STUPID AND CONTAGIOUS

"Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind."-- Nirvana

Now that we're at the end of a school year, I'm thinking back to near the beginning of it, in October, when I attended a Halloween party dressed up as, well, myself -- with a cardboard box over my head.

"What're you supposed to be, Mosher?" someone asked.

"A teacher thinking inside the box," I said.

"Funny," that someone said. And perhaps it was funny, though as usual I simply was trying to make a point in my awkward way.

During this past year I heard Clark County School District officials urge teachers to "think outside the box" 342 times. I know this because I counted them. Also, teachers were told frequently to be "team players" and "on the same page." Good teachers these days, then, must constantly think outside some hypothetical box as they simultaneously play for an imaginary team while being on the same page of a nonexistent text with all other teachers and administrators -- who themselves must think outside imaginary boxes while playing for hypothetical teams on the same pages of nonexistent texts. Which can get confusing. Plus, to complicate matters, those who constantly tell people to be team players are rarely, if ever, team players themselves.

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said: "Whereof we do not know, thereof we should not speak." Which is probably true, but imagine telling that to an administrator on a day the No Child Left Behind EduNazis pay his school a surprise visit; or the morning after a supervisor forgot to drink her Metamucil.

"Test scores are down, teachers," the principal says at a staff meeting. "We need to think outside the box to get scores back up."

"How far outside the box?" one teacher asks.

"As far as it takes," the principal replies.

"Serial killer Edmund Kemper thought outside the box," a second teacher says. "He killed his mother, chopped off her head, then put it on the fireplace mantel and threw darts at it. We could tell students we're gonna throw darts at their dead heads if they don't bring scores up."

"No, parents might complain," says the principal. "Instead, we should tell kids they'll end up flipping burgers or dealing drugs the rest of their lives if scores don't improve."

"That won't work," a third teacher says. "My students flip burgers and deal drugs now. And they're making more money than me."

"Listen, people!" the principal barks. "We need to get on the same page here!"

"Like when America became a nation of mass murderers in Iraq by re-electing George Bush?" a fourth teacher pipes up.

"What's your point?" asks the principal.

"In 2004, the majority of voting Americans were on the same page, but it was the wrong page. Now look at the world."

"That's negative. We need team players here," the principal snarls.

"Team?" the above-mentioned second teacher says. "Charlie Manson had a great team. He'd whisper in little girls' ears, 'I am the god of sex,' and give them drugs. They all passed Charlie's tests!"

Following this meeting about raising test scores by thinking outside a box as team players on the same page, one sad-looking teacher waddles up to me.

"I just wanna put a shotgun in my mouth and blow my brains out like Kurt Cobain," he says. "Moving from Chicago to teach in Vegas was the biggest mistake of my life. How do you survive this crap?"

"Me?" I ask. "I just go home and in my awkward way write a poem about it at the end of the school year"--

SMELLS LIKE TEACHER SPIRIT

the classroom is empty now
hollow and spent
like an ancient tomb
raped by grave robbers
the shell of something living
left behind
and the hatchlings
are loose and loosed
upon the world
scuttling feverishly
(can't you hear the scampering?)
toward the safety of the water
where there is no safety of the water
and in this hollowness we know
that we never taught them enough
because we never knew enough
hence we must scuttle too
from this once living thing
an empty shell
this room
(can't you hear the scampering?)

Chip Mosher is a simple classroom teacher