(6) Mrs. Prentiss' Penis Problem, Part 1

I'm going to post a story that I think best illustrates the kind of camaraderie that we had as a teaching staff. I wrote it at the time because it was one of those events that I really wanted to remember. The story is longish, so I'll post it in parts. Just an FYI, it was our custom to call each other by our last names without any title.

Feel free to read with a southern accent. If you know a N'Awlins accent, even better!

"Excuse me baby... I forgot to call about my pig," with that, she whipped out her cell phone right in the middle of my fourth period class where she was helping me distribute textbooks to my students.

When I first laid my eyes on Prentiss, she frightened me; she still does. This late middle-aged, dashingly dressed, high-heeled, Virginia Slims 100's smoking (out of a fifties cigarette holder), black woman with a jutted jaw and a martini voice, is my colleague. We teach fifth grades at a school in what locals call a blighted neighborhood within the New Orleans public school system. She has been here for twenty-seven years, knows the families in the neighborhood, taught the children's mamas, grand-mothers and aunties. I've been at the school for three weeks now. Prentiss and I are peers.

"...err, yeah...Hello. I dropped off my pig yesterday to be worked on."

"His name?"

Here's where I couldn't hear too well. She mumbled pig's name.

"His problem...?" He's been urinating blood... This afternoon? Okay...When you might think I can pick him up? ...Okay...."

Click.

"I'm sorry baby... I had to call. My pig hasn't been feelin' too good. ...he's a pot belly... 'took him to Baton Rouge yesterday to the hospital, but they haven't worked on him yet. 'hope he's gonna to make it."

'Um....now where was I?... Taylor, Dondrel...You're next."

Next morning, just to make conversation, I asked Prentiss for news about pig.

"They found out what's wrong with him," she says.

"Oh yeah, what's the matter?"

With impeccable frankness, she delivers the following line:

"Baby... his penis is bleeding because he masturbates too much."

I didn't know where to look or what to say.

Part 2 to follow.

(7) Mrs. Prentiss' Penis Problem, Part 2

The staff lunchroom conversation that afternoon was interesting. By some perverse destiny, Woods, a special education teacher, happened to be eating pig fried chips. The rest of us told her to have some respect and decency for the sick. Prentiss was eating at the other end of the table.

"What's the matter with ya'll?" Woods asks flustered. I wouldn't have traded places with her for anything.

"How can you sit there eating those things when pig's in the hospital?" Jones pipes.

"What?... Who?... What are you talking about?"

"Mrs. Prentiss' pig!" Jones answers annoyed and assuming that Woods knew already.

Woods yells across the table, "Prentiss! What's the matter with pig?"

"Baby, he's sick."

"What's the matter with him Prentiss?"

Prentiss doesn't yell back. Her voice carries very well, even when she is talking in a hush.

"He's been masturbating too much. His penis is bleeding."

"What? Masturbating! Pigs masturbating... how do pigs masturbate?... I mean, I didn't think they could."

"Woodson, you fool!" Boudreaux joins in, then explains basic sex to Woods.

"He rubs himself on furniture... a table...a chair."

"That's terrible!" Woods is genuinely upset.

"I feel sorry for him... you know... I never thought about that. How do pet pigs have sex? If you are a dog or cat or somethin', you can just run away and get some."

"So, what's going to happen to pig, Prentiss?" Woods yells across the table.

"Baby, I don't know if he's going to make it."

"Of course, he's going to make it! They'll fix his penis." Boudreaux interrupts Prentiss.

"Prentiss, what happens if they can't fix it?" Woods keep on the subject.

"I don't know, baby...."

Woods answers her own question innocently and then sighs, "If pig doesn't make it... pig is livestock."

All together: Shut up Woods!

(8) Boxed Up

The first year of teaching for anyone is usually a learning curve, but to teach in the Calliope made that learning curve exponentially harder. As a first year teacher, my college teacher preparation program did not prepare me for the kinds of situations that I would have to face on a minute by minute basis. I learned what I needed to know to survive from my colleagues and the community.

That year, I watched our shiny, new principal unravel into a fatigued, cranky, and self-serving leader whose new agenda seemed to be moving on up to a district level director job. However, as I know now, that would not happen for a few years. The reality is that our district office expected administrators to do their time (and to demonstrate that they had served their time loyally) in order to get out.

