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The SnakeApr 06 '03 (Updated Jun 18 '03) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line This is a story about a very sad situation. The lessons should not be taken lightly.
When one teaches children they become one’s own children. To watch children grow up into adults and live out their lives is both a wonderfully rewarding and cruelly disappointing process. Such is the tale I relate. I began teaching in a small town in the northwestern part of the state some 30 years ago. Twenty five of those years were spent working under one principle. The man was a tyrant. He was slovenly, bigoted, and totally unaware that anyone should have any idea of excellence other than his own. He was completely intolerant of anything that put him in a negative light. He was an excellent disciplinarian, politician, and his administrative duties usually kept him out of the classroom. The successful children of the small community never had to deal with him. The trouble makers were usually not bright enough to cause him very much trouble. So he retained his position for entirely too long. The superintendent in charge of this man was an excellent administrator, so the principal did not need to do much thinking. As long as he took the money from the ball games to the safe, and as long as the football and basketball games started on time, he remained basically worry free, and his superintendent left him alone unless he needed something and the poor man would break everyone’s neck seeing that his boss got it. Their idea of staff management was to stand together on the campus and visit about who knows what. It gave a wonderful impression of supervision and those of the staff who were prone to trouble making just knew they were the one’s being discussed. A wonderfully funny song became popular during this principal’s term of administration. The song was titled “Sneaky Snake”. For some reason unknown to anyone, the students started referring to this principal as the snake. At first it was sneaky snake. Then it corrupted itself into simply the snake. For a period of almost five years this principal was plagued with the reputation. He knew of it, and instead of going along with the joke, he would become violently angry at the simplest of references to anything resembling a snake. It became quite popular for the students to harass seventh graders fresh from grade school by encouraging them to make hissing noises in the principal’s presence. The result was often devastating to the seventh grader and hilarious to the perpetrators. The staff just shook their heads for they all understood that the poor man was bringing all this abuse upon himself. He just could not see it. My own daughter, at the end of one school year made a poster of a snake in a pair of basketball shorts and hung it in the principal’s office window. It stayed there almost a week before he got the message, and he never found out who did it. Many were interviewed, and among them was one of my flag girls, Tanya, an exceptionally bright young lady with much energy and a mischievous disposition. Although she did not do it. He never stopped suspecting her. I myself expressed the desire of arranging a ceremony wherein the Daughters of the American Revolution would raise the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag above the school yard while I directed the band in patriotic melodies. The staff members, the principle's boss included, tried to get him to lighten up, but that only made matters worse. He endured the reputation for entirely too long and something had to be done. A solution was found by some very wise staff members, but no one was willing to hang the bell. It had to be hung or the disruption would continue unabated. I was elected to bear the risk of bringing the abuse into a public forum. It would be in the form of a joke that was very well crafted so as to close the matter for the students, make everyone aware that it was only a small matter, and elevate the status of the principal to the point that he appeared to have given up his disdain for the reptilian reputation. At first I thought it would be dangerous, and I refused, but the more I thought about it the more I was willing to do it. I was asked to do a skit as “Carnac the Magnificent.” This was a familiar Johnny Carson routine where I was to be given a list of answers and would delve into the supernatural for the questions. The deed was done at a football pep assembly. The first few questions were about the team, the cheerleaders, the band, and a teacher or two. I even sportingly took the brunt of one of the jokes. The snake had already stricken several times during the first part of the football season. It was apparent that the reputation had to end. I held up the “answer” to my forehead looking around the room with a very large grin, and very plainly spoke the sentence fragment, “A snake and a balloon.” There was devastating silence in the room. Every eye was on the principal. They no longer looked at me. I waited until the attention returned to me and after an interminable pause, I replied the question: “What goes hiss before it explodes.” There was uproarious laughter. I had not mentioned his name. I had not done anything to warrant any reprimand, but I had made very public the reputation, and had put it into a very different light. Later I visited with the superintendent and mentioned to him that if the principal was wise he would no longer be plagued with the nickname “the snake”. It came to pass that for the remainder of that year the snake struck not a single time, nor in the years that followed, except once. At a pep assembly during Tanya’s junior year, near the end of the football season, Tanya presented the principal with an off color T-shirt. Specifically, it had the image of a jackass on it. This was meant to be a joke--something she had concocted herself--in retaliation for something he had done to offend Tanya. To her way of thinking it was harmless. She had been taught by her peers and by her parents to stand up for what she believed in. She did just that. I witnessed the presentation. I had suggested to her that she should not do it. I was powerless