Remembering Fern or The First Week

Earlier in this online journal I said that I was not a teacher. I am still of this opinion even after the first week in that roll. Thus far I am a glorified babysitter that allows parents a one-hour break for a trip to the hair salon, grocery store or bed room. I have this image in my head of teachers, the empowering educator who gets all his students to rise up against tyranny and stand on their desks as they seize the day. Some might see the great professors of ancient Greece or great minds like Socrates and Aristotle. Maybe even Einstein. I see Robin Williams and Mr. Holland. I’m a victim of mass media manipulation via the medium of film. Yet, I also think of John Fern.

John Fern is not a fictional character. He will never be known as a great philosopher. Books won’t be written of him and libraries will not be named after him. However, within the borders of the tasks of a high school teacher, he fulfilled the primary qualification. He educated and he did so well. For me, he was a diving board of inspiration launching me to new heights during one of life’s many lows. In these transitional years between the late hormonal teens into the rush of early adulthood one false choice could send you spiraling out of control. I have seen a few friends take the wrong turn, missing the signs of proper direction, and there on the road found all night bars, trenchcoat clad dope salesmen and knife wielding hitchhikers. Translation: drugs, drink and relationships best avoided. The first moment of catalyst to such turns in life is highschool. Some bad influences and maybe one wild party could lead you to a futuristic catastrophe where you find yourself dressed in a stained and crumpled Denny’s outfit at the age of 45, grease popping and dotting your skin with burns as you flip another piece of bacon around and wonder why you’re not an astronaut! Okay, a wild extreme, I know, but when people forgo their dreams their path is usually marked with regret.

I feared failure and rejection back then and, at this point in my life, had the opportunities to make a lot of money doing the wrong thing. Instead, I purchased an electric typewriter (computers were not in abundant use in small town Ontario households in the mid-1990s) for about $100, all I had left that month after the Welfare allowance had gone to groceries and rent. I remember the thing was so heavy I had to hijack a shopping cart from the LOAB nearby and wheel the typewriter back to my dingy apartment where I set it up on a rickety table that, with the added weight, could topple like the bridges of London at any time. Ah, but it held. There in the darkness, on a lumpy and uncomfortable torn beige swivel chair, I tuned out the arguments from the couple next door, the crying newborn down the hall and the thunderous walking above and I wrote with the fury of a man possessed. The voices of Mr. Fern would serve as a stern enforcer some nights when the never ending updates of the “Trail of the Century” seemed more important then tapping out a few poems I figured nobody would ever see. They were pilled in small stacks on the wobbly table next to some sort stories and an unfinished novel. My output of writing that year was pretty prolific. I was in the lowest state I have ever been, despondent and wallowing in a self imposed loneliness, maudlin, sulking about in the doldrums I’d designed. Yes, I even had those suicidal tendencies rattling around the brain. I worried people, I fought everything and every body in wasteful unnecessary insurrections and would not listen to anybody cursing them all for my lot in life. Years of apologies will not bring back some of the friends I lost and other scars from you troopers still around may not heel but thanks for riding out the bad patches of road with me and sometimes taking the wheel when I couldn’t drive.

The one person that did reach through the hate and anger was my highschool English teacher. Mr. Fern with his salt and pepper hair, his faded suit and his Ackbar lips. Some days he would slither into the class looking very reptilian, tongue constantly licking his lips, amidst the snickers of the class. Fern was not well liked by most of his students in the mandatory English classes. Unflattering sketches were drawn in notebooks and mocking of his monotonous teaching style was done by lockers after class. Someone even wittily concocted the nickname “Mr. Sperm”. Fern rolled with the bunches, tossed paper airplanes and terrible test grades and continued on in what could be classified as comical endurance. He preferred the squeaky chalk on the board over the more popular overhead projector, he would write novels of notes on assignments next to your grade and during reading time he would sit quietly hunched at his desk like Quasimodo, reading classic literature.

