I reached my Master's level in philosophy before my financial resources dictated a period of retrenching before I decided where my career path was to lead. In the halcyon days of the 50s and 60s, I had always been able to finance my studies through savings from my days in the military, and through summer employment, but now I had to go to work, and my English Minor gave me a chance to teach high school on a temporary certificate. This seemed harmless enough. I could work a year and then go back to philosophy.

I happened into one of those rural situations where the new and untrained used to begin their careers, and of course found myself overwhelmed with the need to get up the masses of instant material required to fill the demands of three History and two English courses, with a class of Grade 10 Health thrown in for good measure.

Given the burden of working eighty hours a week preparing and teaching for the first time, I will freely admit that my beginning methods were very crude, although I did manage to get the students through their departmental examinations. The work load did not discourage me, and I was encouraged by my principal and inspector, who felt that I had promise as a career teacher and urged me to take professional training. It was thus that I made my decision to turn away from a university academic career and go into high school teaching instead.

One of my first challenges was grammar, which traditionally forms an initial element in communications teaching. My philosophy background did allow me to develop a functional, writing-centered approach to grammar, and the success I had with this approach in my first year was the catalyst which led me to follow the advice to go into language teaching. (1) Obviously grammar can be furnish no more than a beginning for effective communication, which must be supplemented by effective use of the formal paragraph and the extended essay. I was to encounter the latter, quite by chance, during my first urban teaching assignment following the stint in the college of education.

I happily blundered into what I later discovered was something of an anomaly in education: an English language department led by two master teachers, who had put together a program of instruction in communication which I have not had to alter significantly since. (The full program, together with my approach to functional grammar, will be dealt with in chapter 8). I thought naively that I had found a home in education. Worse yet, I thought that the perception and coherence I had found straight off must be standard in secondary schools, or at least common. I had far more to learn than I could have imagined at that point.

For, as promising as my new teaching situation seemed to be, it turned out to be seriously flawed. I had yet to learn the hard lesson that innovation in education rarely survives pressures from school priorities more closely related to institutional needs, particularly those priorities which impinge on the turf or autonomy of professionals. One such priority is effective public relations, so necessary to keeping outside groups off the backs of boards, administrators and teachers.

The approach to writing instruction in my new school depended, fatally as it turned out, not only on dedicated and trained professionals, but also on some of those who were not primarily writing teachers. Most English departments will have a core of specialist teachers, but schools are forever bringing others into the mix, for a variety of motives. For example, Vancouver and district schools seemed overrun at the time by administrators, usually with a physical education background, who seemed especially fascinated by public relations. Subject specialists tend not to be interested in staff and public relations. Indeed, there is a certain disdain for it. But public relations is the raison d 'etre of modern school Mafias, and the relation to the informal Compact referred to in the introduction is intimate. No undertaking to protect the classroom teacher at the understood price would get very far unless outsiders are kept at arms length.

But bringing specialists into school public relations is only a small part of the effort. The bread and butter of public relations are those aspects of a school's offerings which fill out the programs of many students whose academic abilities and interests are limited, and which are therefore needed to maintain a stable school environment. These will include the technical courses: automotive, construction, and welding, which in many cases have replaced the old catch-all: industrial arts. Sports are a key component, but other areas such as computers, electronics. cooking and cosmetology are also important. These areas all meet legitimate student needs, and no school would be complete without them. But, for the Mafia, the urge to keep students happy by trying to meet such needs can become an end in itself. It was the administrative desire, in my first school, to supplement language professionals in the ambitious communications programme with Home Economics teachers, as the generalists of the day in homemaking skills were called, which was to prove fatal.

