After the Fact: It’s a circus out there

Back in my day, and probably still, the 4-year plan for a teacher included a “block” of student teaching. For those of you who chose a different path, this “block” meant servitude as a general flunky in a classroom for a whole semester at the end of your junior year. Now, this is far enough into the program that the school feels you’re barely capable of teaching on your own but too far in debt to consider changing your mind.  Not only are you evaluated by your host teacher, you also have to bow and scrape to an advisor approved by the college.

Being the equivalent of the upstairs maid (I was going to say “first mate” but even that is too glorified to describe the duties of a student teacher), I was dusting and mopping and whisking my way through the high school art classes, mostly indulging in “one-on-one” instruction. When the advisor said she’d like to observe my “teaching technique,” I was thrust upon center stage. Now, the lesson plan called for “one and two-point perspective drawing.” That’s a snap. It’s enough art to be fun but also a smattering of math. But trying to explain “draw what you see and not what you think you see” was a horse of a different color. It was more like a unicorn, actually. And these students wanted to draw like M.C. Escher. He’s the fellow who drew stairways that went up at the same time they went down and water that flowed both ways. 

It wasn’t so traumatic that I gave up on teaching, but it opened some gaping holes in what I had thought it was going to be all about. I had spent inordinate amounts of time learning how to write lesson plans only to find out that nobody really read them and even fewer actually used them. From the very first year, my lesson plans were contingent upon whatever supplies were available. 124 boxes of wallpaper paste.  Cardboard from two reclining chairs. Left-over crayons and colored chalk. By year two, I had prepared a very tight budget that included the extravagance of paint and brushes and paper. “Tight” wasn’t tight enough because the principal sent it back with a note written in crayon. 

I’ll confess that I wasn’t the greatest art teacher that ever graduated from Adams State (that honor still belongs to Alamosa’s elementary teacher, Sue Patterson) but I faked my way through enough years that some of my students still think they learned something, and I, at least, had an unbelievably good time. I’d apologize to the person who “inherited” the dregs of that supply closet but I never did figure out enough ways to use up all of those boxes of wallpaper paste!

I’m not really sure, but I think there are more job opportunities and better benefits if you go to work at McDonalds right after high school graduation and skip college altogether.  At least you don’t have a staggering student loan to pay back. It may not be the job of your dreams, but my plumber makes a salary that brings tears to my eyes. I haven’t priced a Stetson lately, but I’d bet the folks who take the hat making class at Trinidad State Junior College can put t-bones on their barbecue.   

It’s a little slow coming around, but we’re becoming more aware of alternative education programs and alternative employments. Not everyone wants to go to Harvard. “My son, the doctor” is not nearly as exciting as “my son, the guy who fixes your son’s Mercedes.” I’ve heard that employers like Boeing are desperate for help that might actually know a welder from a bicycle pump.

But there are definitely good reasons for going to college: you meet people from places as far away as New Jersey, you learn to understand foreign languages (see the part about “New Jersey”), your legs will actually carry you from your dorm to the Campus Café before 10 a.m. and, by your junior year, you can tell the difference between Coors and Budweiser. After all the years since I graduated, there may be even more significant and valuable lessons to be learned as a college student, but you have to master the basics first.