I enrolled in his Writer’s Course class that tumultuous year. English was the only thing I was excelling in and with most the other courses falling under par graduating highschool was a virtual unknown. I was reluctant to show my work to anybody but because it was forced upon me in classes Fern would be the judge and jury and potential executioner of my writing. Fern was known to be the sternest of graders. You would find more red ink on your assignments then anything else. Some even wondered if Fern had any other writing utensils at his disposal. A girl one day gave him a pencil as a gift. Fern, never cracking a small, always remaining stone faced, said “maybe one day I’ll get to use it on your papers”. Direct bluntness is an asset to teachers that many don’t agree with. Those who cradle the minds of teenagers are asking for footmarks on their clothing. Fern told it like it was, warts and all, and those who feared his red pen were usually those more interested in school dances, gym class or fixing their cars. Ferns little clan of writers maybe feared the pen more. I was part of this group, those Fern said had “flare”. This was a favorite in the lexicon of Fernology. This group would always leave wide margins for Fern’s notes and would feel insulted should a red mark blemish our page.

It was his urging that prompted those sessions of hammering at those keys on the electric in the dark. I worked to please him but soon, with less red on the paper and more novel notes, I was empowering myself with my ability. Fern sensed the depression in my words and would ask me sometimes to stay after class to discuss the particular sentiment of a poem or story and in these one on ones I confided in him through my work. Writing for Fern’s classes kept me going. The poems wrote themselves and impressing him was of great importance. He would always point out my missteps and he was, of course, always correct. He could signal out a lazy poem with amazing accuracy. It was with his urging me to submit my work to magazines for publication that I started to seriously look at becoming a writer. I would purchase writing magazines and took out the Canadian Publisher’s List from the library on many occasions. I eventually would summon up the courage to send a few poems off and some of them would see print. I was seventeen years old and published. It was a burst of energy, a rush of direction and I decided (and the birth of my daughter also played a large part in my changing direction) that I wanted to go off to college to try a stab at a journalism career. True, in the end, journalism wouldn’t pan out and my writing would falter. Two years in the newspaper would dissolve into the pursuit of more cinematic endeavors. The typewriter would gather dust while I was away in school and one day, forgetting it was there on the floor of my room, I stepped on it and cracked it putting the final nail in. The garbage man took it away the next morning. I have never written as well and which such fertility, I believe, as I did that year under the tutelage of Mr. Fern. My mind was fresh and inspiration was all around me. Every time I find those poems when cleaning out my big green plastic bin I think of how mature and advanced they were for somebody at that stage of life. I normally don’t toot my own horn but some of them were pretty deep and unlike a lot of write I write I am proud of the Fern Class Poems.

Fern would turn me around. I wonder if he knows it. I wonder if he is still with us and, most of all, I wonder if he still teaches at the highschool because, if he does, I will seek him out and thank him when I return to Canada. Mr. Fern was a teacher and I aspire to be as influential as he was to me. This week, though, I was going through the motions under the watchful eyes of parents and Japanese teachers. I did not deviate from my path. I fumbled, I stuttered but I survived.

The Company curriculum in the younger stages is mainly repetition. The children are learning through drilling. My lessons this week taught them nothing new and I was basically just reinforcing the previous three weeks taught by the Japanese teacher. I felt, in many ways, like Barney without the purple dinosaur costume. All singing. All dancing. Keep them moving and entertained and send them home smiling whether they learned something or not. Lots of games and songs for the younger set and I should be paying the company for the aerobic workout I get on a daily basis from chasing kids around the room. The Japanese teacher said there would be some criers in the bunch because I am new but it only happened twice, and one kid wasn’t even my student. The first was the previously mentioned demon kid when I wouldn’t allow him to snatch a book out of my hands. The second was part of my biggest problem with having the lions in the classroom. They would bring their cubs! I had no idea what kids were mine and the Japanese teachers did not help me much, if at all, with their own speeches to give. At times I had 17 kids in the class and not knowing who to teach I tried to work as many of them in as possible. One little girl was so great. She had on a shirt with the word BeBe on it and not knowing her name that is what I called her and she laughed hysterically at all my antics. This one class room is a danger nightmare, though, when it comes to letting the kids outside. For one, that is where the bathroom is. They have to go outside and into the hallway of the building the classroom is in to go. We are instructed in training to bring all the kids with you if you have to outside. Personally, I think this is a loony concept because wrangling all the young kids into shoes and then trying to keep them from running away once you are outside, maybe having to help the other kid use the bathroom, is not logical. It has not had to happen yet, though. The other issue with this school is that the door is practically on the street so when you let kids out they have a tendency to run into the road. There is an auto body shop near by and a delivery service so fast trucks are speeding by all the time. Normally, parents would be outside the doorway but because they were observing the lesson they stood behind the kids, for some reason, as I let them out and did not bother to do much to stop them from darting outside. The little laughing girl ran into the middle of the road and I quickly ran and scooped her up bringing her back to her mother who smiled and laughed as her daughter cried in her arms. The kid was just terrified by me picking her up and rushing her off the road. I tried to explain to the mother but she could not understand. The laughing girl was not traumatized thankfully. I had her in a class the next day and we were friends again. Next to the road there is also a canal. Kids love to jump onto the edge and toss rocks into it. The most heart attack inducing about the week has been the final few minutes at the door.

