Menopausal Mountie

One little, two little, three little students…

My high school English teacher, Mrs. Wanda Jessulat would label this as a ‘plop’ if you look at my writing as a story line. Last week however, I received a lovely email from the parent of a student I taught a long time ago which brought me to this post. If you are enjoying my writing, please share with your friends. I do enjoy an audience.

I taught at George Street Junior High School in the early 90s in downtown Fredericton NB. The school itself is brick with a wide stone staircase leading to the doors that first opened to students in 1924. In 1931, a rectangular annex was added. By the time I did my student teaching there in 1991 the city had grown up around it leaving it without greenery or a playground.

The classrooms were large and sprawling with high windows that needed to be pulled open with a pole. The Art room downstairs was a mysterious place to someone like me who could barely draw stick people. There were tables and shelves with partially finished paintings, papier mâché projects, boxes of paints, pastels and any number of things I could neither name nor use. The library was run by Duska Slipp, who was likely the closest to me in age, at about ten years my senior. I was by far the youngest employee in the building.

Not much seemed to have changed since I had been a junior high student in another part of the province. Desks were still lined up individually, often in alphabetical order by last name. The Pigman and The Outsiders were read in English class and some old guy with readers and Einstein hair taught history by pulling out the same lined yellow pages that he used from one year to the next.

The profession was still staffed by my father’s generation, and teaching contracts were hard to come by. The pay for a substitute teacher was $84 a day. After ten consecutive days, the pay went up to over $100. The next benchmark came when the number of consecutive teaching days triggered a contract.

The first time that I was days away from the magic number (and being able to afford cheese), I was called to the principal’s office. Conard Symonds was a nice man with kind eyes, and I knew his words and his disappointment were sincere.

“I’m really sorry, Sandra” he said. “The District called and you have to stay home tomorrow”.

“Couldn’t I stay home one day next week?” I had been replacing the same teacher for several months and had no plans ready for my own supply teacher. I also was broke.

“I’m afraid not,” he answered and that was that. I had a day off without pay, the magic clock went back to zero and my daily wage went back to the starting line. This would happen at least once more.

My shot at a permanent contract finally came with a phone call the week before school started in my third year of teaching. Conard Symonds explained that there was a .6 position with a grade 7 homeroom that needed to be filled. Technically, it hadn’t been posted and wouldn’t be for at least another month, but he was excited for me and was hoping I’d be interested. I was. I went to work the next day.

“How many Scoobys do you have?” a teacher asked me as I walked by him in the staffroom with my first ever stack of student files.

“Scoobys?” I hadn’t a clue what the question meant. The teacher asking was one of the heavy smokers in the staff room who generally did not engage in small talk with me. I was pretty sure he wore a toupee. My mind was picturing Scooby Doo.

“Indians,” he added. “Wagon burners. How many in your class?”

I don’t know how or if I responded but I do know that I didn’t make the connection between Scooby and what he was asking until later. I likely muttered something unintelligible and got out of there as quickly as I could. I had textbooks to track down, combination locks to sort out and a classroom to set up.

I felt like I was in a time warp. I had been raised in a middle class suburb and had never heard racial slurs spoken in my home. I remember using the ‘n-word’ in the eeny-meeny miny song when I was very young and being corrected by my mother who told me that we didn’t use that word anymore. The black licorice doll-shaped penny candies she liked from McArthur’s store changed to licorice babies around that time as well.

‘Native’ was the word I was taught to use as an adolescent when referring to Indigenous people. I knew that ‘Indian’ was not only inaccurate but dated to say the very least.

And then there was the Indian Attendance Form that showed up on my desk.

“You’ll know who the natives are” one of the teachers told me when I asked her about it.

“How?” I asked. “By how they look?”

I knew that many natives had dark straight hair and dark eyes but so did my cousin Michelle who wasn’t native and most of my mother’s family. My uncle Frank, who easily could have passed for native used to threaten to drop us off at the nearby ‘reserve’ and leave us there when we were being pests.

“Well, that and their last names” the teacher clarified.

“Last names?” I didn’t know a single indigenous person well enough to know their full name.

“Francis” the teacher said. “And Sacobie, and Polchies…”

That’s when I connected the dots. Sacobies. Not Scooby-Doo.

There was no Erin Brokovich moment for me. I went on to figure out which students needed their attendance recorded on the form. My teaching days consisted of figuring things out, loving it, and feeling like someone was going to catch me impersonating a grown up at any moment and send me home. I learned which teacher I could go to for help and which ones to avoid.

When the teacher across from me offered to help me set up for my first parent-teacher meeting, I was relieved. I thanked him when we were done. “I just wanted to watch your ass while you picked up chairs,” he said. And so it went.

The parents of my students started a petition in October when they found out that I couldn’t apply for my own job and would be leaving once it was filled with a ‘qualified’ candidate. The District Superintendent faced a classroom full of these parents one evening. I sat in the back, humbled.

“The job itself requires a science degree, and unfortunately the teacher is question does not have one. This in no means implies that the teacher in question…”

I was teaching one class a day of Grade 7 science using the thick textbooks that predated my birth. The thing I’ve always loved about teaching is finding different ways to explain and demonstrate a concept. For the life of me I can’t remember any of the actual science lessons, but I do remember getting the students to bang rulers on their desks. They loved it, and none of them questioned my qualifications.

I raised my hand. “I’m the teacher in question, sir. You can call me by name.”

It was already a done deal, I knew that. But it was awfully nice for the parents to try. More than 35 years later, it still warms my heart. Not getting the job wasn’t the hardest part though. The part that broke my heart was telling my students.

“I won’t be going far,” I told them “I’ll still be a supply teacher here. And I want you to give your new teacher a chance. It’s a difficult situation for him, starting after the year is underway and I know that each of you will be respectful and kind.” Whatever else I said was equally full of platitudes. I was broke, back down to 84$ a day and my fog was heavy with a new kind of grief that I didn’t know was part of teaching.

Three of the girls in that science class were indigenous. The trio were a head taller than most of the girls, and I can still picture them, owning the middle of the hallway as they walked. They sought me out a few weeks after their new teacher had started.

“Miss Christopher, he doesn’t like natives.”

I didn’t hold it against the guy for getting the job, but I certainly didn’t have it in me yet to make small talk with him about the students I considered ‘mine’ so I had avoided meeting him. Surely the girls were wrong. I said something vacuous to them about giving him a chance while hoping that my smile looked sincere.

Eventually, I did run into him.

“Hi, I’m Sandra.”

He introduced himself, smiling. He hadn’t connected the dots.

“Miss Christopher.”

“Oh.”

We chatted about something, maybe the weather, maybe the coffee. I can generally drum up a conversation with anyone. I finally asked about my three girls.

“How are they doing?”

His response amounted to “You know what Indians are like.”

There’s no moral to this story. I was broke, discouraged and decided that maybe teaching wasn’t for me. I would go back to it 25 years later and sometimes teachers would comment on my very long hiatus.

“Things aren’t what they used to be are they?”

No. No they aren’t.