It was hard to fall asleep, but Mr. Webb managed to get six solid hours of sleep before the big first day. There wasn’t anything special to wear or anything special to eat: what made the day special was getting to school in time to get a decent parking space. The faculty lot was on the side of the building opposite Mr. Webb’s room. That was a huge schlep, so Mr. Webb parked in the student lot that was practically outside his door. If he got there early enough, he could get a pull-through spot in the first row.

Lucky day! Mr. Webb got the spot he wanted. He got out of his car and waved at the other teachers and the students he knew as they wended their way into the building. As soon as Mr. Webb got inside, hapless freshmen asked him about where their fist classrooms were located. It seemed to be a rule to have the freshmen schedules set up so that they would criss-cross the building from period to period. Passing periods were six minutes, so they could get from one end to the other in that time, but there would be no time for getting to the bathroom. Kids weren’t supposed to be allowed to use the bathroom for the first fifteen or the last fifteen minutes of a 50-minute class, so that really limited their opportunities to feel comfortable in the educational environment.

Mr. Webb saw a senior that he knew was in one of his classes. “Say, Oscar, can I see your schedule?”

Oscar smiled as he pulled out his schedule. “Sure. You have a good summer?”

“Yes, I did, thanks. And you?” Mr. Webb looked to see what room the schedule said he was in.

“I had a good one. Went back to Manila to see my grandma. What do you need my schedule for, anyway?”

Mr. Webb pointed at his room assignment. “That.”

“Yeah, I’m in your class. I’m stoked.”

“No, you don’t get it. Look at the number.”

“It says A121.”

“OK, now look at the number on the men’s room here.”

“A121 – oh snap!”

Mr. Webb’s room was actually A119B. The ISS room was A119A. Every now and again, not only would the scheduling program put Mr. Webb’s AP classes against other sections that were more in demand, the scheduling program would also decide that it couldn’t handle an A or a B after a room number and would assign Mr. Webb to the next available room number, A121. A120 was a computer classroom, so that wasn’t available.

While people that had been to Teller before were pretty familiar with where Mr. Webb’s room was by the time they were seniors, students new to Teller were going to try and find Economics in a men’s room, which was an uncomfortable prospect, at best. Mr. Webb went to his room to make a sign to put up next to the bathroom so that the kids would know where to find the real classroom.

Waiting for Mr. Webb were the kids that knew the score. Three students stood outside, waiting to put their lunches into Mr. Webb’s fridge. “Hey, Mr. Webb! Do you know what lunch you have?”

“Nope. They don’t announce lunch assignments until third period.”

“What the hell, Webb?”

“They’ve been doing that for the last few years. It used to be that the Social Studies department classes always got B lunch. Some people complained how other departments would grab up the A and C lunches, so now Mr. Hradzin makes the assignments himself.”

“So did you get, like A lunch?”

“No, I keep getting B lunch. But now I have to wait two more days to get it.”

“At least it’s not C lunch. The cafeteria always runs out of the good stuff by C lunch. All they have left is the plate lunches. It’s nasty.”

“That’s why I eat my own lunches.”

The kids put their lunches in the fridge. “What if we don’t have the same lunch as you do?”

“Just heat it up in the microwave and don’t disrupt my class, that’s all.”

“Cool. OK. Can we wait in here until the bell rings?” Nobody liked those cafeteria seats.

“Sure. Make yourselves comfortable.”

A few other kids walked in to sit in Mr. Webb’s room instead of the cafeteria. Mr. Webb started his computer so he could get some music going. “What do you guys want to hear?”

“Something mellow.”

“OK.” Mr. Webb put on some nice bossa brava. That made for a cool vibe.

“Are you gonna show movies during lunch again this year?”

“Planning to. I’m going to start with ‘Dhoom’. Get some cool action.” Mr. Webb pointed at the poster for “Dhoom” on the wall. The students nodded approvingly.

“It’s got motorcycles in it, right?”

“Yeah. Lots of ridiculous chase action. Great way to kick off the year.”

“Say, did you hear about Coach Guffman?” That was the coach that was recently fired for his sexual indiscretions.

“Yes, and we’re not supposed to discuss that with students.”

“Not discuss with students? What if we’re emotionally distraught and stuff?”

“You talk to the counselor. Any of you emotionally distraught?” They all shook their heads. “Well then, that’s a non-starter. We have a replacement for Guffman, so school keeps going.”

“Does the new guy know how he got the job?” A little giggle went through the students.

“Heh.” Mr. Webb had to laugh a little, too. “I don’t know. Be kind of a bad shock to find out after you got the job. Kind of like buying a house without knowing it’s built on an Indian burial ground.”

“Dude, that would suck.”

“Indeed it would. That’s why I don’t plan to ever move. The house I got now isn’t built on any kind of grave or what-not, so I don’t want to press my luck by buying another house.”

“You know who I wish they would fire? Mr. Benton.”

“Who’s he?”

“He’s an assistant band director.” That explained why Mr. Webb didn’t know him. “Total jerk.”

“If you don’t like him, why don’t you quit band?” Year in, year out, Mr. Webb asked this question.

“This is my fourth year, I want to see it through.” And that was the answer every year.

“Well, do you like band?”

“I like concert season. I hate marching.” It seemed like the only people that liked marching were the clarinets.

“You could always start your own band if you want to play concerts. You don’t have to merge your personality with a nameless mass in pseudo-fascist performances reminiscent of Hitler’s Nuremberg Rallies.”

“Wow, way to make it sound creepy, Mr. Webb.”

“It’s what it is. Aldous Huxley wrote about them in his book ‘Brave New World Revisited.’ When you march around at night, your sense of reason is diminished. When everyone else is wearing a uniform, you lose your personality. You become the mass of marchers, you merge with them. If they wanted you to become Nazis, that would be the time to do it. You should quit before they do that.”

“But I’d miss the trip to Corpus this year.”

“You know, you’re allowed to go to Corpus whenever you want to. Does band pay for the trip?”

“No, we do.”

“Well, you don’t miss anything if you bump the trip up to the summer and do a road trip on your own.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“You could probably get a better hotel, too.”

“Yeah, we could.”

“So why stay in band?”

“It’s my fourth year. I’ve made it this far, I might as well see it through.”

“Or you decide that having only three years of something you don’t want is better than having four, and you enjoy the difference.”

“But if anyone tries to quit, Mr. Mastiff really lays on a guilt trip.”

“So you go to the counselor, drop the class, and tell them that you feel uncomfortable about talking about this with Mr. Mastiff.”

“But then he’d tell my parents, and my mom would kill me! She did four years of band and she’s secretary in the band booster organization.”

The bell rang. End of that conversation. The kids said bye and everyone filed out. Mr. Webb locked his door and went to his first period duty station, the tardy station by Mr. Powell’s room. Mr. Walker did duty there, too, but he’d be there in a few minutes, since he had to wrap up his zero-hour class. For the first week, most of what they’d do would be to tell people where to go. For the second week, it would be giving warnings about dress code and tardies. Starting in the third week, it would be time to enforce the rules.

The rationale behind that was that kids needed an adjustment period to get back into school mode. Mr. Webb doubted that wisdom. It’s not like the kids weren’t in a school the year before, where the exact same rules applied. So the result of the two-week grace period was that kids that wanted to make trouble, made trouble, and got away with it.

Mr. Webb wondered how many names he was going to learn this year for all the wrong reasons.

Heat pervaded the innards of the copy machine. There was no way to avoid it, so Mr. Webb aimed his arm for the center of it. His arm went in sideways and he could not see where it went. Carefully, deliberately, he let his fingers stroke the air ahead of them for a tiny brushing against that substance most familiar to teachers: paper.

Ever so gently, he discovered the demon corner of paper, the devil in the details. Blindly, but with precision granted by his heightened sense of touch – well, to be honest, there were times when he was an absolute butterfingers, but he had to believe in himself in times like these if he was to have any hope of clearing the entire jam. So, back to that heightened sense of touch, he used it wisely, cautiously, delicately, to pinch the paper corner between his forefinger and long finger and then tug it out of the press where it was pinched.

He pulled it out, but that was not the whole of the battle. Now, it had to come back out. If it fell out from between his fingers, it was all over for the copier, that grand, magnificent beast.

Seconds felt like centuries.

But success was Mr. Webb’s, as he completed his operation without any loss.

Right about then, Mr. Friendly got his job going on the other copier. “Wouldn’t you know, the thing was just out of paper and nobody cared to look at the error on the screen. Tsk, tsk, tsk!”

Seriously? That was all that it took to get the other copier going? And that was the good one, the one that didn’t overheat as easily. Well, at least it was going, and that meant Mr. Webb wouldn’t get crucified for printing a 36-page packet, 20 times over. With front and back printing, that was 360 pages, which, at even the top speed of 60 pages per minute, was a 6-minute job. When it was already after 4PM on the day before school started, nobody wanted to wait 6 minutes plus time to clear jams before doing their job, let alone if others were ahead of them. Mr. Friendly’s timely loading of paper meant that the line would move faster, the frustration would recede, and everything was going to be all right.

15 minutes later, Mr. Webb was finished with his printing. Thankfully, all the other jams didn’t involve any paper tearing. Still, that copier had a serious attitude problem. If it was a kid, Mr. Webb would refer it to the anger management counselor.

