The end of my teaching years at Moreno Valley district came in a most distressing way. For the first three years I was in the teacher in charge of the Independent Studies Program. In the first year, it grew from about 80 students to about 150. In the second year it was about 260 by the end of the school year, and the third year saw the student load reach about 390. As it grew, the increasing need for study materials drove me to the university curriculum library, where I found lessons for all high school subjects, from Algebra to Spanish. I made copies of these lessons, then packaged them in individual packets with cover sheets describing the lesson, and the time period to complete it. By the end of the third year, I had filled a storage room with big boxes filled with lessons filed by subject and they lined the room, on shelves that reached to the ceiling. I had to have a ladder to reach some of them. I had been given two teacher aides, working four hours each day, to help with the materials processing and student tutoring. One of these, Mrs.Van Goor, turned out to be a keyplayer in my fall from grace with the district.I had met Mrs. Van Goor at a fabric department in a local store. She seemed very friendly and smiled a lot. We talked and laughed, and she told me she would love a job working with the high school kids, and she asked me to give her a recommendation. I did, thinking it would not hurt me at all to give her a boost from a store clerks job to a school job. She was hired and assigned to work with me in the program. I did not know that in time she would betray me, in fact undermine me. The program grew to almost 400 students and the load was phenomenal for one teacher with just Mrs. Van Goor as a three hour aide for help. The copied materials were issued and every day of the week, with students coming in daily for the transaction. Katherine Van Goor came in the morning, from 8 til 11 am, and was there to sign students in and help to re-file the lesson materials. She looked them over and checked them for completion. Then, in the spring, I learned that she had made some criticisms of me to the administration. Of course it was a ridiculous and false criticism, but nevertheless it marred my teacher image. So now in addition to the continuation school principal taking credit for the development of the program, now a subordinate was undermining me. By the semester's end, the school district hired three additional teachers to teach in the program, so that instead of me handling it all, the work load now was divided among the now four teachers. That was how much work I had been doing: the equivalent of four teachers. It was a testiment to my organizational abilities, my energy, and my ability to handle large numbers of people with diverse needs. It was the following year that I was transferred to a middle school, teaching social science to 7th and 8th graders.
Middle school can be hellacious. The age group is known for its behavior extremes, as they are adolescents going through major physiological changes. They get emotional, angry and just downright wacky at times for even the slightest of reasons. At the particular school I was assigned to, they had developed a habit of all running en masse spontaneously in the same direction, sweeping across the concrete center area of the school and around the curve to front of the school. It was an odd behavior. The teacher who had the classroom next to mine, on the other side of a portable fabric covered padded folding wall, had an unruly class and he seemed to not be able to control them. Each day the wall, closed but not rigid like a wood wall, would be pushed by the other students in his classroom. In our room, we watched as the wall moved in waves as they pushed on it from the other side. It was like watching ocean waves. You could hear the shouting and the chaos on the other side. The poor teacher was clearly having a tough time with them. The principal, a woman from Peru, came to me and other teachers to ask that we write statements against this teacher. Some of them agreed to do so; I refused. It did not seem proper or just for me to make any statements against a fellow teacher. If the school district was not happy with him, they could use the performance evaluation process to terminate him. That was their job, not mine.
Things grew worse after I refused to write any negative statement against my fellow teacher. One day a girl in my class took an orange out of her book bag, and peeled it, dropping the peelings onto the floor and eating the orange. The juice dripped on her desk. I reminded her of the "no eating in class" rule and write a referral, sending her to the office for making such a mess eating in class. Later at lunch, the principal, the Peruvian woman, encountered me in the teacher lounge and asked me : "Dr. Peters, why do you allow students to eat in class?" God. Of all the ridiculous things to ask. Clearly I did not allow it, as evidenced by the referral I had sent the student with to the office for such behavior. Apparently the student had lied to cover her ass and told the principal that I always let them eat in class. Any student would try to protect themselves from admonishment by saying such a thing. Any idiot adult would realize that. At any rate, it revealed the principal's stupidity and her bias against me. I simply explained that in fact no eating is allowed in class. It was a hopeless situation, and I knew that ultimately I was being pushed down and in the end would be pushed completely out of any chance of promotion to administration.
In early October that year, Pete became paralyzed. He could not get out of bed; his legs would not respond. The doctors at Kaiser where he had not long before had surgery for a hernia said that he had bifocal neuroplagia. This meant that the nerves leading down from his trunk to his legs had been damaged during the surgery and he was now paralyzed.
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