TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 161

[Tobie Shapiro]

February 24, 2000000000000000000007


Dear surrogate family,

	Feyna got a job!  She found out about the 
opening in the afternoon and went for the 
interview at six o'clock in the evening.  She was 
so nervous, I nearly kicked her out of the car on 
the way to the BART station.  It is a job with a 
household appliance company doing customer 
service.  This is a perfect job for her, because 
it doesn't require speed and multi tasking.  It 
requires tact and brains, in both of which she 
has talent.  I told her to tell the interviewer 
that she is used to calming people down since she 
has an autistic twin brother and has been 
defusing crises all her life.  I don't know 
whether that was what did it.  I think her innate 
charm helped, and her obvious intelligence.  It 
probably didn't hurt that she's gorgeous.  The 
job is quite a ways from here, south of San 
Francisco in San Bruno, but she can get there on 
BART.  The hours are flexible, evidently, and the 
pay is excellent ($17.70/hr. at first).  She's 
excited.  I'm excited.  This must feel awfully 
good to her, because she's been turned down for 
much less interesting jobs, and was starting to 
think she was sub standard.  We kept encouraging 
her.  "There is a job out there.  Keep looking." 
And she did, and there was.  Now she can start 
getting independent.




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Bad Teacher


	Miss Mac Eninny was the meanest teacher 
I'd ever had.  In fact, from first grade until 
Miss Mac Eninny in the fifth grade, I'd never had 
a teacher I didn't like.  Then this one came 
along.  I put her in the same category as Miss 
Baxter, the kindergarten teacher who hit me 
across the face for drawing a picture of her when 
we were all assigned to do a portrait.  Mac 
Eninny didn't like teaching and no wonder, she 
was teaching little kids in the fifth grade, the 
worst grade of elementary school.  It's the age 
when the girls have matured enough to form 
tightly packed cliques that do social abuse as a 
calling.  It is the time when the little boys 
start spitting and talking nasty, hating the 
girls and punching each other in lieu of, "How ya 
doin'?"  We are an unruly, destructive, 
inattentive and obnoxious group, the lot of us, 
in fifth grade.  No more innocence, no more, "out 
of the mouths of babes," moments.  Fifth graders 
are a danger to themselves and others and should 
be put in a psychiatric involuntary lock-up for 
the benefit of society.  On the other hand, 
locking them all up would be as a punishment, and 
these new unsavory behaviours that have been 
acquired are exactly what these kids are going to 
need when fitting into the adult world, many 
years down the road.  The teachers, in their way, 
applaud the behaviour by letting them all loose 
on each other rather than disciplining the cruel 
behaviours out of them.

	"We like to let the kids work these 
things out themselves," said a couple of Feyna's 
teachers in the fifth grade.

	"Like, 'Lord of the Flies'?" I asked.

	Mac Eninny wasn't a bad seed like Baxter 
was.  She didn't beat us up.  But she did a bang 
up job of not understanding us, of applying 
stringent and arbitrary rules, and punishing by 
humiliation.  My hay day of high fourth grade was 
definitely over in the fifth grade.  In high 
fourth grade, for a month or so, I found myself 
being one of the popular girls in the class.  The 
boys liked me as well.  This is when Chris 
Diebenkorn, Richard Diebenkorn's son, had a crush 
on me, along with his friend, John Ritchie.  The 
three of us played illicit handball together 
after school.  It was wicked.  Came fifth grade, 
I was back down at the bottom of the heap, and 
Miss Mac Eninny should have seen this, but she 
wasn't a keen observer of her students.  She just 
applied the rules and assigned the homework.

	I told my mother that Miss Mac Eninny 
didn't like me.  I said she was mean to me.  So 
my mother went off to school to meet with her.  I 
don't know why I didn't forbid that.  When the 
parents go talking to the teacher, they all do 
their grown-ups thing where they collude with 
each other against the child.  Parents come back 
from meetings like these telling their child that 
she misunderstood the teacher.  The teacher 
really has the child's best interests at heart. 
"I'm sure she didn't mean to have you hold onto 
those live wires while standing in a pool of 
water.  It was a misunderstanding."