With no real leader, my colleagues stepped up and took over my education. The person who had the most direct access and influence over me was Mrs. Prentiss. We both taught fifth grade and our classrooms were next door to each other. There was a door in the back that connected both our rooms together.

In order to have a relationship with Mrs. Prentiss, I had to compartmentalize what I knew about her as a person and what I would find out about her as a teacher. I had to learn how to put my thoughts and feelings into separate boxes in order to move forward. This was a skill that I came to rely on for many people and situations during those first years. If I had not used separate boxes, I would have lost my mind.

(9) Sad Sad People

The title of this photo by A. Maheshwari best sums up the emotional climate in Mrs. Prentiss' classroom. I want to preface this post by saying that Mrs. Prentiss was the exception at the school. The other teachers that I worked with were, for the most part, caring professionals. We all, at different times, made attempts to rescue students out of her room, if only for a short while. Looking back now, I am struck that Mrs. Prentiss was enabled for so long and would be for her entire thirty year career.

It's still confusing for me to write about her. On the one hand, she was my mentor and was a great support to me for my first years. I liked her as a person. She had a sharp wit and a gripping life story which included overcoming the abject poverty of her childhood, and as an adult, surviving breast cancer. She was a wife and a doting mother. Her only child, a daughter, at that time was graduating from medical school. She was well traveled and a phenomenal cook.

On the other hand, to most of her students, Mrs. Prentiss was an abusive monster.

One of her favorite forms of torture was punishing her students (especially boys) by having them stand in the back of the classroom for the entire day. This meant that they would miss lunch and would not be allowed restroom breaks. I remember incidents where standing students would urinate on themselves because they could not hold on any longer. I also remember an incident that I debated whether to write about, and then decided to include to illustrate the degree of humiliation that some of Mrs. Prentiss students had to endure.

I remember a time when a male student was left standing, and by the end of the day was moving his legs from side to side indicating that he needed to use the restroom. As the pressure to go grew stronger, he held on to his crotch area to further indicate the urgency. Mrs. Prentiss, came up to him and in front of the entire class said,

"Boy, what do you think? You are a man now? Baby.... Starch couldn't make that string between your legs hard!"

He was humiliated and she was surprised to see me standing in the doorway. I had the student go to the restroom and he ran from the class.

Mrs. Prentiss had a way with words and she used them creatively and daily to remind her students where they came from and how without her, they would be destined to "run the streets like their parents."

Beyond the daily emotional abuse, I recall a couple of times where she took her students into the restroom for their punishment. The school had a history of corporal punishment and I learned that the staff had only decided to stop the practice where the new principal came on board (in 1996) . I don't think Mrs. Prentiss stopped and I would hear her warn her students how she would "tear them up."

(10) Labels

One of the most widely used terms to identify urban children is "at-risk". There are 28,000,000 Google entries that describe risk in the context of students, but most of us know the general idea. Labeling a child at-risk is to say that they will potentially have learning delays, drop out of school, do drugs, have poor self-esteem, become violent, become pregnant. If you are a poor, minority child, research tells us that the chances of these things happening to you are even greater, and so you are at greater "risk".

The origin of assessing risk is a medical model. In researching the the term, I was not able to able to find when it became widely used, but I did remember a lecture that I attended many years ago where the speaker identified the term used during immigration through Ellis Island, NY, as early as the late 1800's. As immigrants to the US disembarked from ships from Europe, they were corralled through a series of checkpoints. The medical checkpoint was the most important and here they were examined to determine their risk of carrying communicable diseases such as cholera, tuberculosis, trachoma, and measles among others. Once a diagnosis was made, their clothes were marked with chalk symbols (such as an X for medical defect). Many immigrants would wear their marked clothes inside out from fear and embarrassment. Interestingly enough, those who had traveled with first or second class tickets did not have to endure such humiliations.

Even during my first years as a teacher, it became clear to me that my students were acutely aware of the label that they were given by society. While "AR" wasn't drawn on their clothes with chalk, it might has well been as I could tell that my incredibly bright students would spend the rest of their childhoods turning their clothes inside out. There are a lot of fingers to point for this, but the bottom line to me is that we get past the blame and deconstruct our labels for what they really are.

Two editors who turned the at-risk model on its ear are Beth Blue Swadener and Sally Lubeck. Their Children and Families "at Promise": Deconstructing the Discourse of Risk is a good read and adds a much needed counterpoint to the discussion. We'll also talk more about the "at-promise" model in posts to come.