Celebrating the Fourth of July at Liberty Bridge Academy. 2011.
I cast my lot with an eccentric band of educators and students in Woodbridge, Virginia, several years ago. It was my daughter Madelaine's idea. She was on the board of directors for a private school called the Liberty Bridge Academy. They needed teachers; I needed a job. At the time I didn't own a car, and so found it hard to get back on the road with the circus. Since I had just come home from teaching English in Thailand, Madel convinced me that a career in education was the next logical step in my somewhat mildewed career. I decided to believe her, so she scheduled an appointment for me with the Principal of the school, Elaine.
I passed my interview with colors flying gloriously aloft, mainly because I was willing to take the job for room and board, with a stipend of one hundred bucks per month to keep me in shirt pocket protectors.
I boarded with the Trubnakovs. Their son Alex was enrolled at the Academy, and since they were feeding me and giving me a cozy little bedroom of my own, they were not charged any tuition. In fact, as the school year progressed, I discovered that none of the students were paying for their education -- such as it was. Their parents were all on the board of directors, like Madel, and exchanged various favors, goods, and services with Elaine for a free ride for their son or daughter. I think she got a new roof on her house out of the deal.
I had a spacious ground floor bedroom that looked out upon a wide and verdant suburban vista of split level homes with elegantly barbered lawns -- the abode of mid-level Federal bureaucrats who commuted into Washington DC, just fifteen miles away. The Trubnakovs were connected in some vague manner with the World Bank, and spoke off-handedly of huge volumes of cash being poured into one Third World country after another to build koi ponds and squash courts for avaricious politicians and bankers-cum-sneak thieves. The love of money may be the root of all evil, but the lack of same ain't no picnic, Tallulah.
Our teaching staff at the Academy shrank rapidly after the first month of school, until there was just Elaine and I handling all the classes. The other teachers all got jobs in the real world, with real incomes. I stayed on because I was promised rich pickings from state education grant money that seemed to stay as elusive as calorie free eggnog.
Elaine was the boss, so she elected to teach Spanish and Religion (we were not specifically affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, but Elaine patterned the curriculum after Church academies out in Utah) and I was stuck with everything else -- English, Math, Geography, Creative Writing, Gym, History, and Home Economics.
English and Creative Writing were a cinch to teach. I had the class read classics out loud for an hour each day. We started with Little Women, progressed to The Vicar of Wakefield, took a hair raising detour with H.G.Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau (it wasn't on the curriculum at all, but I snuck it in while Elaine was vacationing with her family in Idaho), and finished the school year with Shakespeare's The Tempest.
My blood pressure steadily mounted as I gave the kids writing assignments -- they never finished them or else lost them or claimed they were purloined by the numerous squirrels that infested the oak trees in the yard. One day, in desperation, I threatened to make them write on the blackboard one hundred times "I will finish my writing assignment," and do it in Klingon. I didn't know Klingon, they didn't know Klingon, but the idea turned on a switch in their devious little brains, and they began to improvise a dictionary of Ancient Klingon that would have made Gene Roddenberry proud. Too worn out to guide them back to real literary pursuits, I let them work on it every afternoon just before school let out -- to keep them from slipping out the door when my back was turned.
"Very advanced pedagogy" commented Elaine, when I told her about it. Well, I told myself, she's the one with the teaching license from the state of Virginia, so I'll let her worry about it. I didn't need a license or certificate or anything, since I was simply listed as a 'volunteer' on the books the Academy kept.
We started out with a dozen students, ages seven to twelve, in a section of Elaine's cramped basement next to her fruit preserves. Each student had their own desk and brought their own backpack, which they inevitably threw on the floor any which way so that I constantly took screaming nosedives into the carpet as I moved around to supervise my darling pupils.
Elaine was big on the function of rote memorization in education, so I showed the kids Animaniacs doing their countries and state capitals songs -- and then had them sing 'em back to me. So much for Geography.
They had dreary math workbooks. They plodded through two pages each day, which I then had to correct. I had a teacher's key for each page, but kept misplacing it -- so graded them on penmanship and neatness. Nobody seemed to notice, or care.
They had an hour at noon to eat their sandwiches and run around in Elaine's back yard, which was bristling with oak trees and sickly pines that dropped large branches on my student's heads without warning. They didn't seem to mind. The noon hour was also their Gym class, so I scrounged Frisbees and tennis balls out of Elaine's basement and let the kids have a go at breaking some of the casement windows. They never succeeded, since they had lousy aim.
When the weather was inclement we stayed inside for Home Economics. Madel gave me a Walmart juicer when I first came back from Thailand, so we used that to experiment with the different flavors and properties of fruit and vegetables. Did you know that you cannot get juice from a banana? Even if you include the peel. And the combination of celery, tomato, and potato juice tastes pretty darn good. We also produced cucumber and grated ginger finger sandwiches for the Parent and Teacher Conference, which generated quite a stir --inwardly, as well as outwardly.
Elaine wanted a diorama, a timeline, of world history that would stretch completely around the classroom. I encouraged my students to get creative; accuracy and realism were secondary. So they drew antediluvian dinosaurs cavorting with unicorns, a Minecraft version of ancient Rome, and placed Spiderman at the head of General Grant's army during the Siege of Vicksburg.
Towards the end of that first school year Elaine wangled the entire second floor of the Woodbridge YMCA/YWCA building for the Academy to move into. We now had access to an indoor gym and a computer lab. Those should have been palmy days for me, but two sudden kidney stone attacks, one right after the other, laid me lower than a turtle's tummy. Lacking any health insurance, I got the bum's rush at the ER -- both times they pumped me full of painkillers and sent me home with instructions to irrigate myself until the stones passed. They eventually passed -- at least some of them did -- but I stayed so exhausted and listless that I had to resign my teaching position. A few months later I moved to Provo, Utah, at the invitation of an old friend who teaches at BYU. I appreciated the offer because it put me close to most of my own children and their children. When I felt better I interviewed for another teaching position at a local language school called Nomen Global. Why not? There's always something good just around the corner, right?
For those interested, just click on the following Newsweek headline to find out what happened to me next:
