On the Stoop of Spring

 As I am writing this, I am covering a group of petulent sophomores due to the fact we have a sloppy coverage system in our school - the concept of a substitute teacher does not exist, so the administration in their infinite wisdom chose to choke other teachers with coverage duties - a "lateral promotion" situation where we do more work without additional compensation.  The idea is not exactly popular with many teachers, as it means we are dealing with students whose names we don't know and it creates an issue for any disciplinary problems that arise because the dean, assistant principal, and principal are all generally unresponsive to requests for assistance if needed.  It is one reason why I am re-evaluating my own career path right now - I will be a teacher probably until I need to retire, but the location where I exercise my vocation needs to change.  As mentioned, I work in inner-city Baltimore, and the demographic of students I teach can have a set of challenges that make me feel a bit overwhelmed at times.  There are many of them who are exceptionally talented students, and those I appreciate as they make this vocation worth it, but a large percentage of them act like at times they simply don't care, and an unsupportive administration doesn't alleviate the issue any.  It is one reason why I am looking into getting out of here soon.  There are other reasons totally unrelated to the institution I teach at though, such as city life in general, but the work environment is definitely prominent.  In the process of this, I have a few observations I wanted to make regarding a day of volunteer service we had last week. 

One requirement of this school - which is a commendable one, I might add - is the obligation for faculty to participate in a "day of service" volunteering at a local non-profit of some nature.  Last year, as well as this year, my organization of choice was the Little Portion Farm located in the nearby community of Ellicott City.  Little Portion Farm is an institution that is operated by the local Franciscan friars, and it is a full farm that grows produce which in turn is used to supply many local shelters and other service organizations in Baltimore with fresh vegetables.  The produce is all sustainably grown and harvested, and our duties this year included harvesting carrots.  Now, farm work is something I am very familiar with, as I grew up in rural West Virginia in an agricultural environment and it was actually somewhat refreshing to do some work like that.  Myself and two other teachers worked together harvesting the carrots, and we actually also had some fun doing it, as finding one was like a sort of treasure hunt.  One of our teachers in particular that was working with us, a 9th-grade Biology teacher, was particularly entertaining as he essentially dubbed himself "Lord of the Carrots" and it made the time pass faster.  While it was exhausting (as well as messy!) work, it also was satisfying although at my age I am not as adept as I used to be at it.  The farm experience was enriching as always, but it was afterward that a concern was raised.

After our service at Little Portion Farm, we returned to the school for a meaningless session of that whole "Spark Brilliance" stuff the school is pushing, and no one really cared to be there as all of us had volunteered and we just wanted to get home, relax, and clean up.  While a group of us - which interestingly consisted of our entire department - were seated at a table in the auditorium, the CFO was sitting with us, and he decided he was going to "suggest" some things to the Theology department (Theology is not an area of his expertise, which will be illustrated shortly) and he proceeded to give his "astute" opinions on Sacraments.   Here is how that went.

The CFO, who I mentioned has no fundamental knowledge of the subject areas of the teachers and really has no leverage at all in the curriculum, was castigating us for not allowing non-Catholics to take Communion in Mass.  The first impression I got of that comment was that this man was either not a Catholic, or he was a bad one.  He failed to understand the basic concepts of Catholic Sacramental theology, and in doing so was asking us to do things that even the Pope himself has no authority to change.  In addition to an outright hostile English teacher here who hates Christianity, I am just gobstopped by the weird inconsistency regarding our school's identity as a Catholic institution, and the outright ignorance on the part of leadership in this school.  It is one reason why I am starting the process of getting out of here by next year, because this is just not normal.  So, at the risk of possibly jeopardizing my current role, I will leave it there.  I wanted to now move onto the Spring season.

Although officially Spring does not start until around the 21st of this month, the weather patterns suggest Spring is around the corner.  Yesterday, for instance, was the first time since October that I have not had to wear a coat or jacket outside, and it was a comfortable 70-ish temperature range.  This is odd considering that just last week we had snow on the ground.  But, that is March in the Northeast.  While a part of me will miss the snow days, I am also glad the weather is warming up.  It signals that this school year is in its final stretch as well, which means that with less than 30 days of actual classroom instruction the year is winding down, and I am ready for that.  While it is definitely possible to have a bit more chilly weather as winter morphs into Spring soon, I think the seasons are transforming.  Also, given that this is the third week of Lent, we are also halfway to Easter as well, and in a couple of weeks we have a much-deserved Spring break coming up that I think teachers and students alike are looking forward to.  After that, the next couple of months will be a flurry of activities which will speed the remainder of the year, and I personally have to squeeze three more chapters of my lesson plans into the context of 30 instruction days.   Fortunately, given I am teaching Morality, I have some leverage to do this, so it won't be as crazy as it sounds.  

