Chapter 15

Chapter 15
Teaching Experience

My desk was in the very front row where Mr. Haakedahl couldn’t possibly miss me. The way I saw it, he’d been trying his best to ignore my existence for the past week, ever since my “teaching experience” class had begun. I realized I was going to have to take some sort of stand, or I’d be overlooked entirely. This class was a prerequisite for anybody pursuing a teaching degree, and if I didn’t perform at a satisfactory level here, I knew I wouldn’t even be considered for a student-teaching position later on. Mr. Haakedahl was the one I’d be dealing with when it came time for doing my actual student-teaching, so a precedent needed to be set that would guide any future communications between us.

My face grew hot with resentment when I realized there was only one other person left in the room besides me, as everyone else had already been assigned to the perspective elementary schools in the area where they would be working for the rest of the quarter. I raised my hand and cleared my throat loudly as my instructor walked past me to the back of the room where the one remaining student sat, waiting for her assignment.

“I think Konnie was trying to say something,” the girl put in quickly before he could begin speaking to her. I was grateful for her intervention, and wondered briefly how she knew my name since we hadn’t met before. But then, I’d gotten used to the fact that there were usually a lot of people who knew who I was, even though I’d never met them. Just comes along with the package when there is something that makes you different from those around you.

Seemingly taken aback, Mr. Haakedahl turned around hurriedly, as though noticing me for the first time. I forced myself to stay poised and speak calmly, though what I really felt like doing was shedding a few tears of humiliation.

“I was just wondering where I was going to be helping out. “I haven’t received any assignment yet,” I reminded him.

“Oh, that,” he replied, as though it were a simple oversight of little consequence. Then he proceeded to pace around the room, shuffling papers as he did so. Finally he came to a dead halt in front of me and said dismissively, “I’ll just send you along with Heather, here.”

Fighting panic, I tried to decide quickly how to respond to this. I didn’t want to be “sent with Heather,” as though I were some sort of afterthought. The solution he’d come up with wasn’t fair to either of us. She likely didn’t relish the thought of me tagging along with her, any more than I did. If someone were partnering with me, I knew that person would get all the focus, while I was stuck in a corner somewhere, doing menial tasks that wouldn’t prepare me at all for teaching in the real world.

Trying to remain respectful, I pointed out that I thought it would work out a lot better if I were assigned to my own classroom, just as every other student had been given.

“That isn’t an option,” he informed me in no uncertain terms. “You can go with Heather tomorrow if you want to, and if that turns out to be too challenging for you, we can talk about having you opt out of the class.”

Shaking with anger now, I figured I’d better drop the matter temporarily, before things escalated any further and poor Heather was caught in the middle somewhere. I bit my lower lip until it almost started to bleed, in order to keep my composure while I listened to the instructions he was giving Heather about the location of the school and the name of the teacher, etc.

Heather and I left the room together, and she patted my shoulder sympathetically as we turned down the hall. “Sorry that didn’t quite go the way you wanted,” she said.

“Well, it wasn’t your fault,” I assured her. “Just frustrating to not even be given the chance to prove myself, you know?”

“I can certainly imagine,” she empathized. “Maybe once he sees you in action…”

But I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Mr. Haakedahl was already biased against me and would surely have already talked to the elementary teacher by the time I met her the following day.

Heather must have seen the doubtful look on my face. “There has to be something we can do to get through to him,” she persisted.

I was touched that she was taking such an interest. “Well, thanks for your concern, anyway,” I told her. “I appreciate that a lot.”

“Just let me know if you can think of anything I might do to help the situation,” she offered generously. “I’d be happy to do whatever I could.”

I gave her a wan smile. “In that case, would you mind walking to the school with me, so I can familiarize myself with the route before tomorrow morning?”

“Not a problem,” she responded quickly. “We can go right now, if you want.”