The anger management counselor was a really nice touch at Teller High. Mr. Gil Gutierrez was a real ace in the hole, when it came to the poker game of student discipline. Say some kid was really acting out, really having a bad day… say this kid was having a bad day, nearly every day. He’d have his altercation all scripted out:

“Ricardo, you need to settle down right this instant!”

“Yeah? And what? You’re gonna send me to the office?”

“You bet I will!”

“Well then, get busy with that referral, ’cause I ain’t stopping.”

At which point, the teacher would write up the referral and Ricardo would get an hour-long vacation from school as he cooled his jets in the assistant principal’s office. Mr. Webb knew that strategy and had a counter for it. His discussion went like this:

“OK, Ricardo, that’s about enough.”

“You gonna write me up?”

Mr. Webb reached for his paperwork. “Already on it. You are leaving the room.”

Ricardo would almost nod, satisfied his work was done so quickly.

“There, get on out of here. Come back when you’re ready.”

Ricardo would grab the paper, but it wasn’t an office referral. Noting the unusual weight and lack of triplicate, Ricardo would look down. Confused, he’d ask, “Who’s Mr. Gutierrez?”

“He’s the anger management counselor. His office is across from the cafeteria, by the courtyard.”

“I thought I was going to the office?”

Mr. Webb made his best surprised face. “Why would I send you to the office?”

“Because of the way I was acting and stuff.”

“Well, did you want to go to the office, or did you want to go somewhere where you could do better than the office?”

“Uh…”

Mr. Webb smiled. “You don’t need the office. You need Mr. Gutierrez.”

Ricardo would then walk down to Gutierrez’ office. He’d come back, half an hour later, apologize, and then, with regular sessions with Mr. Gutierrez, he’d get to where he wouldn’t act out so often or to such an extreme. Mr. Webb would meet with Mr. Gutierrez and learn what was pushing Ricardo’s buttons so that he could do something different in his class. It didn’t work every time, but 90% of the time, it really helped. Maybe five of the 200-odd teachers at Teller actually referred kids to Mr. Gutierrez, but it made all the difference for those kids that went to see him.

And who should come around the corner, but Mr. Gutierrez? He feigned surprise. “Mr. Webb! I thought you were in jail!”

Mr. Webb feigned equal surprise. “And I thought you were dead!”

Both responded, “Well, things got better!” Their greeting ritual really got good laughs from students, but they enjoyed it just as much on their own.

“So, Dean, are you all ready for tomorrow?”

“Helluva question to ask me at 4:30 in the afternoon, Gil. Good thing that I got my copies. So, yes, I’m all ready. I think.” Mr. Webb grinned.

“Hey, belief is everything. If you believe you’re ready, then you’re ready.”

“How about you?”

“Got my act together. Say, is it hot in your room?”

“No, it’s freezing. It’s always like that when they kick on the AC for the start of the year.”

“Man, it’s boiling in my office. I’d put in a window unit, if I could open my windows.”

“Come and see how cold it is in my room. It was tolerable around lunch, but now we can hang meat in there.”

Mr. Webb led Mr. Gutierrez to his room. “Touch the handle.”

Mr. Gutierrez grabbed the metal door handle. “Wow! It’s like ice! If I lick it, my tongue’s gonna stick!”

Mr. Webb opened the door and the arctic blast poured into the hallway. Although it was August in Texas, Mr. Webb pointed to a small supply of blankets in one of his closets. “Oh yeah, I’m ready. I’m on the same register as the cafeteria and the lecture hall, so if those places are warm, I get to freeze. Every year, this happens, and every year, the custodian adjusts my vents just so after two weeks, then it’s fine until we kick over to heat.”

“Why is it two weeks?”

“That’s how long the request takes to work through the system. He could do it today, but he doesn’t have a work order, so it’s unauthorized work and he could get fired for it. Isn’t that crazy? Naw, I got blankets. I can survive.”

Bad phyiscal plant, goofy kids, inservices, book room drama, copy room trauma… yes, Mr. Webb could survive. So long as the central administration didn’t go completely insane like EDCISD’s did, Mr. Webb could survive. That’s why he chose to work in Garson ISD: their administration had had a long history of not being completely insane.

Mr. Gutierrez left and Mr. Webb straightened up a few things, putting his finishing touches on his room layout, with benches, tables, and chairs organized to allow for good traffic flow and orientation towards his projection screen that hung just over his left shoulder. Copies went on the cart next to the book cart, along with textbook checkout forms. Everything was ready to go. Mr. Webb turned off the light and locked his door.

In the hallway, the cheerleaders were hanging “Welcome back Titans!” banners in the hallway. They’d finally gotten to this part of the building, so they were almost ready to go home. Some of them could be full of themselves, but for the most part, they were some of the nicest people Mr. Webb had ever met. They showed up to every game, even the sports that didn’t draw big crowds, and they really did support the athletes on the field or on the court. They worked hard at what they did, and not everyone realized just how much service they gave to their school.

Bravest was the mascot. She had to wear an outfit that retained moisture the way a hoarder socks away back issues of National Geographic. And what moisture did the Titan costume foam retain? Best not to think too much of the sweat of generations that languished within its odorous interior. And that odor – its source? Suffice to say it was a germophobe’s nightmare.

The cheerleaders arrived early and stayed late. They walked quickly in the hallways. It was almost like they were teachers, themselves. That’s why Mr. Webb liked to talk with them when he passed by. He’d go on about their posters like they were fine art hanging in a museum: “I love how the black outline around the red T here illustrates the inner conflict of humanity in the balance of the 20th century! And here, in the way you dotted the i with a heart, this speaks to the hope that we can overcome man’s inhumanity to man!”

They’d laugh and he’d wish them good luck and thank them for all they did. Showing gratitude was easy to do, went a long way, and made everyone feel better about life. Best of all, it was free. As an Economics teacher, Mr. Webb knew that there wasn’t such a thing as a free lunch, but that man does not live by lunch alone.

Besides, teachers and students at Teller only had 28 minutes from bell to bell in the lunch period. If they lived by lunch alone, they would surely perish.

As Mr. Webb drove home, the ennui and depression of the staff development uselessness lifted from him and a true excitement about tomorrow welled up in his heart. He had but one problem between now and tomorrow morning. Would he get enough sleep before the big day?

The stacks of books looked good. Plenty of blue-backed regular Economics books, stacked in groups of five with spines alternating left and right, just the way Mr. Webb had left them at the end of last year. That means they hadn’t been raided for summer school. That was always a mess. Whenever a summer school requisitioned books to another high school, they stayed there until after their home school hollered. And then, it would take almost six weeks for them to arrive – and grading periods were every six weeks. Not a good arrangement.

Mr. Webb took 120 books, five at a time, thanking God for giving him hands big enough to grip the books in that easy-to-count manner. That filled up both sides of the bottom two shelves of the book cart. It also made the 15 AP Economics books on the top shelf look weak. The fact that the books were a sickly shade of green with spines disintegrating only made them look sadder.

Both titles were ridiculously out of date. The last textbook adoption had been in 2003, of books that had been published in early 2002. They were supposed to have lasted only ten years. Now they were like so many veterans, kept too long at the front. Shells of their former selves, desperate for some relief.

The AP books were the hardest hit. They had been written just before the huge tech stock crash of 2001, so their chapters about the “Internet economy” having possibly found a way to end the business cycle were hopelessly, unintentionally hilarious in a world that had seen the hard side of a business cycle not once, but twice, since then. And that second time was sure one for the record books. Mr. Webb had seen later versions of the same text, with the bubbly chapters on eternal growth and dotcoms forever excised like they had angered Stalin, replaced with chapters asking questions about global growth and income inequality.

Worse, the AP books had been written in a very pro-econometric way. To a non-economist, that meant they taught concepts that the Panic of 2008 with its subsequent none-dare-call-it-depression had shown to be horribly delusional. Mr. Webb believed that Economics had no business calling itself a science. Sure, there were a lot of numbers to be analyzed, but the subject had nearly zero predictive power – just ask all the poor slobs that got wiped out in 2001 and 2008.

Rather, the subject seemed to have a sort of reverse predictive power. Whenever all the major banks and first-world governments proclaimed things at an all-time high were only going to get better, you could be sure that a major recession was in the cards… and that if it didn’t come on time, then it was going to be violent, destructive, and brutal when it did arrive. Cue the pictures of kittens.

The regular books were so watered down, it was hard for their basic concepts to be irrelevant, until one got to their hip and relevant focus articles. The article praising Enron’s innovations in the energy market was particularly piquant. The chapter exuding the buy-and-hold virtues of stock market investing was downright dangerous, though. Zero interest rate policies and high-frequency trading algorithms had made the stock market a regular minefield for retail small investors. Over the last 15 years, bonds had outperformed stocks, contrary to the optimism expressed in the books. And now cue the pictures of baby dolphins.

With his load of books ready, Mr. Webb signed out his books and wheeled them back to his classroom. State law required that he have one per student, and he intended to honor the law even if he didn’t honor the book. This year, the assistant principal in charge of the books had said something that made Mr. Webb’s spidey-sense tingle.