Whatever the primary specialty, there is frequently insufficient work in that specialty to employ full-time teachers. In order to ensure that such specialists will be available, it is necessary to fill out a full employment schedule by slotting them into the teaching of courses in the humanities, even if their background there is minimal. Jocks, Home Economics teachers, guidance councilors and others may not be able to teach mathematics, welding or calculus. They can all (more or less) speak and write English, or read history, and so they will be used to round out a humanities department even if this means that they effectively displace some teachers far better suited to teaching effective communication. This would be less damaging if the new teachers were retrained and subject to close supervision, but this compromise in the terms of the Compact would almost certainly provoke a hysterical reaction. It would be interpreted as a vote of non-confidence and as a gross interference with professional freedom.

I was inexperienced in school politics, and had been obliviously and naively following department policy, assuming that others teaching the same subject were following policy and adhering to standards. Students were expected to produce a paragraph a week for much of the school year, and at least six in-class book reviews, and much emphasis had been placed on a common marking policy. The marking load was heavy, even medieval, by modern standards.

The problem with the non-specialists did not surface until the final exams of the year. A significant part of the final mark was a grade for the in-class essays. Department policy, in line with the grading curve fashionable at the time, suggested a 61% average as a standard for the essays. I had wondered why some of the part-time English teachers had been so interested in the marks others had been giving, and I found out why after a year's-end staff meeting. My students had a larger percentage of poorer grades than the curve permitted. A cursory investigation quickly revealed that the part-timers had averaged over 8O% in their book-review grades, in order to plump their students down in the middle of the range of marks. Since I had failed to anticipate such tactics, my students had been at a disadvantage.

A more bizarre incident came to light in the General English examination, again only after it was too late. There were two of us teaching the slower learners and again we were subject to the tyranny of a curve of suggested marks. I had marked honestly, and found that I had more failures than the curve allowed. My compatriot had marked only enough papers to satisfy an acceptable number of failures and burned the remainder of the examinations.

I received some negative comment on my failure rate from the principal, and it was immediately obvious that he had not bothered to delve into the matter to uncover a reality which was as available to him as to me. The irregularities can hardly have been new, yet he was clearly unaware of them. A new teacher had messed up, and that was enough.

Why was it enough? It is not necessary to accuse anyone of deliberate dishonesty, cowardice or incompetence. Checking on the performance of other teachers would create controversy and even hysteria, and the principal may have followed the path of least resistance. He would have instinctively avoided opening a can of worms even if I had blown the whistle. Accepting responsibility for enforcing departmental standards could soon force administrators to choose between offending single individuals or entire staffs, so it is not surprising that being caught off base is an occupational hazard of being a rookie.

The following year saw a transfer to another school in the same district. I was a junior teacher, and perhaps the transfer would have happened anyway, but I was never sure. I had seen a typical behavior of a survival-oriented administrator who had not compromised the anonymity of the classroom, part of a ubiquitous and suffocating gentleman's agreement which, many years later, I have termed the Compact. Needless to say, there was no administrative procedure for reviewing marks or ensuring that the policy of retaining old examinations for a specified period of time had been observed. Why unearth a problem which could only raise tension on the staff? Twenty years later I learned that the writing program which this school had pioneered had survived only a year or two after my term there. That can hardly have been an accident.

The marking load of the serious communications teacher in those days was particularly onerous, since the essay schedule was a bearcat on private life. I was used to marking on the way to school in the car pool, marking between classes, marking through weekend football games on TV, and, eventually, marking and preparing lessons at school until at least 5:30pm so that I could avoid the demoralizing practice of trying to do such work in the evenings in time to get enough sleep to function the next day.

The writing programme advocated later in this book does not assume the zealous excesses of my youth. Where I originally assigned six book reviews for the year I now suggest three or four at most, unless administrators are willing to schedule teaching loads to permit more. Seven reviews and a research paper during the high school years, in conjunction with writing in other disciplines, might serve our purpose.

In the absence of adequate spare time for marking, the communications teacher can always do what I did on occasion when I was swamped: call in sick and spend the day catching up. Substitute teachers used to leave notes glowing in praise for my superb organization and the pleasure of filling in for me. You would almost think I had planned things that way.