In many ways, at this stage, I feel as though I am more of a stage performer. I have to prep for the production, plan my craft, and mentally build myself up for the show. I plotted my lessons ahead of time so I was ready and would show up to class early to gather all my materials. For the long Saturday I did so the day before. The stage was ready. I take 15 minutes to just lay down and relax. Then it is a sip of coffee in a can, liquid energy, and I unlock the door and the audience rushes in. Show time! Some switch inside is flicked on and I become that children’s entertainer, a lively Mr. Dress-up, and for one hour I try to remember my lines, what track of music to cue up and I try to keep everybody interested. Then the time is up, the show is over, and the audience leaves the theatre and the next batch bursts through the door and I start another production and, in some cases, put on an identical show.

For the most part I think my act is a success. The kids had fun and left smiling, the sign of a well performed production. Did they learn anything? I don’t know. I was surprised but what they already knew and their ability to repeat it. A lot of running and drawing and dancing and games here which keeps them out of trouble for one hour. Again, I feel like a babysitter that keeps rushing from one thing to another to keep the kids entertained and out mischief. The only thing I am able to impart on them, at least this week, that is not part of the Japanese lesson is a five minute section devoted to telling the older kids (the younger kids are excluded from this part of the lesson because having them stop for five minutes would require chains and large metal spikes) about the differences between my home country and theirs. I choose the difference ways we celebrate Valentine’s Day. I think one student understood me. Oh well, maybe pep things up with more visuals next time. Learning from students is all part of becoming a teacher.

I do feel happy that I was able to make it through the week as, honestly, I was worried. With classes that hit sometimes over 10 kids and parents watching me this first week it was not easy to remember all the lines and hit all my marks but I think my blunders went unnoticed or forgiven by all parties evolved. At the end of the day I would push onto the crowded trains, plop down next to the people and their cell phones, the school boys and girls in their pressed uniforms, the half masked ninjas and the those so exhausted that they were nearly falling out of their seat as they dozed and I would look out the window at the dark and feel a bit of pride in my current profession. Call me what you will, teacher, actor or babysitter, but I am getting much more satisfaction out of this then shucking phones and digital cable for a wealthy conglomerate. I am thinking more, having to use my brain instead of acting as a drone to consumerism. Planing lessons is almost as rewarding as performing them. I am finding creative aspects I didn’t know I had and that makes me feel great. And, well, I suppose, I am writing just as much as I did the year of seventeen what with this online journal.

No, I don’t feel like a teacher just yet, no John Fern, but things are starting to develop. In my youngest class, four year olds, I used the word “present” once or twice, trying to work in some new words not in the manual. The students had not been taught it. After I had seen all the kids out one little girl returned and held up a small strawberry candy to me. She smiled and said “present”. I thanked the little girl for more than just the candy because in that moment she made me fell briefly like a teacher. The moment would past and leave the taste of strawberry in my mouth but it was a good moment. One step at a time…one step at a time.