“If you would rather have just a classroom set of books, that would make things easier for you and reduces the risk that we lose a book and have to pay the fine for it.”

Back in 1993, when he taught at Sunflare High School in East Dallas CISD, the book room guy said the same thing. That school was a desperate mess of teachers that taught only to the tests, and books were useless for that sort of thing. Mr. Webb had to struggle to get one book per student then. He also returned 100% of his books, in spite of the book room guy betting he’d do no better than return one of every ten.

There wasn’t a struggle this year at Teller, but the attitudes of East Dallas CISD seemed to be settling in here and there. Mr. Webb wondered how long it would be before things got bad enough for him to leave, like he had to leave East Dallas CISD back in 1995.

There had been a grade and attendance fraud scandal at Sunflare, and a friend of Mr. Webb’s had gone to the news about it. The television news station had gotten a copy of a Sunflare student’s transcript and showed evidence of the fraud. East Dallas CISD’s response was to go after Mr. Webb and his friend, since they were in a team-teaching project that, according to the TEA audit in the wake of the scandal, were the only teachers engaging in instructional activity in the entire school.

East Dallas CISD transferred the principal and his assistants to other campuses, where they kept their salaries and privileges. It then sent an assistant superintendent to Sunflare, where he accused Mr. Webb and his friend, Ms. Violet Gardens, of handing over transcripts to the media, which was a felony violation of the Family Educational Records and Privacy Act of 1973.

Mr. Webb and Ms. Gardens had hired a lawyer to sue the district, which was a big mistake. In court, the lawyers for the district admitted that the assistant superintendent had committed defamation per se and that his accusations were groundless, but that the law was written so that the district couldn’t be sued for the actions of one of its officers. Said officer had to be sued individually. The judge over the case was disgusted with EDCISD, but had no choice but to find for them under summary judgment. The district lawyers then turned around and offered a pair of options: either the plaintiffs could pay their legal fees and re-file to sue the assistant superintendent personally, or they could drop the case with prejudice – meaning they wouldn’t re-file – and they wouldn’t have to pay the very substantial legal fees for the district lawyers.

Mr. Webb remembered the wicked glee he felt when, years later, those same lawyers were fired by EDCISD for financial misdealings. But that didn’t make the trauma of the ordeal go away. Mr. Webb had found a way to forgive the assistant superintendent, which was fortunate when the guy later moved into his neighborhood and began to shop at the same supermarket. Even though Mr. Webb had found forgiveness for his fellow man, he knew his name was mud in EDCISD. Worse, if he tried to get a job somewhere else, he’d be tarred with a reputation as a troublemaker, should any district call back to EDCISD. If Mr. Webb had been making out with his students, he’d have a better chance at getting a job in another district. Schools were only too happy to pass the trash and keep those teachers in heavy rotation, but whistleblowers deserved to die on the vine. They didn’t get deliberately bad assignments – that would be retaliation – but they would get progressively worse class assignments and reviews.

Mr. Webb knew that was in his future if he stayed in the classroom. Therefore, in the summer of 1995, he quit the profession that he loved with all his heart. He went into the IT industry and got a job supporting Doors 4.0 for Nauticalmilesoft. That led to him getting into email administration with Nauticalmilesoft’s Missive server when it released in 1996. From there, he went on to be a consultant, a system administrator, and then back to Nauticalmilesoft in 1999 as a full-time Missive expert.

By 2002, all the people from EDCISD that had been involved in running Mr. Webb out of the business had either been fired, were retired, were dead, or were in jail, so Mr. Webb felt it was safe for him to go back to teaching. He took a 45% pay cut, traded in some pretty sweet benefits for crappy health insurance and long vacations, and got a job at Teller High. He was so happy when that happened. Garson ISD was a great place to work, even though it had a streak of racism amongst some of its older, more hidebound teachers.

In the years following, Garson’s gleam had faded. The kids were the same. His fellow-teachers were pretty much the same. It was the administration that was going weird. Them and the state legislature. No way did Mr. Webb want to endure the trials of 1995 again. That’s why the suggestion to get just a class set troubled him so much. Crappy inservice sessions, he could put up with. That was part of the price one paid in order to be a teacher. Falling standards and increased paranoia were another thing entirely. If things got too bad, Mr. Webb was going to have to find a way out.

But, for now, things weren’t intolerable. Heck, they were pretty grand. Mr. Webb rolled his cart into his room and checked things over. He had come in a week earlier to set things up, and everything seemed ready. He had a stock of food for the first few weeks in his cabinets and fridge, his books were ready, his walls were covered with posters, maps, and cartoons, and his copies were –

Faster than you could say, “Oh crap!”, Mr. Webb had grabbed the masters for his copies and was halfway down the hall, headed pell-mell for the copy room.

Mr. Webb got to the south book room just in time. All the Economics books, regular and AP, were here, and those were the books Mr. Webb needed, in plenitude. The Government books were in the north book room, and Mr. Webb was glad he didn’t have to schlep over there this year.

Once upon a time, the athletes actually delivered the books to the classrooms. Oh, for those days. Once upon an earlier time, teachers had more than one day before classes started to get their rooms ready. That was over twenty years ago, back during Mr. Webb’s first stint as a teacher. Although his five years in the East Dallas Consolidated Independent School District were something of a hellride when it came to the administration, there were elements of teaching unique to that era that were better than what teachers had to deal with today.

Back then, in the five days prior to the first day of school, teachers spent all of two days in meetings. The meetings dealt with getting back to the campus, saying hello to the new staff members, and procedures for kicking off the start of school. The other three days all belonged to the teachers. With those three days, there was no crowd to get copies made, no line at the laminating machine, no teachers coming in a few days early to get their rooms in order because four of those five days before school started were killed with stupid meetings, with only a day or less to deal with the actual usefulness of going over the start of school procedures.

As Mr. Webb inched his book cart forward six inches closer to bookland, he reflected on all those meetings from the last four days.

Total waste of time. That was the short version.

Complete waste of time. That was the version with one additional syllable.

Those were the meetings, all day in an auditorium or a student desk, that made Mr. Webb hate auditoriums and student desks. They made Mr. Webb hate the politicians and administrators that were complicit in confining teachers to auditoriums and student desks. But worst of all were the staff development days in cafeterias. Those flat, backless seats were absolute torture. They always made Mr. Webb’s back go out, which was why, in recent years, he had taken to wheeling his own chair into the cafeteria whenever he had a staff development meeting there.

Cafeteria meetings tended to be ones about improving test scores. Social Studies teachers had it relatively easy: the State of Texas made sure that football coaches would keep their jobs by making the state-mandated Social Studies tests ridiculously easy to pass. The State of Texas had learned its lesson in the Texas Educator Competency Test fiasco of 1991. It’s not that all the coaches were bad teachers. Loads of coaches were totally awesome at teaching. It’s that there was no reason for a perfectly good offensive coordinator to have to be let go because he was a little weak on The Gilded Age.

So while other subject areas were being run through the wringer over passing percentages that were at or below state minimum standards, the Social Studies crew was sitting pretty with over a 90% pass rate. That meant they got a challenge goal. Increase the percentage of students passing with a commended score. All at once, that sent the message that it didn’t matter how well they did, they weren’t going to be rewarded for it. Did 99% of the students pass, with 89% of them commended? Way to go! Now go for 100% and 90%! Stretch yourselves! No, the lesson was clear: just muddle through the same as you did the year before.

Lately, the district had taken to killing time during these cafeteria meetings by having teachers collectively work on district-standard final exams. Mr. Webb liked to invite the Economics teachers to his classroom, where they could sit on a chair with an actual cushion and a back to it. Besides, they all taught seniors. Who cared if they passed or failed the test, so long as they passed for the semester and got to graduate? Nobody liked to fail a senior, least of all in a class like Economics or Government that wasn’t even subject to a state-mandated test.

At Teller High, there were three Economics teachers. Mrs. Steinway was for the kids that wanted to keep their GPAs up without any real effort. In 45 years of teaching, she had never changed her assignments or tests, so students would hand down her coursework to their buddies in the upcoming class. Just copy those papers to a T, and a 100 was guaranteed. Coach Walker focused a lot on microeconomics and running a personal business: he wasn’t hard at all, so long as you showed up sober and did your homework. If you were actually into the idea of running a business, he was a great teacher to have.

And then there was Mr. Webb. He never let his assignments or tests get cold. He made class participation 25% of his final grade. On the other hand, he never had homework. Kids that had a distaste for busy work and who were blessed with a gift of gab would sign up for his sections. Between them, the three Teller High Economics teachers covered the spectrum of the student body. None of them would ever teach the way the other did, but they also respected that each teacher got to run his classroom the way he wanted to.

So, when it came time to grind out the district-standard final, they each chipped in a few questions from finals they’d given in the past and let it go at that. Once the copy and paste job was done, they got to relax a little and complain about having to do staff development instead of something useful. The exercise of composing a final was, itself, a complete waste of time since the district always used an old version that some earlier central admin had cobbled together. Every year, the teachers would point out the spelling errors and other mistakes on the test. Every year, Marlene Holroyd would thank the teachers for their input and promised to make corrections. Every year, the same test, mistakes uncorrected, would show up in time for finals. What in the world did Holroyd do in her office all day, anyway?

