The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Maybe I’ve neglected to mention that before I graduated from the Univ. of Wisconsin with two useless majors in Sociology and English, I panicked and took some courses senior year in Education. If nothing else, I could at least teach youngsters grammar, punctuation, syntax, political science, demographics and the like. Not as if I had a passion for teaching kids stuff they couldn’t use either — at least for jobs and careers — but we humanities majors are a bit more ‘high-minded’, meaning, we weren’t in it for the bucks.

Today I drove past my old school, Cherokee Middle School in Madison, Wisconsin, still standing albeit a lot more shabby than the shabby it was when I taught there in 1972. I taught 8th grade English and no, not sociology, history, a subject I had never seriously studied, one my principal decided I could study a night or two prior to each class. Which begs the question, why the hell did I need a college degree?

My last professor in Education, the aging hag who made my last semester miserable, called me in for a conference to offer me her nomination to Phi Beta Kappa in exchange for my commitment to teach secondary rather than pursue a masters or doctorate. Since none of the above mattered one whit to me, I said, yah shure, u betcha. Some bargain. But I took a job teaching. A deal’s a deal.

This, like I said, was 1972, hot on the heels of the campus riots, student strikes, ROTC bombings, radical outrage. You think I was going to be an orthodox teacher? C’mon, we were tearing down walls. My kids got the full-bore, no grades, no seating chart, no authoritarian prison guard teacher expecting to revolutionize his classroom with guerilla tactics. We read outside with kids in the trees, made movies of zombies who were the kids in other classrooms, created our own syllabus, butted heads with fellow teachers and the administration and even some conservative parents. Oddly enough.

The kids were confused, the staff was confounded, the administration was concerned and I was pretty sure my career was kaput. We were all correct. C’est la vie, I guess. And so, ironically enough, the rest of my life my college degree wouldn’t be guaranteeing me employment. Lucky break for me.

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