Wonderful wonderful people

Confession—I spent seven years hectoring my students on rule number one of writing….

Consider the reader.

What does he know? What does he need or want to know? It’s not about you, the writer. It’s all about the reader.

Yup, banged that drum for seven years as loudly as I could!

And then?

Was completely deaf to it.

I wrote a book, you see, all about life and death and iguanas and some other stuff. Then, I concluded it with my getting laid off at Wal-Mart. I mentioned throwing pencils at the students, about not going back to say farewell to my room, about not getting to say farewell to my students.

Well, I sent off drafts to people, and people mostly liked it. Not surprising; is a friend gonna write and say, “Jeez Marc, you’ve written a dog! Couldn’t get past the first chapter!”?

OK—the book is coming out on Saturday. We set up—my partner in literature and I—a little page on Facebook. There was a sample chapter. And then I realized. I talked about the building. I talked about the iguanas behind the building. I certainly mentioned that Wal-Mart cheer!

What didn’t I do?

Mention what in the world I was doing at Wal-Mart in the first place….

Marc? Duh…..

Didn’t bother my friendly readers—they know the story. But wouldn’t a stranger be a little confused?

So here’s what I should have written.

Nothing was more improbable in my life as the fact that, every day between 6:30 and 7AM, I walked up concrete steps, ducked the dive-bombing grackles, passed the alarming cars, and entered the Wal-Mart Home Office.

I knew how it had happened, of course. Ofelia, my old boss and a cherished friend, had sent me off to teach in a trailer in a parking lot in Bayamón.

“No, Ofelia, this is too crazy. I mean, I’ve done the rum factory. That was fun. I’ve done the executives and their wives of the third largest bank on the island. And what is Wal-Mart, anyway….”

She sighed and explained.

Well, needed the dough, and a gig is a gig.

“So how did it go,” she asked, after that first day.

“Ummm, I think I blew it.”

“Oh, dear,” she said.

“Look, you know I’ve been teaching ESL for ten plus years, right?”

“Of course.”

“Well, what you don’t know is that I become a completely different person when I’m in a classroom….”

“Of course, it’s called the teacher’s persona…  So what happened?”

“Well, I get there and introduce myself to this lady, Elizabeth, and she’s completely unimpressed. I go into this little trailer straight from Arkansas, and begin the class. And then, I hear this clapping from next door and someone shouts ‘Gimme a W!’”

“Oh, the company cheer,” she said brightly.

“Well, I was dumbfounded,” I said. “Didn’t know what to do. So then I said ‘What the hell was that?’ And they said what you said. So then I lost it and said, ‘well, do we have an English class cheer?’”

“Oh no,” breathed Ofelia. “Marc, you didn’t. Marc, tell me you didn’t….”

“Yeah, I got ‘em all on their feet and clapping, and I shouted ‘GIMME AN E, GIMME AN N. GIMME A G’ all the way through the word English, and then I shouted ‘WHAT DOES IT SPELL’ and then ‘I CAN’T HEAR YOU’ and then ‘WHAT DO WE SPEAK!’ and then….”

Here I noted that Ofelia had her head in her hands.  

Curious that the company hadn’t called, demanding a change of teacher, I went off to do more damage the next day. And met the president of the company, coming out the trailer door.

“Great cheer,” he said, introducing himself. “Loved it! You’re really part of the Wal-Mart family now!”

Completely sincere!

Well, the disasters multiplied. Tired of teaching, I turned to presentations. Get the kids to talk! (All students of any age are my kids…)

Great—first presentation was about the Florida Keys. I noted confused faces. And did something that I should never do.

Try to be a teacher….

So I jumped up, grabbed the magic marker, went to the flip chart, and started to draw.

I drew Florida, I drew the keys, I created what looked for all the world like an obscene graffitum on a men’s room wall.

Worse, I saw myself do it!

It was like a train wreck—I saw it coming on, I saw my hands creating it.

Couldn’t stop!

Never confessed that to Ofelia.

Well, I started off my Wal-Mart days as a contractor—Ofelia is the head of a very good little language school.

Then Elizabeth, apparently more impressed, phoned me, offered me a job. They had created a position for me, and wanted me to be the fulltime English teacher.

“Great,” I told her.

“Wonderful,” I said to her.

“SHIT!” I said, after hanging up the phone.

Didn’t want it, but knew I had to take it. The benefits? Great!! Salary? Excellent!

Marc in the corporate world?

Nahhhhh!   

For two years, it drove me nuts. Then, I relaxed. I began roaming the halls with my ruler, pretending to be a traditional teacher. I put a ridiculous yellow duck on the door of my room, and called it my VPI—the volume producing item so beloved of Sam Walton. I instituted the ‘cultura de la clase de inglés’ one tired day after hearing the “Wal-Mart Culture” invoked for the umpteenth time.

Among other items, students had to breathe audibly in and gaze upwards when I pronounced the name of Sam Walton.

Someone wasn’t taking it seriously.

Oh, except for one thing.

The students. Those wonderful, resilient, amazing people who told me their stories, shared the joy and pain in their lives, showed me the pictures of their kids or pets. The kids who put up with my nonsense and dodged the pencils I threw at them, and said “333 jewelry thieves” and hid under their desks when they heard me approach, smartly tapping the ruler against my thigh.

Wonderful, wonderful people!