Mr. Webb moved his cart another four inches closer to the door of the book room. Any day now, it would be his turn. He thought about that one test-score meeting run by Holroyd’s predecessor, Shelly Ann Tewkesbury. It was her first time to be an administrator in a suburban district like Garson. She had come from Midland, where she had been a school secretary for a few years, got her Master’s in School Administration, and had run the night school there for a year and a half before coming to Garson. She had never spent a single day in a classroom as a teacher, and it was her job to try and tell the teachers how to do their jobs better. In that first meeting of hers, she showed a rah-rah flag-waving God-loving 100% Southern Baptist-approved video that had been put together by the First Baptist Church of her flatland prairie hometown.

Quite a few of the Jewish teachers wondered what to make of it. There were some Muslim teachers that were left scratching their heads. A majority of the Christian and unaffiliated teachers were also puzzled by that video. Wasn’t stuff like that supposed to be saved for spontaneous, student-led expressions of faith?

It wasn’t that anyone objected to Ms. Tewkesbury being a woman of strong faith. More power to her for it. The objections were more to do with the fact that she was using district time to apparently proselytize on behalf of her denomination. These objections were reinforced when she had some light and fluffy youth pastor from her denomination speak to the teachers about the role of faith in History and how to tell the good news and happy truth about Jesus Christ in the course of the day.

Visions of Supreme Court cases danced in Mr. Webb’s mind as he chose to ignore that speaker. Other teachers were sending texts. Some were working on handouts for the first day. There were those that were putting together their hardcopy gradebooks, due to their well-placed mistrust in the electronic grading system. Mr. Webb figured that if everyone else had checked out like that, it wouldn’t hurt if he read a book. He had Robert Fisk’s “The Great War for Civilisation”, a fascinatingly detailed history of North Africa and the Middle East. At least Fisk’s book was going to be relevant for his World History section that year.

He wasn’t more than three pages in when Shelly Ann Tewkesbury had parked herself next to where he was sitting and made an example of him. She cleared her throat and said, “Let’s all pay attention to the speaker. Be the kind of person you want your students to be.” Mr. Webb quietly closed the book and looked up at the speaker. A few other teachers followed suit. The older teachers kept at their tasks, pausing only long enough to smirk at how Mr. Webb got caught. They were within their rights: Mr. Webb would have been a smirker himself, there but for the grace of the First Baptist Church of Way Out in West Texas’ God.

But as Shelly Ann Tewkesbury walked away, Mr. Webb fired back with his bad back. He screwed his face up in deep pain and reached back to that lumbar region that is so faithless and inconstant, especially if it’s connected to a posterior that’s been stuck on a cafeteria seat for an hour. He gathered up his book and staggered deliberately out the door to the cafeteria. It wasn’t at his high school that year, so he couldn’t recuperate in his room. No matter, he had recourse to the men’s restroom, followed by a painful, grimaced easing into a plastic chair out in the foyer adjacent to the cafeteria.

Mrs. Steinway went out to check on Mr. Webb. “Are you all right?”

“Oh yeah, I’ll be fine. Thankfully, there’s a chair out here.”

“Well, thankfully, we can’t hear that unbearable presentation out here.”

“True, there’s that silver lining.” Mr. Webb grinned. “You can go back in there, if you want.”

“Not on your life, Webb. I’d sooner shoot myself. Where does she get off, preaching to us like that? This isn’t some homogeneous village out in the boonies. This is a district with a lot of diversity. You don’t get away with stuff like that. Who does she think she is?”

“Well, she’s our Supervisor of Secondary Social Studies Curriculum and Instruction. It’s her job to torment us. She just chose a religious theme, this year.”

Mrs. Steinway laughed. Then she straightened her face. “And where does she get off, embarrassing you like that in front of everyone? That’s not even good classroom discipline, let alone how you treat adults.” Mrs. Steinway was right about that. The US Army field manual was firm in its disapproval about public shaming like that. It either made people more regressive or more rebellious. The Chinese Army concurred: better to deal with the issue one-on-one, removed from the scene of the activity. How hard would it have been to tap Mr. Webb on the shoulder and then ask him to step outside for a word? Anyone with halfway decent classroom management skills or who had been a POW interrogator would know to do that. Clearly, Ms. Tewkesbury was neither of those types of people.

She didn’t last long in that role, either. After only two years, she was gone. She had been promoted one level higher, to Supervisor of District Social Studies Curriculum and Instruction.

And it wasn’t like all the administrators were clueless idiots. It just seemed to be a role in which clueless idiots could flourish, so long as they could create an environment of fear so that none would dare challenge them.

And so the staff development uselessness kept coming. There were years when the high school teachers were taught the difference between a hot dog fold and a hamburger fold and how to use that in making visual aids for their classes. There were years when everyone worked on document-based questions, even for courses that had no primary source documents in them.

There was one year when everyone was getting technology training on the PCs that would go into classrooms – which PCs lasted only 3 years before getting yanked. A presenter assured all the teachers there that the keyboards were kid-proof. Mr. Webb had to call BS on that claim. Within 10 seconds, he had used a pen cap as a lever to send the N key skyward.

What galled Mr. Webb the most was that the district made him apologize for the incident. That made it clear to him that some administrator had gotten a kickback on the hardware deal, and he didn’t want anyone to rock the boat by showing that the systems didn’t meet the criteria of being kid-proof. Kickbacks and shady deals were rife in administrative circles, particularly in the East Dallas CISD.

In the meantime, the teachers suffered through steaming piles of uselessness in those first four days. Over his 15 years of teaching, Mr. Webb had taken a personality inventory no less than six times. Starting with his second time, he decided to place in a different quadrant than his first time. Having succeeded with that, he got each of the other two quadrants on his third and fourth tries. For his fifth try, he totally nailed having his answers cancel each other out completely so that he had no discernable personality whatsoever, according to the test. The sixth testing was just depressing, since he’d already done as much as he could with it in the five previous tests. And so, being depressed and all, he answered the questions as depressingly as possible. The consultant running the session had him stand with the other “introverted” people and blithely ignored the gothic prose that went into Mr. Webb’s answers. Seriously, stuff like that would have gotten a kid sent to the counselor for a page folded into thirds with “Dealing with Depression” on the front. Another BS artist getting paid big bucks to sling sunshine to teachers…

The motivational speakers were depressing, too. They praised the teachers for their role in society, even though Mr. Webb knew that, statistically, at least one of his fellow-teachers was going engaging in sex with his or her students. Every year, one of them would be asked to leave and not come back. In return for that teacher not suing over wrongful dismissal, the district wouldn’t give the teacher a bad reference. That was known as passing the trash. Mr. Webb was always suspicious of teachers that had covered a lot of ground in their career. Rare was the teacher actually caught in the act and then criminally charged. This year, though, one of Teller’s own was in the county jail. He had been careful, though, and only had sex with students 17 and older. In Texas, that was a felony, but not a statutory rape charge. He had a good chance of just getting probation after a few years of going in and out of the courts. That was why Teller welcomed a new coach that year right before the training on appropriate behavior and relations with students.

That appropriate behavior class got dusted off every year a teacher actually got arrested in the district. If it was at another campus, the principal got to conduct the training. This year, the Teller teachers got to have a local policeman provide the staff development session. Honestly, it was so simple: always keep your door open if there’s one student in the room with you. Never ask for or accept physical contact, like back or neck rubs. Don’t party with your students. Simple enough rules to follow, but there were always teachers that taught for all the wrong reasons.

Team-building events worked at making teams, but usually because the teachers would identify a common enemy in the form of the consultant presenting the team-building exercise. At least the consultants were slick in their presentations: when budgets were tight, the central office staff had to do the presentations, and they were awkward, at best. They nevertheless succeeded, since it was quite easy to identify them as common enemies, as well.

Classroom discipline refresher courses were actually fun if they led to some role-playing. Mr. Webb really liked to test the mettle of a presenter by getting completely into character. Most of the time, presenters would have the teachers portray minor misbehaviors, but one year, a presenter painted himself into a corner. “OK, I need someone to be really angry and rebellious. Any volunteers? OK, Mr. Webb, why don’t you step up.”

Yeah, that led to another apology, but he had it coming with his “student whisperer” attitude. There are times where you just drop the discussion and write the kid up, then call the office to let them know he’s on his way up so that if he takes to wandering the halls, he gets further discipline for that. And it wasn’t like Mr. Webb was being unrealistic. He was only drawing on his past experience with a particularly angry and rebellious young man. If the presenter didn’t want a ten thousand-mile stare and a cold, hard, “I will kill you and your entire family”, he shouldn’t have asked for angry and rebellious.

As it was, he shouldn’t have started crying. In real life, Mr. Webb had handled that situation by making crazy eyes of his own and then saying, “You kill me, and I will go mad dog all up one side and down the other on you. You do not know what I’m capable of when I’m dead.”

“When you’re dead, you’re dead. What are you talking about?”

“What, you think you’re so smart, you know what happens after I’m dead? If I’m alive, I keep my limits, but when I’m dead, it’s on!”