to stop her. The nature of the T-shirt was known only to a few of those standing near the principal. A week went by while the principal stewed about what to do. The talk of the event had subsided. Then without warning the principal called Tanya into his office and booted her out of school for the remainder of the year. He was defended by the administration. The faculty, my self included, would not challenge his decision. Personally, I believed that he had done irreparable harm to both himself and Tanya. It was much too late to do anything about it. The action was totally final. What was a simple misjudgment on the part of Tanya became a very serious tragedy. She did not return to school to graduate. I remember Tanya’s work as a flag girl. She was exuberant. She developed extremely creative routines for the flag corps. My own daughter held her in high regard for her outgoing nature, and her loyalty to the flag corps was exemplary. Her mischieviousness was never a problem to us for we understood that creative people had to be allowed to be creative. Some of the other teachers had a bit of a problem getting her to keep her grades up, but she was much to bored to sit still in class. This was sort of what prompted her to present that T-shirt in the first place. Tanya’s sister, a very funny and precocious child herself, was removed by her parents and sent to study in another community to avoid pressures emanating from the experiences her sister had endured. On one occasion the child returned to visit my classroom. I turned the class over to her so that she could relate a story that I thought the children might enjoy. To my surprise and delight, the child did an hour of perfectly clean and wonderfully funny stand up comedy that kept us all in stitches. Tanya, lacking an education, ultimately turned to catching turkeys for a living. She had an abiding interest in music and fell in with some musicians who tried to help her. Her grandfather had been a professional trombone player who had performed with Red Nickels’ band when Jack Teagarten wasn’t playing with them. His record collection was graciously loaned to me and transcribed onto tape while Tanya was playing trombone in my band. Having heard the stories surrounding the death of Jack Teagarten and having heard the music on that record collection it is my belief that some of those records came directly from the collection of Mr. Teagarten. There were obscure examples of Bix Biederbeck, Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, Paul Whiteman and others that had become legend as well as almost everything Red Nickels ever recorded. There was even a rare recording of the Red Nickels’ band playing a tune featuring a trombonist named Anderson. Tanya’s grandfather had been named Anderson. Tanya came over to my house one morning, she hitchhiked to get there, asking me to help her with a song she was writing. I did the best I could, but she just was not cut out to be a musician. What she possessed in exuberance and desire, she lacked in discipline and skill. Tanya managed to communicate some of the song she was writing to me and some of it was realized. Still, I could not quite grasp what she was trying to accomplish. Rather than allowing her to hitchhike back home, I drove her back to her parents house in the other town. It was a comfortable home and she was overjoyed to introduce me to her Great Dane. I saw Tanya twice more. One evening she showed up at Michael’s, a nightclub where I would go and play tenor sax with some friends. Tanya sat down at the drum set and brought the house down with some astonishing percussion. She then proceeded to get very drunk. I don’t think I ever saw her more beautiful than that evening, but by the time I followed her home, to see that she made it all right, she had deteriorated into a dangerously depressed state. The other time I saw her, was when she introduced me to a rather worthless appearing fellow who she said she was living with in a larger nearby city. I encouraged her as much as time allowed, and she seemed sort of happy, but she looked like she had really had a hard time. That principal, the snake that booted her out of school, began a campaign to remove me from the classroom. It was his opinion that I, somehow, had orchestrated Tanya's presentation. I never asked. I also had purchased a house that I believe he wanted to buy. Many things happened in conflict with his interests, and I would come out with the advantage. The snake got it on an assistant principal that he was a drunk and a womanizer and held it up to him to persuade him to generate negative evaluations against me. I fought that man’s evaluations for a year and the lesson proved invaluable. I finally won the paper war, but announced retirement the next year prior to the first evaluation. The paper trail I left behind would prove to be devastating to both men’s career’s in that institution. Two more years passed and Tanya’s sister died. Some said it was a drug overdose, but her mom and my daughter, who knew her well, said it was of a seizure disorder she had from childhood. Tanya took this very hard and returned home to live with her parents. Then, after time had seemed to quench all of these fires, I read in the paper that Tanya had been found dead beneath a communications tower near the town where she lived. Nothing was said other than that blurb in the newspaper announcing that the thirty year old woman had either fallen or jumped from 98 feet up the tower. My daughter and Tanya used to get drunk and climb that tower. Both of them joked that if they ever committed suicide, it would be by jumping off that tower. They both promised each other that neither of them would ever do that. Tanya, having experienced the turmoil of her sister’s death, would never have put her parents through that again. Of course the truth is often according to who tells it, and this is perfectly selfish of me, but I would be very understanding if a rumor circulated that Tanya was found beneath that tower with a note pinned to her blouse in her own handwriting that said, “Say Thanks to the Snake For Me.” August 9, 2000 Tanya has my place in heaven.  |
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