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| Good times in the old office. |
The more he talked, the more she remembered him, despite the
startling absence of his youthful head of hair. She had been teaching that semester in the trailers, a leaky trailer on the
outskirts of the parking lot and this student had struggled mightily but
succeeded. He liked to sit in the back
and rocked in his chair, which worried her, and indeed one day he rocked
completely over, falling back and over, hitting his head with a crack Rebel Girl
swears she can still hear. She reminded him of this and he laughed. He was so young then they both agreed.
He is a teacher now, teaching AP calculus and water polo at
a private Catholic high school. Doing
just fine, he said, each year more grateful for his old teachers. He was off to find Mark McNeil after his
visit with Rebel Girl. He admired the
new LA building and her new office digs and she directed him to where he might
find McNeil in the still-relatively-new-to-him BSTIC building.
“Are you visiting anyone else?” she asked. “Who'd you study with in Math?” He was, after all, an AP calculus teacher.
What followed was a sad and familiar tale. He had studied, he told them, with a professor now
since retired with whom he did well as math was his strength but what he had
really learned in that class, he said, was the kind of teacher not to be. As a teacher, he said, you need to hold students
up, not pull them down.
Rebel Girl and Chunk immediately recognized the professor,
famous for his rude classroom manner and his animosity toward female students in
particular. The professor’s behavior was
an open secret on campus. He was protected
and tolerated through the years as people made various excuses for his behavior
or downplayed it.
Minutes passed as each shared stories with a “Can you top
this?” attitude until all looked at each other in despair and congratulated
each other on not, indeed, being that kind of teacher or person.
“But why didn’t anyone ever do anything about him, about his
behavior?” asked the student.
Friends in high places, they told him. Plus a tolerance for sexism.
That’s just wrong, the student said.
They agreed.
A few days later, Rebel Girl was in midst of end-of-semester
individual conferences with all of her composition students, an exhausting but
useful activity. One of her outstanding students
this semester is a vet, a student who attended IVC in the late 90s, dropped
out, joined the military and now has returned and is excelling, ready to
transfer. At the end of their
conference, she asked him about his previous time at IVC, what it was
like. He began to tell the tale of the math
professor, in whose class he did well, but whose unprofessional behavior he
recalled with the same fresh repugnance as the previous student. He asked the same question: why didn’t anyone
ever do anything about this man?
It’s still a good question.
It’s still a good question.
Anyone know the answer?
