Some Unsafe Classrooms
By Grant Maher

As a substitute teacher at Gilroy high school, I encountered the occasional chaotic and ominous class. Boys sometimes bickered and threatened each other. I would eject the offending parties from the classroom but the campus security force routinely rounded up these liberated students and returned them to me within minutes. I could not purge the unruly—I had to deal with them. All too soon a scuffle too blatant to ignore would break out again, and then the whole weary cycle would start over. I had a flimsy yardstick that I would slap on a desk when I needed to get students’ attention, and with that yardstick I yearned to smack heads as well.
There were quiet students who never spoke out, and I didn’t want them to. The responses they were likely to get from peers were unpredictable and usually very negative. “Best not to risk it,” I thought. “Let them just sit quietly.” Years later, when I got a glimpse at the inside workings of jail, I recognized the same atmosphere that had been prevalent in those Gilroy classrooms. Between the attitude of students and of inmates I could discern no difference; between myself and a prison guard there had been none either.
I once accepted a substitute assignment at a grade school in Gilroy and created a living hell on earth for one little 4th grader. I was really not feeling very peppy that day, and the class pretty much spun out of control when I took the kids from the classroom to the school library to choose reading books. There were some boys in this class who seemed very eager to act out aggressively against peers, much to my consternation. I had never encountered a group of young children with this predator/victim dynamic before, and I was nonplussed. Exhortations were getting me nowhere—had these been my own children, there’d be spanking to do.
While trying to restore order to the milling and anxious children, I noticed a little girl in a pink frilly dress huddled under a table, weeping and moaning as a peer, Herbert, poked and tormented her. “Oh!” she cried out. “This is the worst day ever!”
This cry was the death-knell of my career as a substitute in Gilroy and my first attempt to be a teacher. I had lasted eighteen months. I owned that I was not good at maintaining classroom order; it’s easy to blame the kids but I don’t think it had been their fault. On a daily basis, teachers maintain order in the same Gilroy classrooms where I had failed. How these superior beings manage this trick mystifies me to this day. What I learned is that safety is job number one in a classroom or anywhere in life. If you can’t stand the heat then get out of the kitchen. I was going to look for somewhere cooler to try my hand at teaching, the only profession that really mattered to me.