A few more minutes of that, and the kid had nothing left to say. Mr. Webb kept the crazy eyes for ten seconds more, then went totally normal and said, “OK, back to the Spanish-American War.” The class laughed when the tension receded, the kid skipped the next two days, then came back and apologized for being out of line. Mr. Webb gave him some make-up work and everything was smooth for the rest of the semester. Kid got a C+ and got along great with Mr. Webb.

But instead of being able to do something useful, teachers had to sit through useless staff development courses that were state-mandated by politicians in the back pockets of educational consulting companies. The politicians were also in the back pockets of the state tourism industry, which had successfully gotten legislation passed to push forward the school start date so that teenagers would be able to work more days during the tourist season. Educational law was full of little nuggets like that.

And, say, how long was it going to take to get some books around here? Mr. Webb noticed that the book room guy didn’t have any helpers this year, so it was just him and the teacher getting the books. Already, the people that had signed up for the next half hour after lunch were queueing up with their library surplus book carts.

Finally, Mr. Webb got his turn to go into the book room to see if he had enough books for every student, or if there were only enough for a class set. Fearlessly, he made his way to the back shelves, where the Economics books were kept.

As Mr. Webb scrolled through the list of the Texas standards for Economics and Government, he had no words to describe his feelings when he saw every reference to “democracy” replaced with “Republican form of government.” He flipped over to the US History standards: strike-throughs permeated the Progressives and FDR’s presidency, with emphasis instead placed on the achievements of Republican presidents that were more business-friendly. Back to Economics, the standards there practically screamed out a jihad to exterminate North Korea and Cuba, the last holdouts of Communism.

It didn’t take Mr. Webb long to realize that the Republican-controlled government had gerrymandered not only the state representative boundaries, but the very curriculum itself. Anything that started with “democra” was gone, to be replaced by words that started with “republica”. What was their game, to have kids vote Republican always because they thought Democrats were a bunch of Commies? Or because they didn’t know any other alternative existed? Mr. Webb pondered long and hard on the implications of democracy’s descent down the memory hole.

Mr. Webb voted, but never for any party that had a chance of winning. He voted to have the right to complain, but always kept open his ability to say “Hey, I didn’t vote for the guy!” when complaining about whoever got into office. Both parties seemed to be completely dominated by special interests, at least that’s what he had gathered after teaching social studies as long as he had. That’s why he felt he couldn’t teach AP Government anymore. It was all about theory, not practice.

Obama being in the White House hadn’t helped to halt the erosion on the Bill of Rights that had started back under Nixon. Republicans trampled on every amendment but the second. Democrats were more even-handed in their amendment-trampling. That meant the exercise of reading through the Constitution at the start of every Government class got to be really depressing when it came to the amendments. Not that the first parts didn’t have their moments: the parts where the Founding Fathers bent over backwards to accommodate slavery always led to some gritty discussions.

Mr. Webb would read out the Constitutional passage from Article 1, Section 9 in an even tone: “The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.”

Then he’d ask, “OK, so what does that mean?”

At that point, the students would squint at the overhead projection of Mr. Webb’s computer screen. In his first year, he would write stuff on the board or make handouts, but he got penalized on his annual assessment for not using technology. Starting in his second year, he put the same information on a computer screen, projected on a wall. That got him high marks for using technology.

As the students squinted, one would say, “Is this about illegal immigration?”

Mr. Webb said, “No. We don’t import immigrants.”

Then a kid would key in on the word import. “Slavery. It’s about slavery, right?”

“There you go. It’s about slavery. And it says what?”

“That… uh… hey! They could import slaves until 1808!”

“That’s correct. Now, do you know why the year 1808 was chosen? I mean, they discussed that number. They didn’t just pull it out of the air.”

Shrugs. Mr. Webb didn’t ask the question for an answer so much as he asked it to prime the class for the severity of the answer he was about to provide. “1808 was seen as a year that, by which, the domestic breeding of slaves would be able to cover our needs for slaves, given their mortality rates, so that we wouldn’t be dependent on importing them from Africa.”

“So why is that in there?”

“It was there to sell the Constitution in the slave states. They took that as a guarantee that slavery would be preserved for as long as they wanted it to be part of the US economy. Six of the thirteen states were slave states. No way to have a union of all the states without them.”

“So they had to keep the slaves.”

“That’s correct. As it was, the slave trade continued. US ships would run the British blockade of the west coast of Africa when that started in 1807. Although US warships joined the blockade in 1808, there were still US businessmen importing African slaves into the USA. There was a lot of money to be made in that trade, even if two-thirds of all the slaves on a ship died in transit and the ship itself became so befouled with human waste that it wouldn’t last more than a few trips, sometimes only one.”

“Wait, Mr. Webb… human waste?”

“Remember your US History class, where they showed the layout of a slave ship, with all those slaves chained down like sardines? They didn’t really explore the consequences of such an arrangement, but if you got a guy chained down to a deck and put food in one end, there’s not a lot of leeway for him in where he goes to dispose of his waste.”

“Ewwwww!”

Yes, that was pretty nasty stuff, but it was also part of the reality of the slave trade, which was a major portion of US History. Acting like the slaves were somehow magically transported to the USA where kindly old masters gave them better conditions that existed back in Africa was insulting and patently false. Families were ripped apart, children murdered, women raped, everyone worked nearly to death… Mr. Webb saw no reason to try and teach a sanitized version of events. The ugly had to be known so that it repulsed and caused people to turn away from that sort of thing.

Even if it wasn’t on the TEKS. Mr. Webb saw it as a necessary supplemental enrichment activity.

As was information on that post-1808 slave trade. “Guys like Jean Lafitte and Jim Bowie were part of the slave trade after 1808. They would bring a ship into harbor, the local sheriff would confiscate the slaves – they were illegal, remember – and then auction them off as police contraband. The traders would then re-purchase their cargoes in auction.”

“Wait, so that meant the auction was a pay-off to the local cops!” Mr. Webb loved it when the light bulbs went on in his students’ heads. Discussions like these tended to keep all but the most die-hard potheads awake and involved.

“You got it. That sort of thing happens a lot in politics, so keep your eyes peeled for shady deals as we go forward in the course.”

Then came the skeptic. Mr. Webb loved it when these kids asked questions, because it helped the bigger picture unfold. “You said Jim Bowie was a slave trader, right? This was a guy that fought for freedom at the Alamo.”

“That’s right. Not necessarily the freedom of his slaves. The South in the Civil War said it was fighting for freedom, as well. Mythology makes everything black and white. History reveals just how gray things are. Consider the story of Andrew Johnson, who was our 17th president, right after Lincoln. OK, he had two slaves before the Civil War started. They were domestic and ran a shop in town. When Tennessee seceded from the USA – which it did only after the Northern states attacked the Southern ones – Johnson refused to leave the Senate. He stayed loyal to the USA, so the state of Tennessee confiscated his slaves and put them in prison. Both of Johnson’s slaves escaped, though.”

“And they made it to freedom?”

“No, they made it to Washington, DC, where they returned to service as Johnson’s slaves. They escaped prison so that they could be slaves. Yeah, that still makes my head spin. It gets twistier, too. In the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln only freed the slaves where the Union was not in control.”

At this point, Mr. Webb would bring up the text of the Emancipation Proclamation and, sure enough, Tennessee – which was in Union hands – and all the Union-occupied counties of Confederate states were left out of its range. The language was very specific.

“OK, so Johnson became the governor of Tennessee after the Union took it over and he actually freed the slaves in that state in 1864. Lincoln did not free the slaves of Tennessee: Johnson did.”

As the students’ brains twisted in the wind, Mr. Webb would continue: “After the Civil War, Lincoln said that there should be a moderate re-integration of the Confederacy. Malice toward none and so on. This was totally contrary to the wishes of the Radical Republicans, who wanted to completely re-forge the South. Lincoln was shot in April, 1865, so he wasn’t around during Reconstruction. Johnson was, though. And Johnson wanted lighter treatment for the South, along Lincoln’s lines. He got impeached because of his opposition to Congress’ plans. I speculate that, had Lincoln not been shot, he would have been the first president to endure impeachment or, at the very least, would have had a miserable time with Congress and would not be as well thought of as he is today.”

“Well, at least he got the 13th Amendment passed.”

“Yes, he did, but read it carefully.” Mr. Webb went back to the 13th Amendment and read it out. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Then he asked, “Does this totally get rid of slavery?”

“Except as a punishment for crime.”

“Right. So, after the Civil War, lots of free blacks went north to start over in a different state. Illinois and Indiana had laws against vagrancy. So, when the blacks showed up without jobs, they got picked up on a vagrancy charge. Can you guess what the punishment for vagrancy was?”

“Oh no.”

“That’s right. One year of slavery. They would be auctioned off at the courthouse to local businessmen. After the Civil War, Illinois and Indiana became the two states with the largest slave population.”

At this point, the bell would usually be about to ring, so Mr. Webb would display pictures of baby animals to soften the cruel blows of history so the kids could contemplate something beautiful and not be overly burdened with the baggage of the past. Sometimes, students would ask for the kitten and puppy pictures early in class if the discussions got particularly depressing, which happened more often than not.