“It’s just not fair!” I exclaimed with extreme irritation as we continued down the corridor. “I don’t get why he’s so insistent that I have a partner! I mean, what would happen if you were ever to get sick or something? Does he think I’d just stay behind, too? If so, he better guess again!”

We walked on in silence for another moment or two, when suddenly Heather coughed rather obnoxiously and began rummaging around in her purse for a Kleenex.

“This is a pretty strange coincidence,” she mused after vigorously blowing her nose, “but it isn’t completely out of the question that I might have to leave you in the lurch tomorrow. I’ve been coming down with this bug since yesterday, and it seems to be getting worse practically by the minute.”

“That's too bad,” I said, trying to sound properly concerned, though my heart was starting to beat just a little faster.

“Not a big deal,” she said as we went out the front entrance of the building and onto the sidewalk. “Whenever I get a cold, it just seems to drag on and on. I usually don’t let them get me down too much, but I hear that it’s supposed to be below freezing and snowy tomorrow, so I may not want to risk going out into the weather and all.”

“That’s understandable,” I said soberly, although I was finding it very hard to keep a smile off my face. “Well, if you aren’t able to go, don’t worry about me. The school is only a few blocks from here, so I should be able to make it there without any difficulty, once I know the way.”

And that proved to be the case. The rest of the week went by in a blur, and Friday came before I knew it. My friend, Debbie from Lemmon was planning a trip home that weekend, so I was going to ride with her. Since it was also the Thanksgiving break, Kim and I would both be home for a couple extra days, and we had a concert scheduled for Sunday. Performing our music together as a family was even more enjoyable now that Rory was playing several different instruments. This also meant that Reed had been promoted to drummer, which was an extra bonus.

Debbie took the bag I was carrying and put it into the trunk, while I walked around to the front of the car and settled myself in the front seat. “So how is your teaching experience going?” she asked with curiosity as she got in beside me and started the engine.

“Oh, fine,” I replied with a nonchalance I didn’t feel. I still had a hard time believing that the little scheme Heather and I concocted had actually succeeded.

“I heard from the grapevine that you are already getting to do way more work with the kids than any of the rest of us,” Debbie remarked a little enviously. “How on earth did you manage that?”

"It was pretty amazing how God worked everything out,” I told her. “At first it didn’t look like I was going to get to do the class at all.”

“I could tell that good old Travis Haakedahl wasn’t very comfortable having you there,” Debbie acknowledged. “That’s why I was so surprised when I heard how well everything seemed to be going for you.”

“You and me, both,” I smiled. “We didn’t get started on very good footing, that's for sure.”

“So what turned everything around for you?” Debbie wondered.

“It was kind of funny, really,” I replied. "I couldn’t have done it without Heather’s help though. That's the girl Haakedahl partnered me with.”

“You got to work with a partner?” Debbie questioned.

“That’s what he wanted to happen, but it didn’t turn out that way fortunately,” I told her.

“You didn’t want a partner?” she asked in surprise. I’d think that would make things a lot easier for you.”

“It would have—too easy,” I explained. “None of the rest of you worked as a team, and I didn’t want him to be able to claim later on down the road that I required a lot of extra help.”

“Makes sense, I suppose,” Debbie affirmed. “I hadn’t thought of it like that before."

“"So I was trying to object to his plan as politely as I could, but he wasn’t having any of it,” I went on with the story. “Fortunately Heather took my side, though.”

“Really? What did she say?”

“It wasn’t so much what she said—it’s what we DID,” I corrected with a little giggle.

Debbie waited a bit and then said impatiently, “Well, don’t keep me in suspense. What did you do?”

“It was really pretty simple. Heather had already been coming down with a bad cold, so when she didn’t show up the next day, I just assumed she was sick and took off without her.”

“Yeah, right,” Debbie laughed. “This is starting to sound a little fishy, if you ask me.”

“What do you mean?” I asked innocently. “It was a perfectly plausible story.”

“Is that what Haakedahl thought?” Debbie wanted to know.

