Fairvale High
By
Enzo Silvestri
Part II
Yvonne instructed them to open their texts to the Epic of Gilgamesh story, and before they started reading she wanted to teach them a little about the background. “Epic means a story, a story about heroism, about heroic deeds, and Gilgamesh was a king in Uruk which was in modern day Iraq and this epic tells the story of Gilgamesh who, when his friend Enkidu dies is so afraid of death that he embarks on a quest for eternal life. Included in this account is a story of a great flood.
“That was Noah, not Gilgamesh, my preacher would whoop me if he knew you was teaching us about Gilgamesh.” Billy interrupted, bringing sounds of agreement from other students. “Actually,” Mrs. Forester continued, “some scholars claim that this is where Moses got the idea of Noah’s flood from, but others say that Gilgamesh copied the details from Noah’s flood, and changed the characters. We can work out though that the Bible story is dated before the Gilgamesh one, so who copied who? When reading Literature we need to decide for ourselves what we’re to believe, to judge it by its merits.” The class settled down to reading the text while Mrs. Forester went from desk to desk assisting students, and explaining some parts in more detail.
The following week Yvonne went to the Library during her planning period and she met the English III teacher who was in there with her class as well. They were doing some research and she was flipping through a magazine. Yvonne had some questions she wanted to ask about the English faculty so she introduced herself.
“Hello I’m Yvonne Forester, the English II teacher, are you teaching an English III class?”
“Oh hi, I’m Karen Hamilton, yes this is an English III class, we’re doing research for their practice Senior Project this year.”
“That would be so nice to have,” Yvonne sighed, “but anyway, is there a faculty meeting ever, I mean in my last schools we got together every month or so to talk about stuff in English.”
“Nah, everyone here pretty much goes their own way, well, Judy is the English Chair, but like she’s only out of College for three years, so we figure why make more work for ourselves, they don’t pay us enough.” Karen laughed. “Yvonne was nodding her head uncertainly, “Yes I guess so.” She murmured.
“But speaking of meetings,” remembered Karen, “a bunch of us teachers, meet about every other Friday at the Black Swamp Grille. You know, it’s onthird street, up at Pemberton. You can join us there as a sort of faculty meeting, only you’re not allowed to talk about school.” She laughed. Yvonne laughed also as she thought back to how she and her colleagues inPalm BeachCountyused to have a similar meeting place. She figured though that kids down in Florida had some more opportunities than up here so she thought that she’d have to improve the odds for them if she could. The rest of the week went well with her fourth period students now beginning to get with the program and actually let her teach them something about English Language Arts. Over the next few weeks she taught explicit classes on sentence construction and paragraphing, linking sentences and Introductions and conclusions, all geared towards the state writing test. “A good way to think about essays is that a paragraph is a microcosm of that essay. What’s a microcosm you ask, does anyone know? Well a microcosm is like a small plan or layout of something which is much larger, but still is of the same structure.” Her students were starting to mutter at this explanation so she decided to clarify. “By that I mean that the paragraph is structured, or made op of the same elements as an essay. Let’s see, how does an essay start? Hands please.” A few of the quieter students raised their hands, and Mrs. Forester called on one, “Natalie, yes?”
“The introduction of course.”
“Excellent yes, that’s correct the introduction, now what can the introduction in an essay be likened to in a paragraph?”
“The first sentence?”Alicesaid softly, a little uncertainly.
“Exactly, thank youAlice, although we don’t call it the first sentence, what do we call it?”
“The topic sentence.” Jackie stated vehemently.
“very good, very good, thank you Jackie, it’s nice to see that our exercises have left a lasting impression.” Yvonne went on to explain how essays can be written on her expanding principle. Each paragraph being a miniature of the whole essay and dealing with a separate topic all related to the central topic of the essay. Over the next few weeks of practice essays her fourth period class went from regular scores of 1, and 2 in the practice tests to regular 3s and some 4s. Dr. Benson regularly popped in to Yvonne’s class room to see how things were going, as the rating for her school rested on the shoulders of her Sophomores. She was pleased with the progress that Mrs. Forester was able to achieve with her students.
Mike Forester, Yvonne’s husband, was also an English teacher but he had specialized in Australian Literature and secured a position at the local university lecturing Freshman Composition three days a week. Yvonne arranged for Mike to come to her classes on one of his off days and do lessons on Australian Ballads. She had told him of the gang culture around the school so since Mike liked to perform with his university classes, he had some ideas of his own on how to fire up the students’ imagination, when it came to ballads. His wife had three periods a day, with planning period at second block. The first went fairly easily with the Honors class and he performed the ballads as they are supposed to be performed with thick Aussie accents and idioms, and the second also a high achieving regular class.