While the above was fine in a regular Government class, the AP Government test never asked any questions about the grittier side of politics. It focused on how things should run and maybe allowed a brief consideration of this excess or that one, but never to the point of saying that the system was broken or perverted. Philosophically, Mr. Webb couldn’t agree with that view. That made it very difficult for him to feel comfortable with teaching an AP Government class.

The class also had the lowest percentage of students getting a top score, a 5, of all the AP exams. Given that the district was starting to pressure AP teachers to get more passing scores, it kind of made good career sense to jettison that course, so as not to be targeted for not improving one’s passing percentage.

Not that there was that much benefit to a student for passing an AP Government exam. Heck, most AP exams no longer got a student out of a college class. Many schools wouldn’t take anything less than a 5. In Texas, even a 5 on AP Government wasn’t good enough for credit unless the student sat for a test on Texas government. And even then, as with most other tests, the high-scoring student would be given a pass on the intro course, but would still have to take a higher-level class in that subject to satisfy degree requirements. Gone were the days when a kid could place out of his college freshman year with AP exams. The colleges wanted their money, and they were going to make every kid take at least four full years, come hell or high water.

Leaving behind the AP Government test wasn’t all that hard to do for Mr. Webb. But now, seeing how the Republican-held Ministry of Truth had purged references to any opposition from the TEKS, Mr. Webb wondered how long it would be before he’d have to leave behind teaching in general, before his opinions got him fired. He wasn’t worried as much about what parents had to say as he worried about what multi-syllabled administrators would have to say.

At least he was teaching Economics, which was a class nobody cared about. The test for all the money was in the 11th grade. Kids in the 12th had either passed it or failed it and counted against the school. Nothing they could do would change that. While the school would pull out all the stops for 10th graders that looked set to fail the 11th grade test, those that failed got a list of re-take dates and a workbook to help them review. While 10th graders “on the bubble” got all manner of drills, Saturday school sessions, and careful attentions, the kids that actually failed had to find their own tutors if they wanted to pass and get a full diploma.

Mr. Webb didn’t like the way the system made a group of kids disposable, so he’d volunteer to tutor his seniors that needed help for the state tests. He didn’t volunteer with the front office or the admin building: they’d never announce it and might instead try to convince him to spend time with those 10th grade kids that might be set to fail. Mr. Webb just let it be known in his classes that he had 6th period off, and if the seniors didn’t have a 6th period class, they could come on by and get some help.

“There’s always hope in Mr. Webb’s room!” was his motto.

Although, looking at what was left of the TEKS after the Republicans had had a go with it, Mr. Webb wondered how he’d have hope for himself. When he added the purge of Democrats to the instruction to teach about the Holocaust “without bias”, his blood went cold.

Thankfully, the picture of three cats with noodle cups on their heads like hats reminded Mr. Webb that, yes, hope remained in his room. The picture of the otters holding hands didn’t hurt, either.

Mr. Webb then noticed the time: he only had 3 minutes left before his appointment at the book room. He had to move, and move fast if he wanted to have enough books on the first day. Mr. Webb grabbed the library surplus book cart and took off down the hall to the elevator.

Mr. Webb’s thoughts about how to keep his fifth period from turning into a zombie apocalypse had to wait. Reeve Powell popped in. Mr. Powell taught US History, and had been a friend of Mr. Webb’s from the start of Mr. Webb’s years at Teller. He had been in the hall when Mrs. Martinet threw her fit over the desks and loved it. Mr. Powell didn’t agree with all of Mr. Webb’s choices in decor, but Teller was a big enough school to afford every teacher enough space to do their own thing.

“Hey Dean, I have a question. Do you have a minute?”

“Sure, Reeve, what’s up?” Mr. Webb turned down his music. Mid-seventies Hungarian hard rock wasn’t always conducive to conversation.

“I was looking for more decorations for my room, Chinese lanterns in particular, and I thought you might know where to find them.”

“Indeed I do. Canton Supermarket at the corner of Elm and Audie Murphy.”

“That’s a Chinese market, right?”

“Chinese and Vietnamese, yes. They should have it. It’s where I got my Chinese Chess set.”

“Huh. Would you mind coming along with me to help me find my way around there?”

“Sure, I’d be happy to. Let’s go get some Chinese lanterns.”

Mr. Webb locked up his room and rode with Mr. Powell to Canton Supermarket. It was one of the centers of the Asian community at Teller, and it wasn’t unusual to bump into current or former students shopping or working there. They always got a little excited to see one of their teachers shopping there.

The place smelled just like China, just with less tobacco smoke and coal dust. Both Mr. Webb and Mr. Powell had been to China and the aromatic blend was unmistakeable. “Wow, it’s like a market in Beijing!” said Mr. Powell.

“Yeah, that was my first thought when I shopped here after I got back from China. I love it.”

“What do you buy here?”

“There are some great coconut-milk covered peanuts I like to snack on. Also the candied anchovies.”

“What? No, wait, never mind. I don’t want to know.” Mr. Powell had his limits. Anyone else could be making up candied anchovies, but if Mr. Webb mentioned them, they were probably for real.

“If you like fish, they’re absolutely great. High in calcium.”

Mr. Powell laughed. “Stop! I don’t want to know! I like fish uncandied, thank you very much. Where are those lanterns?”

Mr. Webb pointed to the left, where the medicines and cigarettes were for sale. Above the counter, near the Buddha statues, hung a few Chinese lanterns.

“Those are perfect!” Mr. Powell walked up to the counter and asked what the meaning of the characters on the lanterns were. He bought a double-luck and a peace lantern.

Mr. Powell and Mr. Webb got along well together. One of those reasons was the aforementioned common cause against Mrs. Martinet. Another was that they didn’t think a demographic shift was a negative thing. It was an excuse to learn more things and to branch out in one’s decorative touches. Mr. Powell liked to hang things from his ceiling and Mr. Webb liked to hang Bollywood movie posters alongside the maps and comic ads. When a kid showed up fresh from Karachi or Guangzhou, they really lit up when they saw a bit of homeland familiarity.

“Mr. Webb, you watch the Bollywood films?”

“Ha, ha, ji ha.” And then Mr. Webb would sing, “Yeh dosti / Hum nahin torenge…”

“Hahaha, you’re a funny man.”

“Well, if you have B lunch, I show Bollywood in my class. We’re just starting “Kal Ho Naa Ho” just now.”

“Oh, that’s one of my favorite Shahrukh films! Can I bring my friends?”

“Yes, and if you want to bring in food, I can get you a pass to my room from the cafeteria. Just promise to keep it clean and to throw your trash away in the cafeteria so my room won’t stink.”

“Of course. I will see you for the B lunch.”

“Chalte chalte. Phir milenge.”

Bollywood brought in just about everyone from a nation that bordered the Indian Ocean or Russia. Persians and Afghans liked the films, too, since Hindi was fairly close to their languages. Those students were the fans that knew the films. Other kids would come in out of curiosity. Once they got past the fact that they had to read the movie, they got sucked into the filmi drama that played for 25 minutes every day in Mr. Webb’s class. A typical Bollywood masala love story would run for 6 days that way, invariably with a cliff-hanger every time the lunch bell rang. They were a great escape.

Since the only rooms next to Mr. Webb’s were the cafeteria and the in-school suspension class, he played the sound loud enough to be heard properly, like a film should be enjoyed. He had 100 watts of speakers playing the songs and dialogue with high fidelity. Nobody in the cafeteria could hear, people walking by would look through the window and wonder what was going on and the kids in ISS, well…

The ISS teacher was fine with the noise. It kept his mind from going funny because of the quiet. Kids trying to sleep got blown out of their golden slumbers every time a shrill soprano falsetto rang out in a song. Kids in ISS that spoke Hindi got a 25-minute break from the boredom.

There were other times when Mr. Webb blasted out his music during passing periods. Kids loved that. They’d smile, they’d dance, they’d move along a little happier. It made their day, having music to walk to. The ISS kids got pretty much just the bass parts. Mr. Webb’s room acted as a massive bass chamber, driving the sound into the room next door through the ceiling and floor. He had tested it before and knew just how it sounded in there. Sometimes, Mr. Webb would put on the sound of a beating heart, full blast, just to mess with the kids in ISS. Again, the teacher there was totally cool with that, even if his charges weren’t always thrilled to hear weird sound effects.

Of course, Mr. Webb would mention to his students that forcing people to stay in a confined space, depriving them of communication with others, and requiring them to all do repetitive or pointless work – like copying pages of a dictionary – were all straight out of the military interrogator’s bag of tricks. Were they torture? Not as such. They didn’t scar anyone for life. They just were an application of moderate mental pressure.

Once, a Palestinian kid said, “Moderate mental pressure? That’s what the Israelis said they used when they imprisoned my uncle for three years.”

“Well, rest assured I don’t go as far as the IDF. I have my detentions, but that’s as far as I go. It’s not like I’m going to start hanging 100-watt bulbs just six inches above a guy’s head because he racked up too many tardies.”

They talked about the differences between school and an Israeli prison camp for a while, and then got back to the lesson. Mr. Webb played a little Oum Kalthoum after that, and the Palestinian kid laughed. “Man, that’s old people music. It’s good, but it’s old people music.”