I shrugged. “I have no idea. But by the time he found out, it was too late for him to do anything about it, and I had made my point by then, regardless.”

“So wasn’t the teacher surprised when you showed up without your partner?" she asked.

“Yeah, she was pretty befuddled at first, but I just explained that Heather wasn’t able to come with me, and asked what she wanted me to do to help out.”

“And did she put you to work right away?”

I opened my can of Pepsi and took a few swallows before answering. “That was the beauty of the whole thing!” I exclaimed happily. “She just stood there and stammered around nervously for a minute or so, and then finally she asked me what I thought I could handle. I told her I wanted her to expect me to do anything that she would require of any other college student she was given. But she still seemed a little flustered and at a loss, so I basically had to take charge of the situation and give her a few pointers on the type of things she might let me do.”

Debbie considered that for a second. “Wow! So you pretty much got to set your own agenda. Must be nice.”

"It was,” I confirmed. “I just jumped in and got to start working directly with the kids right away, instead of doing all this busy-work that most of the rest of you had to waste your time on at first.”

“So what did Mr. Haakedahl say when he finally figured out what happened?” Debbie wanted to know.

“That’s the best part,” I told her excitedly. "So Mr. Haakedahl is on his rounds, and he shows up near the end of the class period, and I'm sitting at this table with all these little kids around me, reading to them from one of the print-Braille books I fortunately thought to bring along. They were all quite fascinated with it, of course, and asking me lots of questions and everything. I guess it must have been pretty obvious to him how comfortable I usually am around children, because he just said 'good job,' as I was walking out the door, and that was that."

"So did he assign Heather to a different teacher then, or what?" Debbie asked curiously.

"I'm not sure; he must have," I replied. "I haven't seen Heather since then. But when I got to the school the next day, the teacher's attitude had totally changed. Right away she put me to work helping this little girl with some math problems, and the rest as they say is history."

"Good for you," Debbie praised. "I'm glad everything turned out so well. And like you said, it should be a lot easier now to get people to believe you can do this."

"I hope so," I said. "But if nothing else, at least now I feel more confident that I can win, if put to the test."

Debbie turned up the heater in her car another notch. “And how is your sister faring at Trinity? Is she having to deal with similar kinds of issues there”

“At the beginning she was,” I said. “They didn’t even want to let her enter the education program, at first. The National Federation of the Blind had to get involved, and they sent her a bunch of literature about blind teachers working in the public school system, so she had tangible proof for all of her skeptical professors.”

“And did that do the trick?” Debbie asked.

“"For the most part, it did,” I told her. “They've pretty much accepted her ever since then."

"That's good,” Debbie said as she turned on the radio. We listened to the music playing in the background for a few minutes, and then she asked, “So how about your brothers? What are they up to these days?”

“Reed tells me he just wrote his first song—can you believe it? I guess it has six verses, no less!”

“Wow. I’m sure you can’t wait to hear it,” she responded.

“And Rory is keeping busy too, of course,” I went on. He’s enjoying playing in the school band, and is really getting to be pretty good on the saxophone these days, if I do say so myself.”

“I’m not surprised,” Debbie said. “What made him choose sax as his band instrument, rather than guitar or drums or something like that?”

“Not sure,” I admitted. “Probably because it would have been hard for him to be a drummer in a marching band, and he wouldn’t get to use the whole drum-kit like he's used to having. As for the guitar, he's likely afraid his teachers would try to make him learn to play it the ‘right way’, if you know what I mean. He sure doesn't want to unlearn everything he’s already figured out and start from scratch.”

“I can see why,” said Debbie. “Not when he can already outplay most anybody around.”