After a short break between covering crazy freshmen and sophomores, I am back in another class to cover.  As we were talking about Spring, I wanted to just mention something that got my attention that also has a lot to do with an old pastime from my childhood.  I have mentioned before how as a kid I used to like catching all sorts of wildlife from local ponds and streams, and to be honest it still is a passion that fascinates me although it has been years since I have actually done anything with it.  A young man in Florida named Bobby recently started a YouTube channel in which he goes to various places and rescues a lot of feral aquarium fish that have been released into waterways in Florida, and the stuff he finds is actually astounding.  For a short time between the time I was 10 and 12 I also was interested in aquarium fish as well and imagined having a tank of a variety of fish - I didn't understand that some of the fish I liked were predatory though and would eat the others, but it was a nice idea. I read everything I could learn about tropical fish then, and I was able to absorb a lot.  When I watched this kid Bobby catching all these fish in Florida, it naturally piqued my interest and I have been watching his videos almost nonstop over the past week.  What astounds me is the number of rather exotic aquarium fish this kid is finding in the waterways there, as he is pulling out literally thousands of non-native specimens, including pleco catfish, bettas, and other types of fish.  In looking at the fish he catches, it makes me wonder what was in the streams near my place in Lakeland years ago when I lived there, and I could have had a tankful of very expensive fish for practically nothing.  I did, however, manage to raise some baby turtles during my years there, and wanted to talk about that for a moment. 

The most common water turtle in Florida is the red-eared slider, and they are extremely abundant.  While a full-grown slider can be quite big, most people are able to find are quarter-sized hatchlings that are often found in adjacent yards and roads near bodies of water.  The reason that is common is that turtles will often go a distance away from the water to dig burrows to lay their eggs, and thus it is easy to find hatchlings when mowing lawns or casually walking on the roads.  Back in 1993, I found two sliders that we named Scooter and Daphne, and over the next 6 years they provided us with a lot of joy as low-maintenance pets that we kept in a large tank. They also proved to have their own unique personalities, as often we would feed them live fish and it was a source of amusement to watch Scooter in particular charge after the little fish in the tank.  At one point, they also made short work of a palmetto bug (a HUGE native cockroach in Florida) that fell into the tank.  Although both turtles were roughly the size of a quarter when I originally found them, Scooter in particular had grown quite substantially by the time I eventually released them back into the wild later - he was about 7 inches across at that point.  However, Scooter and Daphne were by no means the only turtles we found, as there was a third one we had as a pet for a short time that Barbara found one day.

Florida is home to a very unique species of turtle called a softshell.  A softshell turtle looks different - it has a leathery, flexible shell and also has a long snout that prominently is featured on their faces.  They are sort of cute to look at, but they are also noted for being somewhat aggressive - a full-grown softshell can weigh up to 25 pounds, and they bite!  While not quite as aggressive as a Florida snapping turtle, they can still be a formidable critter to cross paths with if they are of a large size.   However, like the sliders, they also lay eggs in burrows away from the water, and it is therefore not uncommon to see their babies on roads and in lawns as well - the hatchlings are very small replicas of the adults, being also about the size of a quarter or half-dollar.  One day, when Barbara was walking home from the bus stop, she walked past one of the many lakes that Lakeland was named for, and when she looked down there was a tiny softshell baby.  She rescued it and brought it home, and we named him Corky - he was actually very cute, but as he grew he also began to display aggressive behavior characteristic of his breed.   As a result, we had to release him when he reached a few inches in diameter.  In addition to the sliders and Corky, there were even more fascinating turtles that I found, and these were perhaps some of the most unique of all.

I am thinking that another species of turtle I encountered in those years was the eastern mud turtle.  These turtles are very small, as an adult reaches a maximum length of 4 inches.  As a result of their small size, they also produce small babies, and I had a chance encounter with those as well.   On a sunny late spring day, I was walking the short distance from the university campus to my house, which was a routine walk every day for me.  The walk took me past what is called Lake Bonny, and it was along this stretch of road that I originally found Scooter and Daphne, my two sliders.   When I was looking down, I saw something that looked like a group of large beetles, but as I looked closer, I noted that the legs were not indicative of insects.  On picking one up, I noticed that they were very tiny hatchling turtles - each was about the size of a dime, and I had never seen anything like them before.  I gathered up perhaps 6 of them and took them home, and after some research later I found out that these were baby eastern mud turtles.  I would later find a bigger one, although this one would have a face injury that meant it was not able to live long.    Finding turtles was nothing new, as when I was a kid I had come across several box tortoises and had kept them too over the years.  However, these were some of the first aquatic turtles I had ever owned, and it was an experience.  I honestly would not mind having a turtle again once I get settled into a more larger and permanent place, and maybe I will look into that later. 

