No Gum or Guns, Just Grace

I opened the thick envelope containing the color-coded handouts announcing the beginning of the 1997-98 school year at Oxnard High School.

Our district, despite overwhelming dissent from the teaching staff, decided to tack on an additional 20 days to our school calendar. So then, my fellow colleagues and I had the privilege of attending our faculty meeting a week early to prepare for the barrage of more than 3,000 students onto our new but already overcrowded campus.

Our motto to carry us through this year, according to our welcome-back letter, is: I will adapt, I will learn to improvise, and I will motivate my students and me!

This uplifting motto was accompanied by a sheet entitled “Just a Few Reminders,” on which the following vital information was imparted:

* Weapons posters and school discipline code poster must be posted in all classrooms.

* No food/drink in the classroom at any time!!

* Staples, thumbtacks, nails, etc., cannot be used to hang pictures, posters, etc.

The comic perversity of having weapons posters and a prohibition of thumbtacks addressed in the same manner on the same page reflects the Theater of the Absurd environment in which our public high schools now exist.

No guns, no gum.

However, we will have a state-of-the-art automated Homework Hot Line that our students can call from anywhere in the solar system to hear their teacher’s recorded message of the daily homework assignment. I imagine this will be far superior to copying down the homework assignment in class or having a study buddy you can call when you are absent. Maybe if our students can master the complex automated gate system to access our hotline, they can gain the skills necessary to follow along in their textbooks without constantly asking, “Hey, what page are we on?”

I’m confident that with these extra 20 days, and our weapons posters, and our no food/drink in classroom rule, and our attendance and dress-code policies, and our “zero tolerance” stance on gang affiliation, graffiti, drug abuse and sexual misconduct, plus our Homework Hot Line, we teachers will, “adapt, improvise and motivate,” all without the use of thumbtacks.

No doubt the 100-plus teachers and classified staff who dutifully returned to campus a week earlier than the staff of any of our neighboring district schools will do their very best to shape the future for the better.

In the midst of a society that now asks educators to teach more and more complex concepts to an ever-growing and demanding population of students who are daily bombarded with images of violence, drug abuse, familial instability and overall incivility, we will prevail.

We will continue to have numerous students rise above the fray and attend USC, UCLA, Stanford and other prestigious schools of higher learning.

We will continue to have students pursue distinguished careers in the military and the private sector.

And we--teachers and students alike--will accomplish these goals using the resources we have relied upon for centuries: our hearts and souls. Plus, a touch of grace. Sans guns, gum and thumbtacks.