During his 4th-grade year, several music-class periods had been devoted to letting the students try out many of the school’s musical instruments, in order to decide what they might want to play in the school band the following year. Rory had chosen to try a horn of some kind, but he found it quite difficult to pick which one he liked best. He checked out the flute, clarinet, sax, trumpet and trombone, and had fun exploring the shapes of each one. For some reason, he couldn’t make the flute sing at all though, and he hadn’t heard of anyone who played country music on the clarinet, so those two were ruled out fairly quickly. Rory preferred bigger horns, and his teacher, Miss Heggerfield thought that he should pursue the trumpet, which was her favorite and thus would have probably been easier for her to teach him. Rory really liked the sound of the trumpet and was able to make a few notes right away, but again, he wasn’t able to think of many country songs which employed that particular instrument.

“I think the main reason he chose sax instead of some other horn is that he’s heard Boots Randolph play, so he knows it can be used for country music,” I told Debbie. “I’m sure He remembers when Kim and I played it a little bit in junior high, too, and he’s heard it on a lot of our grandpa’s polka tapes, so he was already pretty familiar with how it could be played.”

“I see,” Debbie replied. “And didn’t I hear something about him taking up the banjo lately, too?”

“That's another interesting story. Our family did a joint concert awhile back with this bluegrass band, and one of the musicians had let Rory hold and try to play his banjo. He even said he had another one that he'd give to Rory if he promised to learn to hold it the proper way and play it correctly.”

Debbie laughed. “Well, that seems to be relative, isn’t it?”

“That’s what Rory thought,” I smiled. “But this guy claimed there just wasn’t any way to play it the way Rory was used to, because of how you have to do the finger rolls in a certain order with all those fingerpicks. So anyway, the man happened to be in the area a few months later, and he even went so far as to come out to the house in order to try to give Rory a longer demonstration, to see how he would catch on. But Rory just kept insisting that he would be able to do a whole lot better if he could be allowed to flip it around and lay it on his lap. So long story short, suffice it to say that he never got the offered banjo.”

“Bummer,” Debbie said sympathetically. “But wait a minute; I was sure somebody had told me not long ago that they’d seen him playing banjo somewhere recently.”

“Probably so. He was fascinated enough after that guy’s visit to want to learn more about the banjo, so he borrowed one from Mom’s cousin shortly thereafter and proceeded to work with it on his own.”

“Figures,” Debbie said in amusement.

“And now that he has his own lead guitar, too, he’s all set,” I added. “Although he’s always looking for something new to play, so I’m sure it won’t be long until he has added even more instruments to his arsenal.”

When we pulled up in front of Gramp and Gram's house awhile later, I opened my purse and located the place in my wallet where I kept 10-dollar bills. Handing one to Debbie to help out with the cost of gas, I thanked her for the ride and told her that my dad would bring me over to her house on Sunday for the trip back to college.”

"Sounds good,” she replied. "Looks like your grandpa and brothers are playing out here in the front yard. They're heading this way now."

"Hi, Kon; I’ll take your bags," Gramp said as he gave me a warm hug. "Wow. It seems like you have a ton of stuff in here. You'll only be home for a few days, you know."

"Yeah, but I have quite a bit of homework to do this weekend, so that's why I had to bring home so much junk," I replied as I scooped Reed up and reached to hug Rory with my other arm.

"I get to sing a solo for the school Christmas program," Rory informed me as we made our way to the house. "'Oh, Holy Night'."

"Wow, really?" I asked, impressed. "That's a pretty hard song for a 12-year-old, don't you think?"

I felt the shrug of his shoulders under my arm. "I dunno. Evidently Miss Heggerfield doesn't think so."

"You made it," Dad said from the front door, which he held open for us while we entered the house. "I'm glad the snow held off until you got here."

"Hi, Hun," Mom called as she came to join us in the entry-way. After embracing me, she stood back to peer at me more closely. "Where did you get that big bump on your forehead?" she asked in concern.

I put my hand up there to examine the spot. "I'm not sure. It probably happened when I accidentally hit the corner of my bookshelf while I was running from another room to get to my phone before it stopped ringing."