There was no formal agreement on writing policy in the new school. I was eventually to discover that there was at least one English teacher who gave no writing at all, a practice which was to be repeated in all the schools I passed through later. Not only was there no formal agreement, there was a fair degree of resentment directed toward a particular perk that language teachers were already supposed to have.

Both schools had tried a team marking approach during the Christmas, Easter and June examinations in order to ease the heavy load of subjective marking typically carried by the language teachers. Some teachers (especially in science, mathematics or the trades) could save time through objective marking using keys; others had little or no marking to do during examination period the and could often be seen playing badminton in the gym while the humanities teachers were racing to finish before the holiday period arrived. These people were invited to help the English and History teachers with the objective sections of exams, and thus allow the latter to maintain their high essay loads while avoiding the need to take their examinations home over Christmas and Easter.

The practice had functioned well at my first school. True, the Home Economics staff some how disappeared during the examination period, to reappear only at the final staff meeting. True, some of the jocks were still to be seen in the gym. No matter. The co-operation of the math/science people had been more than adequate. (2). It was stimulating too. Some very useful and enjoyable exchanges occurred in the marking rooms, and the math/science people seemed to especially enjoy a glimpse into the professional lives of others.

I can't remember when the team-marking concept was first challenged at my new school, but I was stunned at the outcome. Not only did the jocks resent the idea of helping the English teachers with exam marking, they also objected heatedly to the practice of scheduling English exams first, a practice that had helped the teachers involved to have their work done during the week before the holiday break, in line with everyone else.

I sat in disbelief when no one came to the defense of the concept of committee marking, although I suppose that its loss, though regrettable, could have been borne. But the climax came when the principal, who had raised no defense against the initial onslaught, agreed in turn to schedule the English exams last. The result: I received two Christmas English exams just hours before the school shut down. While the jocks played in the gym to keep busy, the English teachers packed up their essay laden exams for marking at home during the holiday.

I'm not sure whether the memory of treachery from the first school was what made me snap, but I left my exams at school, despite the rule requiring that marks be reported by the first teaching day in January. The principal was livid when he found out that the school's report cards would have to be held back for a day pending receipt of my results. It was the beginning of a very strained relationship. He actually criticized me, on that year's professional evaluation, for being "unable to meet school deadlines". I was surprised to discover that he had been too dense to grasp that my tardiness had not been accidental.

The strain was accentuated when I decided to read Of Mice and Men to one of my English classes - I said read. There was not a penny in those days for supplemental texts, and teachers were not expected to show any initiative in trying to alleviate the dull and mindboggling literature curriculum that had been approved. So I read the novel to the class, language and all.

As novels go, the book's language would now be considered pretty tame. Even then it didn't bother the class. Well, one student waited until the final chapter, the moving final encounter between George and Lenny, to blow the whistle. I was summoned to the office and told to cease and desist immediately or I would face dismissal from the school. True to the Compact, the principal's main concern was to blunt external criticism, not to consider fairly what I was trying to do in the classroom.

My fellow English teachers expressed some sympathy, but no support. I had gone too far. I could not afford to undertake a personal crusade against censorship, and had to explain to my class why I could not complete the final chapter. I gave as moving a summary of the chapter as I could, and invited those interested to borrow the book from the library. (Some did, so perhaps a measure of good came from the incident). As I finished, one of the students turned to his neighbour and snarled, "I hope you're satisfied".

The Compact specifies that the guarantee of classroom autonomy is valid only if complications don't spill over into main office. Survival requires the general serenity; boredom is preferable to controversy; mediocrity triumphs over innovation.

The die was cast. I found myself baiting the principal. My marking and work schedule sometimes left me sleepy during staff meetings, and I found that I could follow matters better if I shut my eyes and listened to the discussion. Presently someone would jab me, alerting me to the fact that the Head Jock was glaring at me from across the table. I would only mutter that I was perfectly aware of what was going on, satisfied to discover that I was so easily irritating him.

