Kathie was still a prayer. I was a doubter, but I, being a spineless dweeb, waffled and wobbled like a weeble when it came to faith. Kathie had accepted a job in Oklahoma City, we both resigned from our jobs at Butner, but we still had a log house, house payments, no money to move, and no place in Oklahoma City to move.
Kathie prayed.
We were in Oklahoma City, looking for something we could rent that was low enough that we could pay rent and make our log house payment. It looked hopeless to me. I was in the with Kathie, we were both in the back, as her dad drove us all to Gibby’s [a nickname for the Store Gibsons, a store like TG&Y or an early Walmart Store], and we drove past this little brick duplex. It looked too nice, and no way we could afford it. Kathie, who is usually the one unwilling to take financial risks, wrote the phone number down.
When we got back to her folk’s house, Kathie called the number and found out the cost was almost $500 a month, which was about the same as our house payment. I thought, ‘No Way This Will Happen.’
The landlord said the couple there had to move soon and he could show us the house with permission from the tenants.
I went with Kathie to see this duplex and I knew there was absolutely no way we could afford to do this. Once we got inside the wife-tenant said something surprising. Her husband had just been hired as the police chief for the Wewoka Police Department.
We were living in Wewoka.
The couple needed a place to rent.
We just happened to have a place to rent.
They would have to have a washer and drier in the house.
This duplex had a washer and drier so we could leave our washer and drier there.
Quickly a deal was struck. We would move in, the same day they moved out. They would rent our log house, and we would take over their rental duplex.
It is hard to totally poo-poo prayer when something like this happens. Oklahoma City is a big town. We just happened to drive past the duplex and see the for rent sign. The couple moving out just happened to be moving to Wewoka and they were needing a place to rent.
Things seemed to work out in a way that does not seem possible. If you insist you can claim that those were just coincidences, or you could at least consider that perhaps God uses coincidences to answer our prayers.
I found that whole experience jarring.
The move worked out and we were in Oklahoma City, and we had someone to pay our house payment for us, via rent. But only Kathie had a job.
I went to the mall and started selling shoes at JC Penny’s, and I applied everywhere I could think of, including a church of Christ K through 12 Church of Christ Private School.
I was a closet doubter. I did not know, then, that most believers are also carrying some doubts.
“It’s funny how you can spend your entire life wondering if there’s a God until suddenly in a time of crisis, you’re begging Him for help as if you’d never doubted He existed.” ― Penelope Ward, Stepbrother Dearest
What happened was more than praying to God out of desperation, this was answered prayer that had shocked me so.
I was confused. I did not have much faith in prayer, although I was given to short shallow prayers when times were tough. I did not then, nor do I now believe that prayers change God’s mind. Most people I knew used prayer as a sort of magic incantation. If you say the right words, the right way, you magically get what you want? No.
And yet, sometimes, like with the housing, the prayer seems to work exactly like a magic spell.
SELLING SHOES
I worked all summer selling shoes but by the end of Summer I was offered a position teaching English at the Living Word Academy. There was one uncomfortable catch to taking the job. This Church of Christ private school required that the teachers enroll their children in the school. That meant that Ryan would have to go to kindergarten, and to stay at their daycare. I needed the paycheck, and I agreed.
The Living Word Academy also required that the teacher attend a church of Christ congregation, faithfully. We placed membership with at the Quail Springs Church of Christ.
One good thing about a big church is that you can, if you want, get lost in the crowd. If you go to a small church you are going to be asked to serve at the table, lead a prayer, lead the singing, teach a class, take over the youth group, or something, but Quail Springs had well over a thousand people every Sunday. I had been burned by churches of Christ repeatedly, and, yes, I was part of the blame for all that, but I was tired of being upset by the church. I was going to try to just do my job, go to church, keep my head down, and hope life got better. Now I was still seeing a shrink. My struggles with depression never left me. It took me years to realize that one of the main reasons I felt unworthy of life, is that I felt unworthy of worthiness.
I started painting again. I painted and drew throughout my childhood. I was doing serious art work while we were living in Milwaukee, so I was 15 years old when that painting was going on. I painted some while we were living in Wewoka, and did several major works then. There was a drop off of painting when I went to Ada, but I did start painting again just prior to graduating from college. In Oklahoma City I did a lot of work. I showed my art work twice at the Paseo art show.