"And you have a big black-and-blue mark on your arm, too," she observed as she held it up to inspect further. "You need to be more careful."

"You should know by now that I'm always getting little bumps and bruises like that; it’s no big deal,” I said, trying to dodge away from her scrutiny. “Most of the time I can't even remember where they come from. They probably look a lot worse than they feel."

To my relief, Gram came in from the kitchen just then. "Well, hello, Kon," she said as she put her arms around me. "How was your week at school?"

"It was pretty eventful," I admitted, and proceeded to recount the entire teaching adventure again for my family. They all seemed to enjoy the tale at least as much as Debbie had. One of my brothers was on my lap, and the other one was squeezed in beside me on the rocking chair. Gram kept coming in from the kitchen where she was preparing one of her usual scrumptious suppers, in order to hear what I was saying amidst the sizzling frying-pan and clanking dishes.

"I bet he was sure surprised when he found out that other girl didn't go to the school with you," Dad said from the couch next to where I was sitting.

"We should wait until Kim gets home, so she doesn't miss all this," Mom said as she began to set silverware and plates at the table.

"I already told her everything on the phone last night," I assured her.

Just then Gramp got up from the chair by the window and stepped over to the door. "There she is now," he announced as he went out to greet my sister.

After everyone had said their hellos and I’d finished my story, we all sat around the table and began to dig in. “Why don’t you tell your sisters about the paper you were supposed to write in school this past week, Reed?” suggested Mom a few minutes later. "You won't believe this, girls."

"Yeah, I couldn't think of nothin' to write," Reed sounded more than a little upset with himself. "I was the only one in the class who never came up with anything."

This was surprising news. Even at his young age, Reed was already very conscientious about his grades and always seemed to have more than enough creativity on hand for any situation that might arise.

"Wow. It must have been a hard assignment," Kim said sympathetically.

"No, it wasn’t,” Rory contradicted. "All he was supposed to do is talk about something that made him unhappy. And he couldn't even think of one thing."

I smiled, thinking how much this sounded like little Reed, who hardly ever had a bad day. "I'm sure your teacher was pretty surprised," I commented.

"I guess so," said Reed. "But I just don't get what a kid should have to be unhappy about, if nothin' much really goes wrong for them or anything. I think it was a dumb assignment."

"I hope that's always your outlook on life," Dad put in. "That's a pretty good testimony I'd say.”

Mom scooped another helping of mashed potatoes onto my plate. “So you girls are planning to do your student-teaching here in Lemmon this spring, right?” she asked.

“I should be able to,” I told her. “A lot of my classmates will be student-teaching in their own hometowns. But I’m not sure how that will work for Kim, since her college is so much farther away.”

“Yeah, I doubt that my supervisor would be willing to drive that far to check on my performance,” Kim had to admit.

“There’s a house for rent right across from the Lemmon Elementary school, which would be the perfect location for you two,” Mom mused. “That’s why I was asking, so I could try to reserve it for you if that’s what you were planning to do.”

“I wonder if we could work out some sort of arrangement between our two colleges, so that Mr. Haakedahl could just check on both of us and then report back to Trinity,” I speculated thoughtfully.

“It’s worth looking into,” Kim agreed. “That house Mom found seems like it would be an ideal situation.”

“Well, that was a pretty delicious supper, Gram,” I told her as I put down my fork and stood up from the table.

“And just think—tomorrow’s Thanksgiving, so we’ll have even more yummy food then,” Rory added happily.

“Well, I suppose we better be getting on home, if you guys want to get some practicing in yet tonight," said Dad as he handed me my coat.

"I can't wait to hear the new song you wrote Reed," Kim said. "What's it called again?"

"He Rose from the Dead," Reed answered. “I’ll show it to ya when we get home.”

"We'll see you guys tomorrow," Gramp said as he walked with us to the door.

"Yeah--turkey and dressing!" Rory exclaimed joyously as he thought of what the next day held in store. “It just doesn’t get much better than that.”