Mister Chips the Zombie Teacher
You might not guess it, and you might actually be alarmed to know it, but I was a school teacher back in 1972. Taught English and Social Studies to 8th graders, those pre and post pubescent adolescents who drove a couple of my colleagues to retire early. Truth is, I retired early too. But it was my fellow teachers and administrators who drove me to it. Or so I like to say. You know, 40 odd years later….
I guess you could accurately say that I wasn’t cut out for teaching. I came out of the radical 60’s where one entire semester our campus was in full blown riot, National Guard camped down at the ballfields, buildings trashed and finally one blown to pieces. After nearly four years of grueling studies in pharmacology, street protesting and alternative philosophies, I realized I maybe didn’t have the credentials for, well, probably any serious occupation beyond car wash employee. So I took some education credits, just to hedge my bet. Who knows, I might like teaching.
I got a job teaching 8th graders. Eighth graders are an interesting subset of humans, half already passed into virtual adulthood, half still immature as a 3rd grader. It was like teaching in a one room schoolhouse circa 1850, kids age 6 to 18. Being a graduate of a radical institution, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I came into the profession with radical ideas. Schools, or so I thought at the time and pretty much still do, are nothing more than prison lite, get those brats into some cells and keep them busy all day long. Instill in them virtues that would make working in a factory or a corporation palatable. Obedience. Subservience. Acceptance. Sit down, shut up. Do what you’re told, get a good grade. Act out, the Man will sit on your head.
So naturally I dispensed with seating charts, grading systems and most rules. My fellow teachers watched with horror my kids outside hanging from the trees where we would take books and read on sunny days. It looked like Monkey U. My principal stopped by one day to inform me that one of my kids’ parents, a University professor in English lit, was extremely distressed to drop by his son’s class only to find him in white facepaint with blood smeared on his lips in the filming of our epic zombie movie. “It was ketchup,” I smiled. “No zombies were harmed in the making of our film.” Oddly, this was not reassuring to him. Nor was the fact that I refused to issue grades, just written evaluations.
The zombie movie, no doubt the inspiration for our current wave of endless copycat books, television shows and B movies, was really a social commentary on the school itself complete with shots of zombie like students in my fellow educators’ classes, sitting in rows, half awake, barely alive. My fellow educators, once we began to screen the film for 25 cents a head, were less than amused. My principal trudged once more to my room to inform me school policy forbade charging money for school activities. I said I didn’t realize that. We instituted the novel concept of voluntary donations and had Gerald, an 8th grade gorilla the size of a bar bouncer, ask forcefully for those voluntary donations. We made more than enough money to pay for processing the film with plenty left over. Lessons in Capitalism 101. And still the administration complained!
At the end of the year my principal explained that I would not be coming back and he would not be offering letters of recommendation. I explained that this was okay with me. I had had a dose of the education system and maybe it was time to remove myself and set out to explore the ‘real’ world. He heartily agreed and for once we were on the same page. The real world, it turned out, proved that I was probably right to get those now useless teaching certificates in the first place. I was ready for some mean lessons in the school of hard knocks. The zombies were about to have some fun with me this time.
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