Kathie seemed to fit in well at Central Junior High [now called Capps Junior High School], but obviously there were adjustments.
Ryan really hated the Living Word Academy. He would cry every single day when I left him at the daycare. When I picked him up he voiced his complaints about what went on in his Kindergarten class. Ryan told me about how his teacher would yell at the children, and make some of the students sit on the floor under their desk as punishment.
“Why can’t she just give them another chance?” he asked.
I thought it was a good question. These were young children and this was their first experience with education.
One day Ryan told me he was sorry he had not cleaned his room, and then he added, “I want to go to heaven, and not to hell.”
“Why would you even think you would go to hell?” I asked.
“The Bible says it is a sin not to obey your parents. If you sin, God sends you to hell,” he said.
“God never sends children to hell,” I said.
I hated the way the students at the Living Word Academy were manipulated by the staff and pressured to accept a “Church of Christ Way.”
One chapel service the head of the school showed an anti-abortion film. It may have been Silent Scream. It is possible they showed more than one and I am remembering parts from different films. What I want to stress is that it was shocking to me and may have been a form of child abuse forcing very young children and tweens to watch those horrible propaganda films. In one film they showed a woman, almost totally nude from the waist down. The woman was on an operating table and there was a fuzzy circle covering her vaginal area. Not much was obscured by the frosted circle and it was clear something had been pushed into the woman’s vagina and they were vacuuming out a fetus in pieces.
There were pictures of dead babies in a garbage can. There was some sort of X-ray film showing a probe grabbing a fetus and the unborn baby was about to be torn apart and removed from the womb, and on the face of this unborn child was something that looked like a scream, a silent scream.
I remember the school showed a segment of the Phil Donahue Show about a woman, named Marian Guinn who was suspected of being involved in some sort of sin, by the Church of Christ in Collinsville, Oklahoma. When the woman found out that the Elders were considering Withdrawal of Fellowship, she sent the Elders a letter withdrawing herself from membership in the Collinsville Church of Christ.
The Elders felt that since no one adds themselves to the Body of Christ, that that happens through baptism, that no one has the right to withdraw themselves from the Body of Christ.
When the Elders informed the congregation of the specific sins Ms Guinn was accused of committing, and the exact scriptures she had violated, they formally withdrew from Ms Guinn.
Marian Guinn countered the actions of the Elders by filing her lawsuit, alleging that she was abusively treated and that her privacy had been violated.
Later I think the courts ruled that when Ms Guinn joined the church of Christ she was voluntarily submitting herself to the process of Withdrawal of Fellowship, but once she sent a letter and dropped out, her consent to the rules of the church of Christ had been removed and the Elders no longer had the right to withdraw from her.
The atmosphere at the Living Word Academy was oppressive. They had daily chapel for the students.
Chapel for the kids was not enough. We had a devotional every morning with the teachers.
I remember one morning, before school started, the sky was still black, and the temperature was freezing. Because the school was not doing well financially, the buildings were not kept warm enough. I was huddled in a circle of desks with other women teachers [there were very few males on staff there] and we were all miserable. One of the principles was giving a little devo-sermon when he says:
“Do you want to know what heaven is like?” He smiles at us like he as this gotch statement to say next that is going to blow our collective and chilled minds. Then he says, “Heaven, [dramatic pause] is like this.”
Nine frozen teachers, tired, worried if our paychecks are going to clear, ordered to come extra early to school for a devo, and heaven is like this? I thought, “Oh, Lord I sure hope it is nothing like this.”
The paycheck thing was an issue. When payday came around the Superintendent would call a teacher’s meeting and tell us, as soon as school was out, we should go to the bank and deposit our check, that if we wait the checks might bounce.
I made up my mind early on that I was not going to stay there another year.
It worked out well because I think the school went defunct the following year, or no later than the year after that.
I was not going to have Ryan go to a place that made him so miserable.
I started interviewing as soon as the school year closed.
I eventually got a call to interview with Bubba Hellzeal [yeah, I made the name up] the principal of Mayfield Junior High School. Bubba was a former CHIPS officer from California, a big barrel chested guy.
I wish I’d had more imagination. I wish I’d looked for work outside of teaching, but at the time I figured I had to teach, that I was too much of a loser to do anything else. I was also too much of a loser to teach, but I still tried hard to get the job. I sent Mr. Hellzeal a thank you card after our interview.