When he came in to fourth period word had already gotten around the school of his presence. Yvonne introduced Mike to the class, and explained that he taught at the university, but that he’d volunteered to come in to school for a day. He gave a short history of ballad writing in colonialAustralia, then instead of launching into his favorite ballad in the usual way, he performed “The Man From Ironbark” in a ‘Rap’ fashion.
THE MAN FROM IRONBARK by A.B. “Banjo”Paterson
It was the man from Ironbark who struck the Sydney town, He wandered over street and park, he wandered up and down. He loitered here, he loitered there, till he was like to drop, Until at last in sheer despair he sought a barber's shop. "'Ere! shave my beard and whiskers off, I'll be a man of mark, I'll go and do the Sydney toff up home in Ironbark." The barber man was small and flash, as barbers mostly are, He wore a strike-your-fancy sash, he smoked a huge cigar; He was a humorist of note and keen at repartee, He laid the odds and kept a "tote", whatever that may be, And when he saw our friend arrive, he whispered, "Here's a lark! Just watch me catch him all alive, this man from Ironbark." There were some gilded youths that sat along the barber's wall. Their eyes were dull, their heads were flat, they had no brains at all; To them the barber passed the wink, his dexter eyelid shut, "I'll make this bloomin' yokel think his bloomin' throat is cut." And as he soaped and rubbed it in he made a rude remark: "I s'pose the flats is pretty green up there in Ironbark." A grunt was all reply he got; he shaved the bushman's chin, Then made the water boiling hot and dipped the razor in. He raised his hand, his brow grew black, he paused awhile to gloat, Then slashed the red-hot razor-back across his victim's throat: Upon the newly-shaven skin it made a livid mark - No doubt it fairly took him in - the man from Ironbark. He fetched a wild up-country yell might wake the dead to hear, And though his throat, he knew full well, was cut from ear to ear, He struggled gamely to his feet, and faced the murd'rous foe: "You've done for me! you dog, I'm beat! one hit before I go! I only wish I had a knife, you blessed murdering shark! But you'll remember all your life the man from Ironbark." He lifted up his hairy paw, with one tremendous clout He landed on the barber's jaw, and knocked the barber out. He set to work with nail and tooth, he made the place a wreck; He grabbed the nearest gilded youth, and tried to break his neck. And all the while his throat he held to save his vital spark, And "Murder! Bloody murder!" yelled the man from Ironbark. A peeler man who heard the din came in to see the show; He tried to run the bushman in, but he refused to go. And when at last the barber spoke, and said "'Twas all in fun— 'Twas just a little harmless joke, a trifle overdone." "A joke!" he cried, "By George, that's fine; a lively sort of lark; I'd like to catch that murdering swine some night in Ironbark." And now while round the shearing floor the list'ning shearers gape, He tells the story o'er and o'er, and brags of his escape. "Them barber chaps what keeps a tote, By George, I've had enough, One tried to cut my bloomin' throat, but thank the Lord it's tough." And whether he's believed or no, there's one thing to remark, That flowing beards are all the go way up in Ironbark.
The Bulletin, 17 December 1892.
His students loved the ballad, and got right into it by clapping time with the rhythm. Mike went on to explain the workings of rhyme and rhythm in balladry, explaining also that when students were rapping they were doing their own form of balladry, just that rapping was a modern name for it, and that they employed some of the same poetic devices that the classic poets had.
“How you mean,” Antwan felt he had to object here, “are you sayin’ that them rapper dogs think about all that shit when they rappin?” Mike smiled as he had expected an objection like this, so he said, “Ok, Antwan is it,” Yvonne had described the more outspoken students, “can you give me a couple of lines of your favorite rap performer?”
“Thieves In The Night” by Blackstar
Give me the fortune, keep the fame,” said my man Louis
I agreed, know what he mean because we live the truest lie
I asked him why we follow the law of the bluest eye
He looked at me, he thought about it
Was like, “I’m clueless, why?”
The question was rhetorical, the answer is horrible
Mike wrote them on the board as Antwan recited them. “Ok that will do, that’s enough to show you what I mean, now, in just these few lines I can see many poetic devices.” “Is rhyming a device?” asked Jasmine.
“Yes certainly, and here you have end rhyme, and interior rhyme, and the scheme changes from ABBA to CC in the same line. Mrs. Forester has taught this, where does he use an Oxymoron?”