Getting back to Bobby, I found out his name is Bobby Botsford, and he is 24 years old.  He lives in south Florida, so he has a lot of abundant range to explore.  Some of the places that kid goes into though amazes me - nasty sewers, abandoned swimming pools, swamps, etc.  However, in almost every place he fishes, he always comes up with buckets of exotics, and he has at his house a pond and tank system to house them all.  He is also fun to watch too, as he gets hyper-excited over a find and also scares easily which also evokes a funny reaction.  That being said, I admire what he does, and he is doing a great service to Florida and also to those fish he rescues.  I will probably be watching more of his material too as it is kind of riveting, and perhaps that will uncover some other fascinating things about my younger self too. 

One ironic part of my fascination with collecting water fauna myself as a kid is that I never learned to swim - as a matter of fact, if water goes above my knees I get very skittish.  Even at my baptism I was a bit scared too, as I had to stand waist-high in water to be baptized then, but thankfully the water was crystal-clear and not murky, as it was also a sacramental act in which I was received into the Christian faith as well as having all my original sin removed.   In a way, my acceptance of baptism helped me to face a fear, and I did well with that.  Now, if only I had remembered to bring a fresh change of undergarments that day!  I forgot to change my undershorts, and it was at the beginning of February in the high hills of West Virginia.  So, I ended up going home with wet drawers, and I caught the flu shortly after.  Although baptism is a one-time sacramental rite, I made a mental note to myself to always be more prepared if I ever had a similar situation.  I perhaps needed to do that with my shoes digging carrots last week too, although I am wearing the same shoes today after washing them up when I got home.  This love/hate relationship with water is one thing that I think makes me have a lot in common with cats too - cats love fish, but hate water.  Maybe that is why I have always been more of a cat person as well.  

After arriving at work today, we had a bit of excitement here as well - an unhinged student was spraying pepper spray all over, and apparently it contaminated the respiratory systems of some other students.  Our particular school has had a discipline issue for a while - despite the fact we are encouraged to write up infractions, they are rarely and inconsistently enforced, and I was told by our vice-principal that essentially it was only to create a paper trail and not really effective otherwise.  As a result, in the past month two very serious incidents happened - a student assaulted a teacher, and now this whole pepper spray incident.  And, that is where I wanted to go to address something fundamental now.

Consistency is a virtue that is often overlooked, especially in broader society, these days.  If you are an employee somewhere - like say a teacher or a cop - you often have demands thrust on you, but then the powers-that-be fail to back you up when you try to actually do your job.  As a matter of fact, often if you actually do your job, you get castigated by your superiors for doing that.  But if you don't, then you are chastised for not doing it.  This is that whole "damned if you do, damned if you don't" mentality.  This seems to be prominent among the public service sector in particular, which should be the most consistent professions on the planet - professions such as nurses, teachers, firefighters, cops, and military.  These types of professions are often the most unappreciated yet the most risky professions out there, and the people who practice these professions are often targets of everyone - their superiors, parents, students, patients, etc.  Politicians try to legally castrate these individuals, and "experts" often are quick to criticize them without understanding the circumstances that surround duties in these professions.  This happened at our school recently, and a situation with a teacher I will not get into here due to professional courtesy really exposed how ineffective some school leadership really is.  When a dean of students, for instance, is more concerned about the polo shirt a kid wears rather than actual disrespectful conduct, it is a scandalous thing.  Also, when a school board or president is more concerned with statistics than they are about the actual success of their students as individuals, that tells where their priorities lie.  The revelatory observations I myself have witnessed not only in the educational sector but in the corporate world as well have forced me to conclude that there is a cancerous rot in our society that seeks to undermine common sense and basic decency.  Companies, schools, and other organizations will spend thousands of dollars on these "seminars" and self-help schlocky programs, but then they ignore the real needs.  Years ago, when I worked at Chase Home Finance in Florida, and I recall they had us do this "life coaching" class in which we attended the thing for a week.  However, when it came down to it, the executives who promoted it didn't follow through with it themselves, and six months later that company ended up laying off about 200 of us.  I see that happening at the school where I currently work at as well, as they are treating this "program" they are into almost with cult-like status, but it actually is not all that popular with either teachers or students in all honesty.   And, the bottom line is a question - are these things good investments?  I would personally say they are a waste, as there are more pressing needs that should be invested in, but often that opinion will be shrugged off as irrelevant to the agenda.  Such is life though.

I think I have pontificated enough today, and in all honesty some of what I have shared is at great risk but it is also my Constitutional right to speak freely with some stipulations.  But, duty calls now, so I need to get onto other life business.  Thanks for visiting, and will see you next time.