Later he told me that of all the people he interviewed for the job, I was the only one who sent a him a thank you card.
MAYFIELD
My first faculty meeting at Mayfield let me know that there was something seriously wrong at that school. The teachers sort of huddled together and made snide remarks about the principal. Now I felt the guy was intimidating, but he’d just hired me, and that saved me from the Living Word Academy, so I had no grudge against the guy.
After the faculty meeting it was clear to me that Bubba was similar in style to Don Hoover. Several of the teachers started passing around that they were going to a bar for drinks as soon as they were released for the day.
I found certain things off putting. Bubba acted like I was one of his close confidants. There was a teacher there who had been teaching drama, and she had been moved to a straight English teaching load, AND she was forced to float, meaning she had to move all her stuff every time the bell rang. I was given her drama class. I took it, because I was needing a job and that was part of the job, but I’d not only not ever had a drama class, and I’d never been in a play, I also had zero experience with drama.
Another duty I was given at Mayfield was to be the Cheerleader Sponsor.
Cheerleader sponsor is not a job that should go to a 32 year old man teacher, but again, I’d been a pep club sponsor at Butner, and I was needing work, so, yeah, I’ll be a Cheerleader Sponsor.
My first problem happened before school even started. The “head” Cheerleader came to me to complain about one of the other cheerleaders who had been caught drinking over the summer, and she had missed several of their practices. According to their bylaws, or rules, or this stupid piece of paper with Cheerleader Rules on it. According to the rules the girl needed to be suspended from performing for the first two performances for the year.
I read the rules, called the girl at home and told her she was suspended from performing for two performances.
The following day I’m called down to the Teacher’s Lounge to meet with that girl and her mother. The mother was one of those born again fundamentalist women who lets you know she is a Christian in every other breath.
Immediately the mother started pressuring me to change my decision.
Here was my thinking:
- If I cave on my very first action as the Sponsor then every decision I make from that point forward would be subject to attack by anyone who didn’t like my decision.
- The rules were printed and clear and I was not doing anything but following the guidelines. This girl and her mother had signed a document saying they understood the rules and they agreed to follow them.
I’d just read something in a book about how to handle difficult people, and one of the suggestions was to use THE BROKEN RECORD TECHNIQUE. The Broken Record Technique was to say what your decision was and then pause. Let the other party vent, scream, cuss threaten, et cetera. Then you were to say what you had just said, using virtually the exact same words, as if you were a broken record. [Those who have no history that included vinyl LPs may not know but sometimes a needle would get stuck on a vinyl record and a segment of the record would play and repeat and repeat and repeat.] That was what I did with this mother. At one point the mother told me she hated me, that I was so unfair. I just kept repeating that the guidelines she and her daughter had signed off on, were violated, and the consequences of that violation was also part of the guidelines.
The mother eventually ran out of steam and my suspension remained in place.
I found out that Cheerleader sponsor was nothing like a Pep Club Sponsor. My responsibility as a Pep Club sponsor was to chaperone the Pep Club as they went to football games. I rode the bus. I sat in the stands. Sometimes I was asked to watch purses.
Cheerleaders dress in skimpy clothes and their practice resembles what I imagine is identical to stripper pole dancer practice. I was very uncomfortable to be sitting in the gym watching prepubescent girls to dance and perform in as sexy a manner as they could get away with.
I felt open to allegations of inappropriate behavior. I wasn’t going to be inappropriate, but that had nothing to do with it. That girl I suspended could easily have destroyed me by waiting a little while and then telling her mother I had tried to touch her boobies. That is all it would have taken. How could I prove I was innocent?
I endured the duty that first year but I told Mr. Hellzeal I did not want to continue with that duty for the following year.
I got an excellent evaluation when Mr. Hellzeal himself did my evaluation.
Hellzeal’s behavior with the teachers was odd and upsetting to everyone. He would do things like require the teachers to go to the office to get a ditto master and when the request was made the teacher was given ONE. They may have had 3 or 4 preparations, but they were given one ditto at a time.
I guess teachers were dragging in slow some days, so Hellzeal made a rule that you had to come by the front office, get the attention of one of the secretaries, and sign in with the time you arrived. At exactly the second you were officially late, they secretaries changed to a LATE sign in sheet.
