Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Feb. 25, 2013

Chalk dust, flying plastic and other collateral damage

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I hesitate to bring this up, considering the seriousness of the topic, but there's been a lot of loose talk lately about arming teachers with handguns. It's one of those ideas that may seem brilliant until you give it a little thought. I have, and I'm against teachers packing heat.

When I remember my school days, I remember that I had several wise, kind, judicious teachers, and also some who were none of the above. There were even a few who, for some unaccountable reason, didn't like me. That was either because a) they didn't understand me, or b) they did.

I had a third grade teacher who, when my parents encountered her on the street, seemed like a very nice, placid lady. But in the classroom, she and I did not get along. She tried very hard to teach me arithmetic, and I tried very hard to learn arithmetic, but her explanations were never sufficient. In those days third graders were not yet attempting calculus or using logarithms. We were working on long division problems, which always seemed to carry with them a “remainder.” That bothered me.


MRS. A: Now, class, when you look at the blackboard you will see that dividing the dividend, 13, by the divisor, 4, gives us an answer of 3 with a remainder of 1. So your answer would be 3, remainder 1.

ME: So then what happens to the remainder?

MRS. A: You leave it at the end of the division sign.

ME: Why?

MRS. A: Because the 1 isn't a whole number.

ME: It looks like a whole number to me.

MRS. A: But the 1 is not a rational number.

ME: Looks rational to me.

MRS. A [face turning deep crimson]: All right then, we do it that way because that is the way we do it, and that is how it is on the blackboard, and ... and ... I have a teaching degree! JUST DO IT!


Mrs. A's face turned red quite often when we conversed, and when I look back at the possibility of her carrying a loaded .357 Magnum in her purse, I shudder.

Later, in what we used to call junior high, we had a science teacher, Mr. H, who threw things. He threw pieces of chalk and erasers, and once or twice he awakened Doug Brower from his morning snooze with an actual, hardcover science book. He had a very effective sidearm delivery, and usually hit who he was aiming at, with little or no collateral damage. Regardless, if he'd carried a gun, somebody might well have come to grief.

And those were the good old days, when teachers were, for the most part, reasonable people. Today, if you've paid any attention to the direction public education has taken, you've probably noticed that some of today's teachers are a little different from those of days gone by. In a February 20, 2013 Fox News article by Kathy Matheson, we learn the following:


“WEST CHESTER, Pa. (AP) – When students at one suburban Philadelphia school work diligently at their desks, they aren't exactly sitting still.

The fifth graders at Westtown-Thornbury School learn while bouncing on brightly colored yoga balls.

Teacher Robbi Giuliano has done away with traditional chairs in her West Chester classroom. Instead, children balance themselves on giant rubber spheres also called stability balls.

Giuliano says the added body movement helps students focus better on daily lessons while toning their muscles.

Experts have linked physical activity with better learning. They say the balls are part of a larger movement to modernize schools with equipment including adjustable height desks and footrests.

Such furniture allows children to naturally fidget without disrupting class.”


I still harbor the sneaking suspicion that a classroom full of fifth graders all perched precariously atop yoga balls is a recipe for disaster. Or at the very least, hilarity. I was a fifth grader once, and I like to think that fifth graders haven't changed all that much, and today's crop is probably a lot like we were. And had we been told to sit on 35 inch soft plastic inflatable balls, you know ere long little Harold would've looked at Leon sitting on his inflated ball with that stupid grin on his face and designed a way to invent a very sharp projectile to fly across the room and puncture that huge ball and send Leon to the floor with a resounding “KA-BAM! Thud!” And then a lively yoga ball fight would result. We couldn't have resisted the temptation, and neither will those kids in West Chester, unless they've all been heavily medicated.


But, given today's headlines, I know that the teaching profession isn't what it used to be, and teachers, unlike kids, aren't what they used to be, either. What with all of the recent headlines about teachers having affairs with students, school administrators suspending kids for wearing those offensive USA T-shirts, teachers banning Valentine's Day cards and celebrations in school, elementary school children being suspended for pointing their fingers at other students, and so on and so forth, you can't help but wonder if the inmates are running the asylums. By which I mean the classrooms. And if these examples are just a small slice of American public education, they still remind us that, as goofy as some of our teachers may have been back during the first Ice Age, they couldn't hold a candle to some of the loons out there today.

And while I understand the dilemma, these yoga ball folks like Robbi Giuliano don't need to be toting guns. Let 'em toss a piece of chalk, and an eraser or two.
Oh yeah, I forgot, hardly anybody uses chalk and erasers anymore. More's the pity.