	In this case, Mac Eninny twisted the 
whole meaning and focus of the meeting.  My 
mother came back saying that Mac Eninny was 
concerned that I didn't read enough.  I was 
behind in my reading assignments and didn't seem 
motivated to catch up.  What could we do for 
Tobie to get her excited about reading?  And here 
was her solution.  Tobie would be assigned an 
additional book per week to read.  Oh, just for 
fun.  Reading is fun.  On the face of it, that 
was absurd and just like Mac Eninny's way of 
thinking.  Tobie's behind in her reading and 
doesn't enjoy the books the class is assigned, so 
give her more of the same.  Have her trudge 
through the stuff on all fours being denied food 
and water until she finishes, "The Secret of 
Blithe Hall," "Andy's Dogs," and, "Jonathan the 
Bold," then hands in a five paragraph book report 
on all of them.  She has a week to finish.  And 
don't forget that she has to keep up with the 
class assignments in, "Black Beauty's Colt." 
It's only a couple of chapters a night.  Well 
within her capabilities.  Yes, Tobie will love 
reading after this.  More like getting someone to 
stop smoking by slamming twenty cigarettes in his 
mouth and lighting them all at the same time.

	I avoided the new books Mac Eninny had 
selected just for me.  I stacked them neatly in 
my room, next to the bed along with the other 
onerous tasks, and didn't touch them even to read 
on the inside cover when the library wanted them 
back.  The library at John Muir Elementary School 
was a large room lined with bookcases.  I think 
they organized it by developmental 
appropriateness.  So all the fifth grade books 
would be together.  The next phase of my 
punishment was to have me go to the library and 
choose a couple of books myself.  I remember 
going there during lunch hour, and reading the 
titles of the fifth grade selections.  They were 
all awful:  stories about heroic children who 
accomplished something against all odds, or about 
a ten year old hospital candy striper who saved 
the day, a lot of animal books.  Most of the 
books were about boys  (something to identify 
with).  I couldn't find anything I wanted to 
read.  What I wanted to do was write, but that 
wasn't what this exercize was about.

	My reading was not deficient by any 
means; it was just slow.  I went over each word 
and made sure I pronounced it in my head for full 
dramatic effect.  This could slow anyone down. 
And I did it with a compulsivity admirable in its 
zeal.  The fifth grade section had failed me, so 
I wandered off into the forbidden sixth grade 
shelves.  The leap of conceptual material was 
noticeable.  The first thing I found was an 
illustrated book about all the possible ends of 
the world.  I landed right in the middle of 
burning temperatures, parched earth, dried up 
docks, uninhabitable terrain.  Remnants of the 
previously vigorous civilization clung to the 
edges of the fissured crust - a dried out boat, a 
stray front door that must have come off its 
hinges somewhere where the skeletons of houses 
wound up.  I turned the pages.  Oh, here was what 
might happen if our sun became a super nova. 
We'd be here one moment, and the next split 
second we'd all evaporate, sort of like the 
rapture only with no saved Christians.  I closed 
the book, worried, shaken by the thought that my 
planet might cease to exist in a hundred million 
years.  Maybe the sixth grade books were too much 
for me.

	I came out of my visit to the library 
empty handed.  There was nothing I felt like 
reading.  I pleaded with my mother to convince 
Miss Mac Eninny that I shouldn't have to do all 
the extra work.  I couldn't manage what I already 
had.  They let up on the reading, but decided 
that I was bored with math.  I'd told my mother 
that.  We had a, "Think and Do Book," the 
workbook that accompanied the math text book, 
which was currently drilling us on adding up 
columns of three and four place numbers.  There 
would be maybe five pages of these problems.  For 
homework, we were instructed to do all the even 
numbered ones.  The odd numbered ones could stay 
there in the book, uninspected.  So I knew that 
each problem itself was not vital to learning the 
skill.  It was just busy work.  Repetition is 
good for you.

	I loathed it.

	Loathed it.

	I could barely get myself to look at 
these rows and rows of similar problems.  Add up: 
3,276, 5,197, 689, 394, and 6,278.  Really 
important work, I thought, as I butted my head 
against it.  The solution Mac Eninny had to my 
being bored with the math at that level, was to 
give me additional problems to do, so that 
whereas the rest  of the class was doing the even 
numbered problems, I was doing the even and the 
odd numbered problems, both.  See?  No more 
boredom!

	This was right along the lines of giving 
me more to read to get me to like it.  I could 
not fathom how unfair this was and how stupid. 
But the same sort of logic and educational 
techniques are used today.  The difference being 
that these days, after all the tedious busy work 
is finished, there will be a high stakes, 
national test on the material to judge if the 
students are learning according to the prescribed 
schedule.  If they are not, then the school is 
marked as a failure and burned to the ground.

	Education has not changed a whole lot. 
We've had sixty four crayons since I was a kid. 
And the colours just get new names.  Miss Mac 
Eninny was an ancient and vengeful beast.  I 
hated her, and she had no way of altering that, 
save leaving me the hell alone.



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Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net