There were dozens and dozens of micromanager, I’m the boss and you’re a turd, actions by the principal, and at one point in the Spring of the school year, someone said they wanted to file a grievance against Mr. Hellzeal. After this was talked it around a second decision was made to have a “group grievance.”
By the Spring I was convinced that Bubba was mentally ill and sometimes he got so angry I wondered if he might go berserk, and hurt somebody. Really.
I signed the group grievance.
Hellzeal’s way of dealing with a grievance was to demand the first hearing immediately. I think he didn’t want the grievant to have a chance to prepare.
After school the same day he got the grievance, all the grievants were called to the vocal music room after school. When Hellzeal came by my room he said,
“Well, Mr. Norman, it seems you have accused me of a crime.”
“Crime?” I said, “there’s just some treatment that needs to be worked out,” I said.
“No!” he said with a raised voice. “You signed the grievance, and you have accused me of a crime.”
Then Bubba told me to show up in the vocal music room as soon as school was out.
We all gathered in the room and sat in student desks. Bubba was there, and eventually, Mike Medford showed up from Putnam City High School. Mike was the grievance chairman for the Putnam City Association of Classroom Teachers.
As I watched Bubba and Mike debated the negotiated agreement I was inspired. The PCACT guy was trying to convince Bubba that he had violated the negotiated agreement. Bubba was trying to convince Mike that he had not violated the negotiated agreement, that this was all bellyaching by a bunch of spineless teachers who were too yellow to come to him directly and instead were hiding behind the negotiated agreement.
Obviously no one agreed with anyone, but for me, the whole thing seemed a little like church of Christ arguments with those sinner Baptists and Methodists. I could actually see myself being the grievance chairman for the district. It seemed like teacher union stuff was something I was perfectly prepared to do.
We lost that grievance, of course, but I was going to meetings and suddenly I found myself on the teacher negotiation team for PCACT. I expected to have trouble with Bubba the following year, because I’d been part of the group grievance, but I figured, being on the negotiation team that that was such a high profile position that Bubba would not single me out for retaliation. I was so fuckin’ wrong about that.
Later, when the teachers and school board were at impasse regarding negotiations I was put on the team of folk who started trying to get the Board to move on their impasse position.
That Fall, Mayfield had this Oktoberfest night where some of the clubs had booths and the choir performed. I was not a sponsor for a club, so I decided to use this opportunity to advocate for the teachers. I had a flier run off at the PCACT office. On the flier it explained what issues were involved in the impasse. The flier also provided all the phone numbers for the school board members and asked the parents to call their school board members and urge them to return to the negotiating table.
The following day I was sitting in the In School Detention Room, where I monitored the room one class period each day.
Bubba comes in and chuckles. “Well,” he says, “it looks like those union marauders hit our cars last night.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Were you involved in putting those fliers on the cars last night?” he asked me.
I told him I was involved.
“I was just wondering,” he said, and chuckled, and left the room.
My life got a lot more difficult after that.
While my last evaluation had been perfect, this time, when I was evaluated, I was deficient in everything. I want to say that I can’t dispute that I had poor classroom control. My experience is that you can suck in every other area as a teacher, but if you have strong classroom management skills you are seen as a great teacher.
I was not a great teacher. I also was not worse at my job in year two than I’d been in year one.
It was clear to me that I was being punished because I was active in the teacher union. There was actually something in our negotiated agreement that said you could not be harassed or intimidated or threatened because you exercised your right to be involved in the teacher union.
I was afraid to do this, but I filed a grievance against Bubba Hellzeal.
The grievance process required that I meet with the principal, orally tell him what issues I was wanting relief from, and give him an opportunity to try to resolve the grievance at the first step before there was anything reduced to writing.
I did the informal step. My hands were shaking. I was afraid. Remember how often I’ve mentioned I had debts, and needed a paycheck. I was afraid, but I did it anyway.
Bubba mentioned that I didn’t look good, that my face and ears were red, and maybe I should look into doing something else. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a school teacher.
I agreed with him, but I wasn’t about to say so.
I started the formal steps of the grievance procedure.
By the end of the school year I was still going through the steps of my grievance against my principal, and I was running for PCACT President. I was elected, replacing Candy Chavez, but it was not that big a deal, because I was running unopposed. I had some fear that someone might seek to be a write in candidate and I would run unopposed and still lose.
One of my happiest periods of employment was while serving as the PCACT President.
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