Miss Manners

My first teaching assignment was a trial by fire for many reasons. First, I had six different preps, meaning that each day I taught six completely different classes: Spanish (a joke, but I had 12 hours in it and that was enough for emergency certification), English II, 7th grade English, 8th grade U.S. History, 9th grade U.S. History, and English IV. Second, I was a senior class sponsor. Third, I agreed to be the cheerleader coach when the sum of my cheerleading experience was watching that made-for-tv movie where Jane Seymour and Julie from The Love Boat tried out for the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.

In addition to all my other duties, for some reason I became the unofficial etiquette adviser for the school system. How did this happen? I really don't know. Maybe it was the dignified way I ate my Frito Pie (For the uninitiated, this is a marvelous concoction served at every Texas high school football game that contains Fritos corn chips with chili and cheese on top. Jalapenos are optional, but in my opinion the vital finishing touch to this dish. After all, every meal needs a vegetable.) at ball games with my napkin in my lap. Perhaps it was the fact that when I had to tell the math teacher to f-off, I whispered it in hear ear rather than utter it aloud for everyone else to hear. I'm nothing if not polite, I say.

At any rate, I became the go to girl for all sorts of sticky social situations. I should mention that our school population was about 98% Caucasian, 1% African American, and 1% Hispanic. I frequently had to remind our kids when we went to football games or field trips that it was unacceptable to make comments about the ethnicity of people we might see. Most of the kids considered seeing someone of another race a novelty and did not mind pointing out at full volume, "Look over there at those black people." I know. I did the best that I could to make them understand that the real world was a much more diverse place than the county they lived in (and that some of them had never been out of).

One of our field trips was a reward trip to the Six Flags amusement park in the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex. A young man got on the bus with a shirt that I deemed totally unacceptable for our trip, since I found it deliberatly racially incendiary. He argued with me, I told him he wasn't going anywhere with me in that shirt, he thought I was just uptight, and we finally compromised on a shirt that said "If you don't like rodeo . . .Buck off!"

These kids had lived such a sheltered existence that they didn't understand why there weren't any Baptists in Romeo and Juliet. When I was preparing my seniors to read The Canterbury Tales, I explained to them how Thomas a Becket had been murdered in the cathedral and mentioned something about the Cardinals who helped run the Catholic Church. They actually thought that I was talking about birds. I once made a comment about someone who had used the wrong fork meaning the wrong piece of flatware at one's own place setting, and they thought I was talking about someone who took a fork from the hand of someone else since they had never seen or heard about having more than one fork.

I did a lot of educating that had nothing to do with the content of my courses, but I certainly think I was fulfilling a need. I have to give the kids credit: they were not afraid to ask questions. I mentioned in an earlier post that our football team once played a team from an Episcopalian school. When we got off the bus, one of the football players yelled (never a reason to be discreet), "Hey, Miss, who's that dude in a dress?" I looked around for the nearest transvestite, but had to reply, "Clay, that's not a dude in a dress, he's a priest."