The Penis Bowl

That reminds me Ms. Anderson.  You’re fired!

I started working for the Polk Education Association in 1990 and one of the first things to happen was that Mario Crews, the President of PEA, took me to visit with the Director of Employee Relationship, Dave Manley.  Dave had actually served as a PEA president and at the end of his terms with PEA he was hired by the School Board to be the Director of Employee Relations which meant that he was the School Board’s Chief Negotiator [he went from the teacher’s negotiations advocate to the teacher’s negotiations opponent], and Mr. Manley was also the person who handled teacher discipline issues.

“I’ve got an issue out at Lakeland High School,”  Manley said.  “With one of your members that we have had problems with before.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Crews.  “Who are we talking about?”

I wasn’t saying anything.  I was new and these guys were friends.

“Liz Anderson,” Manley said.  “She’s an old burned out hippie art teacher who has been inappropriate for years.”

“What’s she done this time?”  Crews asked.

“Well, she allowed one of her students to make this clay bowl,” he paused for dramatic effect, “With two erect 10 inch clay penises sticking out of the bowl, and a set of testicals at the base of each penis.”  At this point everyone laughed.

I include myself in this, but I have to explain laughing.  We laugh for different reasons.  Most of us think of laughter as a response to something funny.  What we find funny, usually is something we expect to be one way and then we are surprised that it is not as we expected it to be.  Example:  “Would you hit a woman with a child?”  Answer:  “No.  I’d use a brick.”  The answerer mistook the question thinking he was asking if he would take a child and beat a woman with the child using the baby like a baseball bat.  Obviously the whole thing is not only ridiculous, but unexpected and so the joke teller hopes the unexpected will be taken as funny.

We do laugh at jokes, but we also laugh when we are embarrassed.  If someone farts in church some might laugh NOT because it is funny, but because they don’t know how they should respond and our bodies just use laughter as a way to respond to the uncomfortable.

I am not sure how everyone was taking this penis bowl incident, but the outer response was that three men were laughing like little boys because someone said penis out loud.

The Liz Anderson incident was a good one.  I was not the lead in that incident, but I was present and a part of PEA’s defense of Ms. Anderson’s job.

The school board’s response to Ms. Anderson was to fire her.  She was suspended with pay until the board met.  She was terminated at the next board meeting, and PEA filed paperwork to request a hearing before the board.  The board ruled against Ms. Anderson which allowed PEA to request a hearing before a Special Master.

This was all in the teacher contract to avoid going to court to resolve employment issues.  A special master was a state licensed hearing officer who would come to a school district.  The Board side and the teacher side would prepare their cases and present their positions to the Special Master.  The ruling of the Special Master was binding, according to the negotiated agreement, which meant that if the Special Master ruled to keep Ms. Alexander in the classroom, the School Board would have no choice but to keep her on.  If the Special Master ruled to sustain the School Board’s action of terminating Ms. Alexander’s employment, then she was out of a job and she would have no other recourse.

It turned out that Ms. Anderson had been a problem to Lakeland High School for years.

When I first met Liz Anderson it was clear that burned out old hippie was a fair depiction of this high school art teacher.  On the other hand, art teacher, hippie, and eccentric frequently will all seem to go together.

Liz wore no make up.  Ever.  Liz tended to dress in denim skirts or blue jeans, and Birkenstocks were standard footwear for her.  She had a car, but often drove to school on her Vespa scooter.  

Most art teachers are also artists, and most artists have a preferred medium to express their artistic drive.  For Liz it was paper mache.  She was actually pretty good at this.  She had some amazing, and large paper mache works.  She would build a frame of wire and cover the wire with strips of newspaper.  Eventually she would do the fine details of her work using a mix of shredded toilet paper, mixed with acrylic varnish and plaster.  She would then use acrylic paints and glossy acrylic varnish to finish the work off.  

The story from Liz went like this:

“It was a Friday,” she said, “and the students had clay sculpture projects due.  I had to have everything in by that Friday because I was going to put the works in the drying room.  The clay has to be thoroughly dry before placed in the kiln, or else the works will explode as the moisture inside the clay vaporizes.”

Ok.

“What I remember happening is, the last period of the day, the bell rings, and those still working on their projects rushed to my desk to place their projects and then they rushed out the door.”  Liz smiled.  “I didn’t notice the bowl with the two boners in it until all the students were goine.”

See?  She was innocent.  

But how could one student make a bowl with two erect penises in it with a teacher presumably circulating through the room helping this person and that, and yet said teacher never noticed erect pensis sticking up out of a bowl?

Well, I’m a hired advocate for the teacher so I am on her side by employment, and therefore, I don’t accuse.  I ask questions, of course, but I accept the answers as if they are the truth.

During the hearing before the special master things looked bad.  

The school board brought in a six foot paper mache joint that Liz Anderson allowed a student to make several years back.  They also brought out some pottery bongs.  

PEA:  Could those pipes be Indian Peace Pipes?