My relationship with the principal went from bad to worse. I once referred a discipline problem to him that I was quite capable of dealing with in class, because I resented the fact that only a discipline problem could prompt an effective concern with what I was doing in the classroom. It wasn't fair to the student, but then I do not pretend to be above making mistakes. I apologize to whoever it was who became the butt of my frustration that day.

The crowning break, however, came from my colleagues in the History department. Well, it came from the female colleagues in the department. Given that the superb English teachers in the previous school had been women, I had occasion to wonder why male teachers in those schools had so often fallen into a comfortable mediocrity, while the women had been either excellent or execrable.

There was an unfortunate policy of assigning the responsibility for preparing the sessional examinations in rotation to different teachers. It was unfortunate in that it allowed a careless few to dictate exam practice to the rest of the staff, who, it must be noted, had never complained. Why trouble the waters and attract attention?

For years it had been accepted practice to scale examination marks to match a desired percentage curve. Compensating for inaccuracies in this way had led teachers into sloppy habits in setting their exams, but it should not have been up to a second-year teacher to put things right. (3)

To recall a few of the more glaring shortcomings: the typical exam was overloaded with recall or short answer questions (of which, more later). Matching questions mixed people, dates, mountains and treaties together, including as many as twenty items not always on the same page. Only a limited number of multiple choice questions were represented, and these were so badly constructed as to be poorly disguised recall items. Oh yes, no map was allowed: I think someone had heard at a convention that the use of maps prevented kids from having fun in history.

The drudgery of setting the Easter exam had fallen, oddly, to the junior teacher (which happened to be me), but only after a staff meeting where the test conditions were spelled out to the neophyte. Existing practice was to be adhered to; there were to be only a few multiple choice questions, and there was to be no map. In short, they expected me to set an exam as bad as those they were accustomed to, and leave the rest to a slide rule.

Perhaps I wanted revenge for the stacked marks the year before; maybe the Christmas exam fiasco still rankled, but I would be damned before I would work down to the accepted level. I kept my peace and listened. Then I waited until two days before the exam date to spring a sounder version on them. I may have baited them unnecessarily by including a ten mark map question on imperialist Africa, including such esoteric places as the Belgian Congo, Cape Colony, French West Africa, and Egypt and the Sudan. There were some sixty multiple choice questions, constructed properly. Matching questions were homogeneous and limited to nine items on the same page. Only a smattering of recall questions made the test. Two general essays were included.

The women were insulted that I had ignored their strictures, and the men sat on their hands. At least I knew where the former stood publicly, whereas the latter would give me but moral support-in private. Since it was too late to refuse to accept the exam, the critics chose instead to quibble: if I said "general" they wanted "military leader". They were utterly convinced that their students would bomb and, I suspect, what they were doing in the classroom would that be revealed as grossly inadequate. In the event, all fears proved illusory.

I had stayed safely within material any properly instructed Grade 10 student could be expected to know. For the first time, no scaling of marks was necessary: the result had been a textbook perfect curve of marks, with a textbook 61.5 % average. My critics were silenced, at least before my face.

Not only had the disgruntled kept their peace for the time being, they had felt obligated to prove that they could construct at least as good an exam, and, sure enough, the final examination was a precise emulation of mine. It followed all the correct principles, the multiple choice questions were intelligently phrased, the matching questions cleaned up. The results: exactly what my exam had produced.

Well, they had proved a point, at the price of tacitly conceding that their old exams had been sloppy pieces of work. That they were not prepared to forgive, even though the validity of their teaching standards had effectively been confirmed. At the end of June I went to check the staff bulletin board on my next year's assignment, only to discover that I wasn't listed. I had to inquire at the office to discover that I had been transferred to yet another school down the road.

I asked the department head what had happened. His reply: "l tried to tell the principal that you are the best teacher in the department, but it didn't matter".