Jackie was the first to get it, “In ‘truest lie’.”
“Yes, that’s great, and what is the imagery evoked in ‘bluest eye’?”
“He talkin’ about how white people make the laws.” Antwan wanted to get a word in since it was his favorite Hip Hop performer.
“Hey Mr F, you sound like you know a bit about hip hop, how long you been listenin’ Dog?” Mike smiled at Antwan when he asked this and he just held his hands plam upwards, “Actually Antwan, I have never heard that song before, and the reason that I could deconstruct it with you was that every piece of text or media follows some sort of rules and once we know them we can decipher them.”
“Hey y’all pretty cool dog.” Antwan respected the man who showed that he understood his art form even better than he did himself. Mike once again addressed the whole class, “Ok now you have all seen how these devices can be employed to say what you want to say. I am going to give you a task now, and Mrs. Forester will be grading it for you. I have here some templates that will help you get started writing your own ballads, each day, and Mrs. Forester will give you another sheet when you finish each one until you have a five stanza ballad. It can be about anything, but there has to be a conflict. Mike finished the lesson and after chatting with a few of the students, he and Yvonne drove home, discussing how the day had gone.
“I thought that went pretty well eh?” Mike began.
“Yes, and I was surprised at how quickly you were able to get Antwan to come around, how did you come up with that hip hop stuff anyway?”
“Remember, I have kind of been around a few times, you use what they know so that you can reach them.” He smiled.
Over the next two weeks Yvonne taught her classes intensive essay test skills, such as introductions, paragraphing, and conclusions, and she insisted on having only one topic dealt with in each paragraph,
“Don’t limit yourself to the five paragraph essay, I know that is the ideal length we talk about, but understand that it is just an example, if you have more points to make don’t just write them into an existing paragraph, add a new paragraph. Now, I know you are sick to death of practice essay tests,” she smiled as her students groaned, “but practice makes perfect, and the school is counting on you guys to improve our scores. Tomorrow there will be a school-wide sophomore writing test in first block. I have been bragging on you guys, don’t let me down now.” She smiled warmly.
In the teacher’s lounge the following day she just sat there drinking a coffee, listening to some of the other teachers complaining about their students.
“Can you believe it,” Jo Williams a math teacher was saying, “Tameka Johnson, she’s one o’ yours Ms Forester, comes in five minutes after we started the writing test, and doesn’t even notice that everyone else is writing. She just sits down, pulls out her make-up kit and starts doing her nails.” The teachers all laughed along with Jo, “So what did you do?” Stuart Canady of the Science department asked her.
“Well I sat there looking at her, and she was so wrapped up in her own little world that she ain’t seeing nothing, so then I get up and write the time on the board, and she looked up, “Oh Ms Williams, we s’posed to be doin’ that test huh?” She says, and I say, “Uh huh,” and she says “Oh dang, why didn’t y’all tell me, where’s the prompt?” and she runs around getting her stuff and I gotta hand it to her, she wrote like the blazes for the rest of the period. Hey Mrs. Forester, you gotta let me know what she got on that essay.”
On the following Tuesday, towards the end of fourth block, Yvonne was giving her class a final pep talk before the state writing test on Wednesday.
“For the test tomorrow, according to the instructions, you are to bring nothing to class. Everything will be provided, as in pencils, and paper. There are special instructions which your teacher wherever you are in first block tomorrow will have to read to you. All I can say is, go over your lessons, make sure you know how to respond to the prompts. If they ask you to compare, don’t argue, if they ask for an opinion, don’t contrast facts. Just do as they ask, remember we have done each of these types of essays to death, it should be a walk in the park for you.”
The next day the writing test was announced over the PA system and teachers followed the sealed instructions to the letter. At the end of the allotted time the essays were collected and placed in sealed envelopes once more and the school mailed them off to the State Department of Education. Yvonne wondered how her fourth block class had fared as she supervised only her honors students from first block. Her other students would have been at any number of other classes in first period. In the final period of the day students were ready to relax and chill out, as they put it.
“Come on Mrs. F, we done did a test this morning, we should be relaxing now.” Yvonne smiled, “Oh I’m sorry, we’re still doing English II, now, the World Literature gets interesting, now that the essay writing is out of the way. In your text books is an excerpt of Night the novel by Elie Weisel.” The students without being told all flipped their texts to the first page of the novel, and prepared to read.