[They were very clearly bongs, but, well, we were advocates for the teacher.]

We ended up getting both the clay bongs and the paper mache joint thrown out as evidence because the negotiated agreement states that the school board is prevented from using anything threes ago or longer from being used in a termination hearing.

Now this sounds bad, after all, Ms. Anderson was being shown as a teacher with a long history of poor decisions, but one way to look at it is that the school board had the evidence to use against Ms. Anderson for the past several years.  Why wasn’t she terminated when the paper mache joint was discovered?

The school board’s attorney, Buba Boswell, had a go at Lis Anderson.

First, the school board brought in the object that sparked all this concern, the penis bowl. Because the bowl was never fired the clay was just unfired dry mud.  In transport the penis cylinders came loose and were rolling around inside the crudely formed pinch-pot bowl.   The four clay balls that originally had been stuck to the bottom the bowl, next to the cylinders to represent testicals, also came lose in transport and they too were rolling around in the bowl.

As Bubba Boswell questioned Ms. Anderson she casually reached over and picked up on of the penis/cylinders and held it between two fingers they way someone might hold a burning cigar.

As she talked Pearl, the Executive Director whispered to me, “Tell her to put the penis down!”

From Ms. Anderson we learned that the bowl was left on her desk Friday before the Labor Day Weekend.  Ms. Anderson said when she saw the bowl she knew it was inappropriate.  She said she put the bowl in the drying room and thought she would deal with the matter later.

If she never intended to fire the penial art project then why did she put the bowl in  the drying room?  No one bothered to ask her that question.

Finally, we got to question the principal, Mr. Fignose.

PEA:  Mr. Fignose, how did become aware of this penis bowl part project?

Fignose:  One of the custodians, cleaning the art room, noticed the object in the drying room, and she called me down to look at it..

PEA:  What did you do after seeing the bowl?

Fignose:  I called the superintendent, told him I felt I should terminate the art teacher, got his OK, and when Ms. Anderson came back to school the Tuesday after Labor Day, I called her into my office and told her she was suspended with pay pending action by the school board and she should go home.

PEA:  Let me be sure I am understanding what happened?  Did you discuss this art object before suspending Ms. Anderson?

Fignose:  No.

PEA:  Well, Mr. Fignose, what if Ms. Anderson had  intended to bring the art object and the student down to the office the next time she had that student in her class.  Would that have been an appropriate action by Ms. Anderson?

Fignose:  Yes, it would.

PEA:  Did you ask her if she had planned to do that?

Fignose:  No, I did not.

PEA:  Well, what if Ms. Anderson had planned to bring the student to her room on her planning period, tell the student they were never to make anything similar to that in her class ever again, then she dropped the penis bowl into a bucket of water and recycled the clay.  Would that have been a proper action by Ms. Anderson?

Fignose:  Yes, it would have been.

PEA:  Did you ask her if she planned to do that?

Fignose:  No, I did not.

So, the Special Master ruled in favor of keeping Liz Anderson on the job.

I had mixed feelings about this WIN for about a month.  I knew the principal and the school board had a teacher that was doing inappropriate things.  I realized that this teacher was making bad choices over and over again.  I understood that the administration was stuck with this teacher because they had failed to create a paper trail.  If the administration had documentation showing that Liz Anderson made several  bad choices as a teacher, and if they had documentation showing that the administration really had tried to correct and guide Liz Anderson to make better choices in her job, then after building this verifiable collection of Ms Anderson’s inability to make better choices in the classroom, then, had they terminated her, PEA would have failed to save Liz Anderson’s job.  

In reality, the teacher’s union does not want bad teachers in the classroom.  What the teacher’s union wants is for there be verifiable documented efforts to help a poor teacher to become a great teacher.  What the teacher’s union wants is for there to be a chain of discipline in place, so that a good teacher is not singled out and fired because some administrator just doesn’t like them, or doesn’t like their political party, or what church they attend. Safeguards needed to be in place because sometimes administrators opted to terminate teachers for personal reasons and not because they are bad teachers.  IF a teacher is really a bad teacher, then there is a way to document that so that it is clear to everyone that the teacher is being fired NOT because the principal just doesn’t like them, but because they are not performing their job to a reasonable level of expectation.

When a teacher who is really bad, wins a case and gets to stay in the classroom, that is not really a win.  Liz Anderson was a burned out hippie who should not have been in the classroom and the reason she was in the classroom is because the administration had done a piss poor job of administrating.

So for a month I felt bad about this win.

After a month Liz Anderson was pulled over by police and arrested for a DUI.  Under the negotiated agreement, a DUI was substance abuse and when it happened to a teacher more than once, they were terminated.

Liz Anderson was fired and this time PEA could not save her.

Later I went to an art show of Liz Anderson’s work.  She really did some wonderful things with paper mache.  And Liz looked sober, and happy.  To me, Liz Anderson looked relieved to be out of the classroom.