I have sinned

Forgive me Father for I have sinned. I am a whore. No, no, not the fun kind of whore. Not servicing some one's carnal instincts. No kinky acts in cheap motels ( I should have been so lucky.) But I have sold myself for money. While the "bending over" and servicing the "good ole boys" was only figurative, it is true I was a kept man for the last few years and for letting them use me for "their own" pleasures I received a pretty comfortable income. True, it was immoral, degrading, and humiliating and the only reason I did it was for my own selfish love of money. I was a whore, an institutional whore, an EDUCATIONAL WHORE. I taught my students at Irvin High School the TEST (Texas Academic Knowledge and Skills Test) and did not give them a "real" education. The shame of it all!

Ok, ok, it wasn't illegal, but I did get screwed, and the kids, they got screwed and the administrators (my clients) they smiled a lot, relishing their feeling of power as they looked at the growing numbers and feeling their fat pocketbooks getting fatter. You see, I was a pretty damn good whore.

I wasn't always a jaded prostitute going against my own morals and selling my services (which was at least unethical if not illegal) There really was a time when I was young, innocent and trying to do the right thing. Now I don't want to sound too pious here. My own moral threshold wasn't always in line with cultural norms and I might have messed up and did things wrong at times, but it wasn't like I was purposely doing the "wrong" thing.

Teaching was a neat little accident for me. After wasting a few years of my youth in the Marine Corps learning how to use multi tonal four letter words in myriads of meaning, the one thing that I knew about my life was that I didn't want to be a Marine (although, I've go to say that being an ex-Marine has opened doors for me, not the least of which was getting my initial job offering to teach.) So it was off to college where I pursued the career of professional student for the next few years. Uncle Sam chipped in with 100 dollars a month (G.I. Bill) and good ole Dad, who actually hadn't liked me very much since I became a teenager (go figure!) gave me a 30 hours a week job polishing small plastic buttons down into contact lenses. I was not rich by any means, but this allowed me to leisurely take 18 to 20 hours of whatever I wanted to from history, to philosophy, to metallurgy, to underwater basket weaving. In those days a full time student was 12 hours and anything over that was free so unlike today's money-conscious student making every course count (think Duck flying, with neck stretched out destination in mind) I could pick and choose whatever struck my fancy (think Buzzard, leisurely flying in circles and picking any tasty morsel that attracted it) and if it turned out to be boring, I just dropped it and often I did. Ironically, this totally haphazard approach to career planning turned out to be fateful because when I finally decided "to leave" the student profession and I asked the counselor, "What can I get a degree in with the hours that I have?" he just kind of slowly shook his head, murmmering, "tsk, tsk,......Oh wait a minute, you could be a teacher." My fate was sealed.

Frankly, the idea of teaching had never occurred to me and it created cascading sphincter spasms
whenever I thought about it. But I plunged ahead, since I wasn't able to think of a viable alternative. At an indoctrination assembly of new teachers in the district one speaker said, well he said a lot, but I only remember ..."Just be yourself" and I thought..."Hey, I can do that, and that became my mantra.

I've got to tell you that although teaching was an accident, I loved it right away. There was lots of positive energy (mostly from the students) to suck up and probably the best thing was that there was idea, at least in Social Studies, that the student should be given the opportunity to think. So it became a game to ask the right questions; to present the material in a way that made them ask questions. Nights were filled with "teacher dreams" and what I was reading or what was happening on the news (Viet Nam, Watergate, Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll) could always be worked into the questions. Like I said, I probably did some things wrong, but I wasn't intentionally screwing with anyone, I was just being me. The feedback was positive from students, peers, and the administration. I was allowing them to think and make decisions on their own and at the same time emphasizing and modeling that they were responsible for their on actions, thoughts and feelings. I loved it and I didn't feel like I was compromising myself.

Then I had my first retirement. I did not leave teaching because of anything negative concerning the teaching. I just wanted to "see" the world from a different perspective. I spent the next 10 years running around Mexico. (I bought junk in Mexico and sold "antiques" in the States). Generally it was a pretty good experience and I learned a lot and I liked it. But, maybe, just maybe, my willingness to compromise myself for a few bucks started at this period, because trying to sell someone something (especially something they don't need) involves a bit of deceptiveness such as "liking what the customer likes", "being the type of person the customer is". You know, being something you're not to make the sell.

By the time I returned to teaching a lot of things had changed. Accountability had become the buzz word. You see, teacher's salaries had increased quite a bit, but politicians never give anything for free. In exchange for the money, teachers would have to jump through a few hoops. Not much, you know, little things like take a literacy test (they didn't trust University Diplomas) and although less than 1% of teachers in Texas failed the test (a few coaches, duh!) the practice along with the expense continues today. You also had to teach by the numbers. Remember those outlined canvases that you could paint by with the numbers correlating to the number on the paint vials? Well, teachers were expected to follow the script (lock step). It seems that while the legislators all thought they got a good education, that today something must be broke so who better to fix it than someone who got his job primarily on his ability to bullshit (legislators).

Slowly these measures, began to eat up teacher's creativity and the more we jumped through hoops the more we gave up control. It was a training period for whores. Don't let 'em fool you. The amount teachers get paid for 9 and a half months of work is a good income and once you get accustomed to the easy hours, and days off (not paid, but, hey, all the holidays and more), it becomes hard to give up for a few measly ideals, like "getting students to think" rather than "you should know this". The kicker came with state wide exit testing. I remember when the idea of statewide testing started, a principal getting up and saying... "Now, we are not going to teach the test." My last principal made no bones about it..."You are going to teach the test.".

True education is really, really hard to measure objectively. Sometimes, just one little bit of information garnered in a boring class, or a long-winded book can be life changing and only you can say that it is. Someone else could have read that same book, sat in the same class and memorized all kinds of facts, made an excellent grade on an objective test and NOT gotten the same life changing experience. An incident that changes your perspective on the world is infinitesimally more relevant than to know a whole list of dates, or facts. But the Exit Test is an Objective Test. It is the numbers that count. Let's look at that through a football analogy, (we love those in Texas). Your team scores more points and you win the game. The coach for a winning team (number of wins) is a hero and can get a "better" job (and more money) somewhere else. So do we have football just for the winners? Is all about numbers or would you expect your child who is playing football to gain some agility, learn something about cooperation, his ability to persist, leadership, and even how to lose. But now we are awarding only the objective end of the game to the test takers (although, this is a minimal skills test) but mainly we are awarding the coaches (read administrators here- principals, superintendents and all those in between). So with this pressure on the administrators to succeed they, in turn, lay it on the teachers. And, unless you are a teacher with no moral compass about what you are cheating your students out of by teaching only the test (Happy Hookers, I guess), you begin to sell your soul for a few dollars.

Please don't get me wrong. I have nothing against a minimal skills test, but it should not become the all encompassing job of the teacher. It is not what is gained by teaching test but it is what is lost and at what cost. Opportunity cost means that you give up something. You spend most of your time teaching to the lowest common denominator in the class, not to see where a student is on the scale of objective data, but to make sure that some administrator's score looks good.

While I sacrificed students time to the Test God, I was not always a good little whore. There were times that I played, and questioned and slipped in something (not approved) to try to get people to think. And I've got to say that my students, like most Texas Students today, have learned the program and are not really complaining about it, but if you have a child in a Texas school room today, you should be really upset with me, and other whores like me, not to mention our clients (administrators) that are cheating your children out of a really good education that is actually possible, but are not getting today.

Wow! I feel better, and I promise, no more whoring; from now on I'll just be myself.