“Well, I’m old people. In’sh Allah, I’ll get older still.”

“In’sh Allah, you’ll get older, Mr. Webb.”

Someone else asked, “Jeez, how many languages do you know?”

“I can start a bar fight in 20 languages.”

“You speak 20 languages fluently?”

“No. I can start a bar fight in 20 languages. I’m reasonably conversational in, uh…” Mr. Webb always had to count. “English, German, Spanish, French, Russian, Hindi and Urdu, they kinda count as one -“, nods from the South Asian students confirmed that assessment, “- and Italian. Two years of Latin in high school and ten years of watching Bollywood really helped out. So that’s seven.”

“So you know, like cuss words and stuff in 13 other languages?”

“You’re such a whiz at math, kid. Time to get back to work.” And back to work the went, as the violins and udd and tablas and tambourines played on, as Oum Kalthoum sang words that stirred the hearts of grandfathers and grandmothers.

Teller High was a multicultural place, for sure. And that’s why Mr. Powell wanted to pick up a few Chinese lanterns.

As they drove back to Teller, Mr. Powell asked, “Have you seen the new TEKS for this year and the district guidelines on how we’re supposed to teach them?”

“No. Not really. They’re different?”

Mr. Powell laughed in a way that indicated, yes, they were most assuredly different and not in a good way.

“Huh. And there’s something about how we’re supposed to teach them?”

“Check your email when we get back. Marlene sent it out this morning.”

Marlene Holroyd was the district’s Supervisor of Secondary Social Studies Curriculum and Instruction. With that many syllables, her job was always in danger whenever budgets were tight. Every district had to have a superintendent, every school needed a principal, and nobody wanted to fire teachers. But the people with too many syllables in the central administration office? They’d been running scared ever since Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers went down.

Mr. Webb suspected that the decline in the quality of his job was directly correlated to the fear-driven directives that started to flow from central admin since 2007-08. Before the bubble burst, teachers were free to innovate. They were free to use their own professional judgment in running their classes. They had to get good scores on the TAKS tests, yes, but they were free to figure out how best to get their kids to pass the state-mandated assessments.

After the crash, property values dropped, and with those, annual property tax revenues. Budgets got tight all over the state, waves of teachers from California came through the state, desperate even for substitute jobs, and talk of layoffs and cutbacks made its way through faculty lounges all over the district.

Mr. Webb didn’t think the central admin’s reaction was entirely conscious and planned-out. It was ad-hoc, and it was born of an unconscious fear. How could a central staffer prove that he was still useful? The simplest way was to start a witch hunt. They made themselves as indispensable as possible, promising to keep scores high, to increase them where possible, and to root out the teachers that weren’t meeting their quotas of delivering passing scores on those state tests. Cut the central office staff? OK, if you want to see those scores plummet and the district go into state receivership…

So the central office staff kept their jobs and the class sizes grew. The central office staff kept their jobs and the teachers didn’t even get a raise that kept up with inflation. Mr. Webb didn’t like the way that teachers would be blamed for and punished for problems that weren’t entirely under their control – that was one of the more mind-bending forms of Chinese prison camp treatment – but he had a hardened mind, thanks to his enduring his own detention music over the years.

Today’s email was likely another turn of that central office screw. Mr. Powell started to share his concerns about it. “I’m supposed to teach about Nazis and the Holocaust this year.”

“Well, you always do that. Field trip to the Holocaust museum, right?”

“Not this year.”

“No budget?”

“No permission.”

“Huh?”

Mr. Powell’s voice took on a mocking, administrative tone. “We’re supposed to teach about the Nazis and the Holocaust without any bias.”

“What? If there’s anything there should be a bias about, there should be one of us standing at the front of the room, saying that murdering millions of people is wrong, flat-out wrong.”

“I know. These kids get idiotic ideas from who knows where, and we need to be able to at least tell them what’s what about being a decent human being.”

“No bias… I just can’t believe it… And that’s not the only change, I take it?”

“Oh ho ho ho ho ho noooooo. It is not the only change. I don’t even get to mention the Progressive movement.”

“Huh? That’s a pretty major part of the second half of US History.”

“Check your new TEKS and Marlene’s email. You’ll go out of your mind, it’s so idiotic.”

When Mr. Webb got back to his room and his email, he found the message from Marlene. Mr. Powell was right. Mr. Webb went out of his mind, it was so idiotic.

Mr. Webb logged into the gradebook program and took a look at his class rolls. Seeing familiar names was good if they belonged to students he’d taught as freshmen that were now seniors. All the terrors usually dropped out, leaving the good ones – or the ones that had matured – behind. Familiar names were bad if they belonged to kids whose names he learned in the course of enforcing discipline in the hallways. Well, if it was for tardies, it wasn’t that bad.

But if it was for when Mr. Webb asked, “May I please see your ID, sir?” and the kid either refused or said nothing, yeah, that was bad. Even worse were the kids that Mr. Webb knew by their ID number because he memorized it from writing it on referral forms so many times. Mr. Webb could also memorize the numbers from the frequent tardies: he had 089365 in his summer school economics class, and it was a blast. He called him 089 for short.

But all the familiar names and numbers were the good guys. That was fantastic, as it meant they knew how things rolled in Mr. Webb’s class. They could mentor others on how things went, how to keep Mr. Webb from going ballistic, and what kinds of donuts he liked, should they feel inclined to bring donuts for the class. They were kind of like his own cadre of drill sergeants. In return for their service, they were automatically pre-approved to sit on the thrones or the sofas.

Second period looked fine, only 21 people in that class. Any number under 25 was good, in spite of what certain think tanks that tried to justify massive student:teacher ratios so that administrative salaries wouldn’t have to be cut in hard times had to say. Mr. Webb liked to point out that the same guys in the state house that voted for education cuts also insisted that there be no fewer than one adult per 10 children for groups touring the capitol building. The student:teacher ratio sure mattered when it was in their backyard.

25-30 kids in a class was tolerable, but over 30, and things got rowdy just about every day. 10% of everyone in a class was a born troublemaker, and another 20% were born followers of born troublemakers. In a class of 20, the two born troublemakers were easy to keep at a low simmer so that they didn’t start an uprising. In a class of 20, those troublemakers had better than even chances of emerging as class wits. In a class of 30, in the time it took to calm the first two troublemakers, the third would get started, and that would get the followers to join in. Calming that uprising got the other two a window of opportunity to get wound up, and the game of disciplinary whack-a-mole would be well underway.

And 40 in a class? Forget about it. Classes that big, usually full of freshmen, had to start out in a state of war. Those were the classes where Mr. Webb let the line between school and North Korean prison camp blur. Mr. Webb read US Army field manuals on interrogation from before 1967 – the ones that had sections that detailed what, exactly, constituted torture – as well as the Air Force report about how US pilots were treated by the Chinese Army when they were captured.

What was amazing to Mr. Webb was how so much of what constituted torture under the Geneva Conventions was considered to be proper classroom disciplinary technique. He was looking for tips, and wound up getting a refresher course. There were mental conditions described as regression, when the captive started to say and do anything that he thought would please his captor. To an interrogator, such persons were useless, as they would lie if they didn’t know an answer, just to show their captors how willing they were to cooperate. In schools, those types weren’t labeled as regressive. They often got called “top ten graduates.”

Mr. Webb liked kids that cooperated, but not if they lost their imagination in the process. That’s why he paid careful attention to the parts about how to avoid regression. Apply moderate mental pressure, and then let up, that’s what the field manual recommended. It was right. Mr. Webb had a formula for detention that involved torture music. It would be 29 minutes of a tune he called “Revolutionary Atonal Hawaiian Cage Match” followed by one minute of Wesley Willis’ “Rock and Roll McDonald’s.”

“Revolutionary Atonal Hawaiian Cage Match” was the blunt instrument that would be applied to the miscreant’s minds. It was an asynchronous looping of several songs that had no business being played together. It combined the randomness of John Cage’s “Music of Changes” (totally random piano notes), The Beatles’ “Revolution Number Nine”, the skin-crawling creepiness of Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Requiem for Soprano”, and the chorus from Don Ho’s “Tiny Bubbles.” It was Don Ho’s repetition that sealed the deal and made the tune sound like it was going on forever. Mr. Webb had no clocks in the room – a Chinese Army touch – so that there was no way to know how long the detention had gone.

When “Rock and Roll McDonald’s” came on, a wave of relief rolled over Mr. Webb and the detention attendees. Mr. Webb asked them not to do whatever they did to get a detention again, and the students promised to never do those things, ever, not even for other teachers. It had a great success rate. Even better, if someone was acting goofy the next day, Mr. Webb would ask, “Do you want to get a detention?”

The young swain would invariably offer up some defiant bluster like, “Maybe” or “So?”

Then the people that had gone through detention would tell the goofball words of advice like, “No, you don’t want it” or “You best sit down”. Or they would have a few involuntary muscle spasms at the mention of the word “detention.” Deprived of an audience and becalmed by the peers, the young person would mend his ways and get back to business. No shouting, no screaming, just moderate mental pressure.