“However, I feel that you can’t get a true feeling for the point of Mr, Weisel’s experiences from just a short excerpt, so I have taken a class set of the novel itself from the library.” As she finished speaking a loud groan went up from the class, until she picked up one of the novels and they saw how slim it was.
“That don’t look so hard to read Mrs. F, I finish that in no time.” Rattled off jasmine, “Don’t let appearances fool you people, the story is very involved and full of layers of meaning, it’s not like reading a Mills & Boon.”
“Hey my mother reads them!” Billy remarked.
Yvonne gave them a short lecture about WWII and the Holocaust, relating this to racial prejudice in many parts of the world. Her students could definitely relate to the concepts that Weisel was espousing in his book. The kept a reading journal and each evening they would read a chapter and in class alternately students would write a summary on the blackboard. This enabled those who had missed something to include it in their own summary. They would discuss the story the next day and foreshadow what might happen in the next chapter.
Mrs. Forester decided to give the students a new kind of final exam at the end of the semester. They had all been used to taking a ‘Scantron’ multiple choice exam, but Yvonne wanted to give students a chance to show what they had learned during the semester. She selected ten of the items that the class had read over the semester and for the exam they were to select any five and answer the question. The answers were to be at least half a page and more if needed. She could see the fear on the students faces as she explained the final exam to them on the day, but then when she told them it was an ‘open book’ exam their fears dissipated somewhat. She reminded them that ‘open book’ was useless to them if they had not done the readings in the first place, as they did not have time to read during the exam. ‘Open book’ was for dates and references mostly.
The final exam was weighted at 75% of the overall semester grade, so regardless of the result of their writing test they could still pass the grade and be promoted to Junior. She spent a weekend going over all over the exam papers and with the aid of her husband she was able to grade all three of her classes in time for the opening of classes on Monday. Her Honors class performed as expected and breezed through with mostly As and some B+s, and the Third Block class all managed to pass the course. When the principal had given her the fourth block class originally, she hadn’t held much hope and expected them to drop out of school or repeat the grade. As it turned out, everyone scored a C+ or better on the final test and when Yvonne factored in their semester work and writing test scores and averaged them for the final grade, she no longer had any Cs but the lowest was B- with several As as well. The students of fourth block were over the moon with happiness at having succeeded against the odds.
“Hey Mrs. F we should have a party tomorrow, it’s the last day of school before summer break, so you just leave it all to us, we’ll handle everything.” Jackie bubbled as she started discussing what to bring for the party. Yvonne and Mike were chatting in the living room of their home and she said that she was so glad that she could make a difference with the kids, in a small way.
“Oh I think it’s in quite a big way, my wife’s a brilliant teacher.” Mike muttered as he kissed her again and sniggled closer to her.
University had broken up for the semester already so Mike accompanied his wife for the last day of school so that he could congratulate Yvonne’s students. The first two classes of the day had also arranged parties and Mike and Yvonne gorged themselves with sodas, popcorn, and candies of all kinds. Yvonne was thinking that she was a little disappointed for her fourth block class who basically had their thunder stolen from them. After the third block students had cleared up the trash from their party they all left at the bell and Yvonne and Mike awaited the arrival of the next class. The bell sounded but still no students had shown up and Yvonne looked at Mike wondering if they’d even bothered to come to school today.
The Public Address buzzed, “Would Mr. and Mrs. Forester please report to the school auditorium please?”
“Now what?” Yvonne muttered, “oh well this way.” She led her husband. They arrived at the school auditorium and it was empty as expected, the Seniors had graduated, the Prom was weeks ago, so of course it’s dark in here she thought. Suddenly a hand grabbed her in the dark and ushered them to front seats of the Auditorium. The lights went up and all of her fourth block students were lined up at stage left withPrincipal Dr. Benson seated in the centre of the stage. Mr. Forester stood and walked up the stairs to centre stage where he assumed the role of MC. He began with a speech lauding the achievements of his Wife Yvonne in one short semester and then called on Yvonne’s students to walk on stage and receive their passing report cards from Dr. Benson just like a graduation. Finally Dr. Benson took the microphone and thanked Yvonne for the hard work she had put in to a class that everyone including herself had virtually written off in January.
“Mrs Forester it was a blessing to have you here this year and I am sure the students will agree that we will miss you during summer vacation. And of course I expect to see you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in August for the new year.”
“I’ll be here, thank you for confirming my job for next year, that means we can have a good vacation now.”
“Oh where will you go?”
“My husband has offered to show me around his home town inAustralia.”
“Ooh, lucky you…” laughed Dr. Benson.
The End
Karenzolingua 