The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 412
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
CHRONOLOGY 46: TAPCO / ATR 4
Tues., Sep. 3, 2013
8:09 p.m. Listen. Guinness #5.
No reply - give it up, Dave!
No, I’ll keep writing “no reply” for the rest of my life, Davey.
Okay, first day back, drinking beer again. Yes, that’s the way it is, I guess. I don’t know if it was being in the Bronx or the idea of “celebrating” the start of a new nightmare year or something else that caused me to buy a beer at Penn Station and keep drinking once I got here but at least it’s already fairly late so I can’t drink too much - although tomorrow is another day.
I did have an interesting first day back to work in the Bronx and wanted to get some note of it down before I forget and while listening to Chicago. I figured that since all we have tomorrow are meetings again and won’t have to do any actual teaching until Monday and since I’ve been handed a curriculum to teach next week to all grade levels - I’m teaching 9th and 11th evidently although Linda Butkowski of TRHS fame and who is the programmer here and now couldn’t make that official today - since, in other words, tomorrow promises to be an easy day and since Thursday and Friday are Jewish holidays, I figured I could drink a few beers tonight to “celebrate”, as I said, this new era of my non-life.
So I was up at 5, on the 5:58 as I did all last year, to 182nd on the B train - taking it slow - that’s 3 stops beyond 170th St. where I’ve been riding to these past 9 years - and got to TAPCO on Webster there by about 7:45, which is particularly fine since they don’t even start there until 8:30 - 40 minutes, that is, after the starting time that I’ve grown accustomed to over the past half decade of 7:50 at JLHS. Fortunately it is only a 7 minute walk according to Googlemaps from the Concourse to the school and that may be so, especially considering that the entrance to the place turned out to be in the back, which is on the side toward the Concourse - significant because it is a steep hill going down there.
8:25 p.m. Free Form Guitar. G #6.
I ended up walking all the way around since I figured that the entrance was in the front on Webster. By the time I came back around, I ran into a teacher named Walker who showed me how to get into the place. It’s a 70s or so building and so it reminds me of the 60s instead of pre-WWII days that Roosevelt and Taft both take you back to. That in itself was a nice thing since I’ve always had this vision of the NYC public school teacher being a Jewish person teaching in a building like that. I only briefly glimpsed that at TRHS those first couple of years but not in this sort of building. There is at least one other middle school in this building and possibly others because it is fairly large.
I ran into Ron almost immediately. He seemed happy to see me and showed that throughout the day by making it clear to his staff that he and I had worked together - “in other environments” was how he generally put it. But he looked good and seemed in good spirits and I got nothing but positive feedback about him as principal from the people that I talked to during the day. I talked to the other 4 English teachers and one of them, a big Dylan fan although he’s only about 35 years old, quite a bit during the afternoon. The morning was spent in going over the new binder system. They’ve got a notebook to give to all the kids that is essentially an agenda book with a bunch of good general knowledge facts in the first pages along with various rules laid down by TAPCO.
More interesting to me was the binder system that they are instituting this year - this is Ron’s 2nd year at the place. Students are to keep all of their work for all classes in these 3-ring binders but - get this, friend. Each subject includes a table of of contents wherein they track their daily activities in each class. Now, it might have been the last year that Ron was a teacher ...
9:06 p.m. Introduction. G. #8.
I was interrupted by a call from Andy. He’s stuck back there at JLHS and said he had to sit there and listen to Hoxha and Clarke - the only 2 administrators left there - all day. I told him that I am on a mission to get my “U” overturned and get Clarke declared incompetent and Hoxha declared malfeasant for keeping that idiot on the payroll for so long. I described my superior situation, of course, although who knows how true it is or will be in 3 or 6 or 9 months from now.
And I told Andy what I was about to say in that last paragraph, i.e., that Ron has instituted school-wide the folder system that he learned from me when we last taught together. He saw the way I made the kids put everything into a folder with a table of contents at the beginning and that is what he told all teachers that they would be doing this year. Each student will have a binder that will hold all work from all classes but for each class there will be a table of contents that correlates with the work in that class.
But maybe the bigger event of the day was meeting Jessica Faugno. She has been following and commenting on my blog for the past year. I finally noticed that last Jan. she suggested that she wasn’t a stalker but she wanted to meet me. I replied a couple of days ago and suggested that since this week was an easy week for us teachers, we try to make it this week. So we did. It turns out that she teaches in the “law” academy that they put into TRHS as one of the original small schools. Since she’s there and I figured I must be pretty close to Fordham again, we decided to meet at the Fordham Plaza at 3:45. I walked up Webster from 182nd at 3:30 today - walked past 3 Way where Andy and I once downed a few beers and listened to the jukebox - up through the Plaza, which is now being remade into a bus depot, and met her near Fordham where they’ve now got a smoothie / taco stand. She got coffee and a smoothie; I got a smoothie and we sat there an talked from about 4 until about 5:30. Her name is Jessica Faugno. She’s 43 years old and has a 14-year-old son that she says isn’t a good student but she’s got him in a high school in Manhattan this year. She started out as a 2nd grade teacher about 12 years ago but didn’t get along with that principal, quit and ended up back as a high school ESL teacher in 2008 in TRHS. She is a big fan of the blog and just seems to appreciate me and my writing, attitude, ability to stand up to administrators. She said the guy who is principal at her school now came from Truman. He was a gay man there but is now married and has a baby that he shows off at their graduation ceremonies.
We talked about teaching generally. She’s nice and has a good sense of humor. She seems to think that I’m some sort of celebrity since I’ve got a blog but I told her that it was just writing and that I probably wasn’t going to be able to blog as much now that I’ve got a real job. She liked the Danielson spoof in particular. This year we are all going to be “evaluated” on those absurd Danielson rubrics. I think that Ron is aware of my spoof but I’ll remind him to make sure that he is.
We sat there in the Plaza from about 4 till about 5:30 and had a really nice time. She is unassuming and able to be very open and honest, something that I haven’t gotten often since I turned my life over to L ... Z. It’s nice to see that someone can actually be like that. We walked back to the Concourse because as it turns out, she has a house 2 blocks from Taft - up from the park. That’s when she told me how 20 years ago there was a little girl next door who was being abused and who was taken away from her parents by ACS. Somehow Jessica ended up with this kid as a daughter and now the daughter is in college. I asked why she had adopted a daughter back then and that is what caused her to think about all of that. It’s a truly amazing story - someone who takes in a child that they didn’t want or need simply because the child needed someone. I told her that. It’s more amazing than any stories about blogging or cartoons that I could tell - and I gave her the cartoon business card. She said she would check it out.
9:32 p.m. Poem 58.
Okay, that’s it ... for tonight ...
Note: Since I was listening to my favorite Chicago track while drinking Guinness #8 that night, I’ll include it here in case there is anyone who is unaware of it. It was the opening song on their first album and appropriately so since in it guitarist Terry Kath told the story of the band and ran us “through the changes” that the band proved more than capable of doing over the next couple of decades and taking us on this album from the ridiculous (Free Form Guitar) to the sublime (Beginnings). They were called Chicago Transit Authority on that album and so that’s how I’ll always think of them. And I’ll always think of Kath as the voice of the group though that tragically came to an end in 1978. (The live Carnegie Hall version can be found in chapter 283.
AUDIO INSERTED: Chicago Transit Authority, Introduction
(Once again I insert this track without permission and will take it down upon request.)
IMAGES INSERTED: Record Sleeves / Labels / Promo