If a student refused to go to detention, Mr. Webb liked to point out that it was obvious that he was a creative person and that he would think of something that would get the student back in line. He’d read “1984.” He knew everyone had a Room 101. Usually the thugs that refused detention had an Achilles’ Heel. Mr. Webb would build up to that. He’d take the guy out into the hall for a conversation, so that there wouldn’t be any audience to make him feel like he had to stand up to authority.

“So you skipped detention. What say I have you go to the office?”

“Whatever. They’d just give me a school detention.” Those were three hours long, but were infinitely more bearable than 30 minutes of Mr. Webb’s “music.”

“Huh. Maybe I should call your parents?”

“Like they’ll tell me what to do.” True. If the kid actually respected his parents, this wouldn’t even have been mentioned.

Mr. Webb would pause, pretend to study the tough guy, and then utter, slow and low-down, “Or maybe, just maybe, I should call your probation officer. Or parole officer, whichever.”

That brought out the fear in the face. “Hey, man, not cool.”

“I get the numbers from the school resource police officer. You got conditions on your release, and I plan to have a conversation with the guy and tell him the truth.”

“Hey, I’ll be good. There’s no need for that.”

“No, there is a need. I’m scheduling a call with him, every two weeks. It’s in your hands, what kind of truth I tell him.”

“OK, mister. I’m sorry.” The sincerity really came through right about now. The kid would either get his act together or skip out. Either way, not a problem in the classroom.

Following up on skippers was required, but rarely got them back into class. Usually, the kid would drop out.

Of course, hardly any school in Texas had a dropout rate over the state maximum allowed, even though, statewide, any given class of freshmen would be much smaller by the time it reached senior year. That was because public schools would have students withdraw and enroll at a charter school that was exempt from penalties for high dropout rates. They used to be able to exploit that loophole with just signing a kid up for home schooling, but the state closed that off back in 2005, probably to boost the amount of state money going to the governor’s pet project of charter schools.

So, yeah… good class size second period… all the regular Economics classes looked good, in fact. Biggest was 27, not too bad. But the AP classes… Only 12 in first semester AP Economics and just 9 second semester? What happened? Usually, Mr. Webb could count on 20-plus in each AP section, and three sections of AP, no less. This enrollment was lower than a third of what he expected. Whoever was in charge –

– probably had a scheduling conflict. Mr. Webb looked back at his biggest class, and there was the story. A lot of bright kids in there, all of them in band. He clicked on a student to see his schedule. Yep. The top band class was right through one section of AP Eco and both AP Physics and AP Biology had killed off 4th period. Kids had to make some tough choices, and, ironically, the class about the study of choices had lost out.

Well, maybe Mr. Webb could just ramp things up in that one class and make it more challenging. Then he noticed one more group in that 5th period class besides the band contingent: four inclusion students.

It was wonderful the way the state decided that a standard class should include students that covered two standard deviations above and below average intelligence and then mandated that everyone pass or the school would fall under severe punishments. Translation: if a person shows up sober in a standard class, pass him. If a person just shows up at all in summer school, pass him. Once upon a time, there were more levels of classes to allow for targeting different ability levels. Now, everyone either got lumped into dumbed-down general population classes or they could have their brains fried to a crisp in AP classes. And it looked like these high-fliers that prized Band, Physics, and Biology over Economics were about to be doing a lot of vocabulary words and questions from the end of the chapter. Notebook checks, even. Level playing field, nothing, they were going to have a leveled playing field. As in scorched earth.

That really ticked off Mr. Webb, because one of the reasons he’d gone into teaching in the first place was to be the kind of teacher that could give a challenge to a student that was bored out of his skull with the standard curriculum. No, there had to be a way to reach those guys without delivering a mental KO to the kids that were barely at a 6th grade reading level. There had to be a way.

Mr. Webb had a great gig. It was the start of his eleventh year as an Economics teacher at Edward Teller High School in Garson, Texas. Garson was one of those infinite suburbs north of Dallas, Texas that always did its best to vote for as many Republicans as possible. The kids were all right in Mr. Webb’s opinion, but other teachers complained about “the demographical change” that had happened in the years between now and 27 years ago, when Mr. Webb was a senior named Dean Webb at Teller.

When the demographics started to change after the S&L collapse of the early 90s, the nearly all-white student body of Teller took on more and more color each year. Some teachers couldn’t stand that. Frau Hassenfleisch, the German teacher, had a great suggestion: just fail all the Mexicans and Blacks so they’d drop out and transfer to “their” schools. Mr. Webb winced when he heard that story in the faculty lounge. Of all the teachers to be unreconstructed racists, it had to be the German teacher.

“Oh, it got worse!” said kindly old Mrs. Smiley. “Mr. Stein told her she was crazy to even suggest that and then she jabbed a finger right up in his face and said, ‘And we should have shoved you all into the ovens when we had the chance!’ We were so glad when she left after winter break.”

“Mr. Stein? The Math teacher? The guy that never hurt a fly?” Mr. Stein was famous for his lectures on how roaches and flies “were God’s creatures, too.”

“Good old Mr. Stein, that’s right.” Mrs. Smiley nodded and frowned. “Poor guy lost two uncles back in Germany in the Holocaust, and she had the gall to try and put him there, too. Just awful.”

But Mr. Webb wasn’t worried about shifts in demographics. He had grown up watching Sesame Street, so he didn’t care if his students were covered in blue Muppet fur. He did care if they were freshmen. He had been at Teller for eleven years, and the years he had freshmen in a Geography class were, hands down, his most stressful ones. This year had a certain sweetness to it: all his classes were senior Economics. He didn’t care what diversity he had in his classes as long as they were properly segregated by age.

His classroom really lent itself to the senior scene. When he got a room all his own in his second year at Teller, he had chucked out all his desks and replaced them with tables and chairs that were being tossed out of the library during its remodeling. That had led to a scene when the lady that used to have that classroom tried to order him to keep the desks in his room.

“Those desks are brand new! You can’t just put them out in the hall!” Mrs. Martinet was hysterical, as if Mr. Webb was putting her mom on the street.

Mr. Webb stayed calm as the football team members moved the furniture around. They laughed a little as they overheard the exchange. “It’s my room. I prefer tables and chairs. It’s more collegiate.”

“They look like junk!”

“They were good enough for our library. It’s a sin to waste them.”

“It’s a sin to waste the new desks! There are rooms with crappy old desks and you’re just putting these out! They’ll go back to the warehouse and nobody will use them!” Mrs. Martinet was turning purple. The jocks’ quiet laughter probably had something to do with it. She hated children. She only taught because the salary was basically money for jewelry and handbags – her husband more than covered all her other bills – and there was a lot to be said for the 80-day weekend teachers got every summer.

Mr. Webb liked the big vacation, too, but he was in teaching for the kids. That’s why he had tossed the desks. He didn’t want his room to be any more like a jail than it had to be. It was bad enough that bells decided when conversations should stop and start, privileges could be revoked on a whim, and going to the bathroom required a security clearance. He didn’t need to add regimented, uncomfortable chairs with plywood bolted on to remind the kids of their institutionalized status.

He also liked to cover his walls from top to bottom with maps and posters from comic book stores. As Mrs. Martinet tried to get between a linebacker and a shiny new desk, she lashed out against the decor. “This place looks like a dump! It looks like some kind of deranged head shop!”

“Hey, I don’t have any glassware!” A cornerback lost it on that one. He laughed so hard, he dropped the desk he was schlepping and scuffed it on the floor.

“Oh my God, do you know how much that costs? I’m getting the assistant principal up here! This is unacceptable!” She stormed out.

Mr. Webb called out after her, “Hey, we could swap out the new desks with the crappy old ones and send the old ones back to the warehouse. That’s a win-win.”

The assistant principal ruled in Mr. Webb’s favor and Mrs. Martinet had to continue her process of losing it somewhere else. Over the years, Mr. Webb had acquired more chairs, tables, sofas, and even a beanbag so his room was the most comfortable in the building. If chairs lost their legs but were otherwise serviceable, he’d set them on a back shelf where computers were supposed to be installed, but had been removed when the district decided that it wanted to “go wireless”. The three big, legless chairs along the back shelf were fondly known as “the thrones.” Kids that sat in them had a commanding view of the whole room, so Mr. Webb tried to reserve those for the students that were least likely to abuse such a vantage point.

To be sure, chairs that old and vintage had more than a little dust in them. Basically, it was best to just sit on the furniture and not ask too many questions. They were much more comfortable if one didn’t think about how many years of dead skin cells were in that dust that would arise and hover over the chairs for a few seconds every time they got a hard thump. At least the tables got wiped down with bleach every week, so those were mostly sanitary.

The two microwaves and the full-size refrigerator were also pretty clean, so students liked to warm up their lunches in his room. That was cool with Mr. Webb, so long as they didn’t interrupt his daily Bollywood showings at lunch. Lots of kids enjoyed having their Bollywood a half-hour at a time, and Mr. Webb had picked up a pretty decent command of Hindi and Urdu over the years. If there was a movie title or a song lyric that could convey his meaning, Mr. Webb could keep a conversation going.

The 2012-13 school year was just about to start, and Mr. Webb was ready for it. He had a sweet gig and looked forward to the day before classes started, when he got his roll sheets and could begin to get ready for the first day. This year, though, when he got his roll sheets, he couldn’t believe what he saw.