Essay Forty, Age 43, 1989 Harassment at Moreno Valley USD, settlement, and a Trip to China

In the photo below I am forty-three years old. It was taken in 1989, on October 31st. I was wearing a black sheer blouse, a full skirt, and much jewelry in a costume as a gypsy as part of the school's Halloween observance. I was teaching at a middle school in Moreno Valley, having already spent years as the sole teacher for the Independent Studies Program and been the victim of dirty politics and cliques that killed my chances of ever climbing to an administration job. Things had become strained; my teaching assignment had become so irrelevant that it was almost a joke. Myself and two other jewish people had been targets of administrative violations of rights.

I had been hired at the end of the summer in 1983, to teach the Independent Studies Program. It had begun with about sixty students and each year grew quite a bit. By the sixth year I had almost 400 students in the program. That is when things reached a peak of difficulty and in fact, impossibility. I had no budget and no textbooks all those years. Instead, I went to the library at the nearby university and found books for each subject I taught and copied sections I needed for the lessons. I then took the copy to the school district copy center and had 30 copies made, which I put a cover sheet on and stapled into lesson packets. These were what I issued to students each week, with the admonition that they were not to write in the packets, as they had to be re-issued to others. So went the program, a system I had developed of massive copying and circulation of lesson packets to the students. I had a storeroom full from floor to ceiling of boxes filled with lesson packets, filed in order by weekly lessons for mathematics, languages, sciences, and the full range of subjects taught at the regular high school campus. Each week, each student took five packets home, one for each subject that he or she was studying, and during the week read and completed the exercises contained within the packet. They then returned their completed written exercises to me for evaluation and the lesson packet to be re-filed for use by others. It was a factory, a drive-through of lessons. I felt that I had devised a fast food chain for learning. But the stresses grew as the enrollment grew to levels that exhausted me. I needed more help but none was given by the district. I began to ask my superiors for additional help. Several times each week, I gave orientation classes for new incoming students. This orientation was an hour long and was an explanation of how to complete the assignments and how to receive credits for them.