but a quarter-mile from no longer used railroad tracks that formally led into toney Highland Park.
I got quite a few lawn gigs but quickly determined that I did not have time to build the kind of prosperity that the Houston years of mowing had produced. For six weeks I learned a great deal as a manager trainee at a Pizza Inn on Lemon Avenue before getting fired for growing, I kid you not---remember that this was early 1970s Dallas, where a hamburger chain known as Mrs. Goff’s did not admit males with long hair--- a beard. Neither an opinion piece of mine written for the Dallas Morning News (arch-conservative at the time, so that publication was actually a surprise) concerning the Mrs. Goff’s policy nor my logical appeals to middle management at Pizza Inn had any immediate impact.
So I then took a job in an electrical parts warehouse, working there from August through mid-November, just before Thanksgiving, when I got the call that I’d been hired for a history position at Pinkston.
I walked on clouds for many days and then ascended to levels of experience and student-teacher relationships that made the Pinkston phase formative in my development as a teacher-advocate for knowledge-intensive, skill-replete public education.
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