I suppose that result might have been predicted. I had some intimation of what was coming when an inspector appeared at my door some time late in the year. He came in, sat down, ready to take notes. I was teaching W.H. Davies poem, Leisure, at the time, after a reading and some discussion, I happened to ask whether they thought that their parents enjoyed their work, and what a meaningful job could contribute to the enjoyment of leisure.

This was twenty-five years before specialists discovered that education which preceded group techniques was a wasteland filled by the mindless pursuit of facts. I had pressed some kind of button, or perhaps the students were anxious to perform in front of the visitor. At any rate, an animated discussion followed in which everyone wanted a say on the place of work in defining one's lifestyle.

I had intended to move on to something else, but the interest of the students in the topic at hand was so real that, after a glance at my watch, I decided to let them have their head.

Only on one other occasion-at the same school in fact-had students in effect taken over a lesson. In that case they had staged a "revolution", taken over the class, and preceded to teach their own lesson on the French Revolution, with me sitting at the back of the room (in the Bastille) coaching them along. In both cases, the ensuing activity consumed the rest of the period.

My inspector was most critical after the class had left. His main point was that I was "over the heads of the class", a curious criticism given the unusual degree of involvement. It was fairly obvious that he had been programmed, as we should now say, to find something-anything-wrong with my performance. He left in a huff when I suggested that in acting as a hatchet man he was somewhat lacking in professional pride.

I was again experiencing, although not fully aware of it at the time, the downside of the Compact. The Office Mafia needs to be immune not only from the bother of fending off discipline problems, but from any threat to its turf, and this may include having to adjust to the existence of anyone who rises significantly above the prevailing mediocrity in a way which requires a Mafia response. I will have occasion to amplify on this theme later, for it was not to be the last time that a strong teaching performance would leave the grinders feeling insecure, even in the absence of direct interaction or friction.

There was some indication in my new school that my fame had preceded me, and that principal was to be on the alert for some excuse to force me out of the district. The strategy misfired, however, for they made the mistake of giving me a Grade Ten English class, and a Grade Eight History class, which I still remember as being among the two best I was to have in my career. For the present purpose, my experience with the Grade Eight class best illustrated the limitations of the Compact. (4)

By now I should have seen the problem coming. I shared a Grade Eight class in Canadian history with a jock, again. She was the basketball or volleyball coach, as I recall, and the school again followed the practice of having only one teacher setting the exams. I had offered to set it, having learned not to trust others, but I might have smelled a rat when she insisted that it was her turn to set the exam and she didn't want to give it up. Since we were working with the same text I carelessly assumed that there shouldn't be a problem; we simply had to be in agreement, I thought in my naivete, about where the classes should be about mid-term time.

This was Canadian history, and my bright class and I sailed into it. The sole resource was the textbook, so we manufactured interest wherever we could; debating what one might expect when a primitive culture collides with a commercial civilization, whether Riel should have been hanged, which pass through the mountains was the best choice for a trans-continental railroad, and so on.

Jock thought processes work differently. Canadian history begins in England and France, so my colleague naturally began with due attention to English and French geography, with special emphasis on numerous miscellaneous facts about European rivers, mountains, and products. We must know our roots. I was blissfully unaware of the awesome extent of this project, and so my bright class and I heard the first shots of the Riel Rebellion before her Jacques Cartier stepped ashore.

Like the Hurons, we were taken by surprise. The kids found themselves staring at a mid-term exam made up of well over one hundred questions all worded thusly:

Or words to that effect. The reader will get the drift. There were over one hundred straight recall questions, with a significant number of them irrelevant to Canadian history. It was one of the most exquisitely mediocre tests I have ever seen, and I would see nothing quite in its class again for a generation.

It left my bright class with lower than expected marks, and once more brought the stern disapproval of a principal down on my head. No questions, of course, were raised on what the jock had been doing. There was no glance at the way the exam had been put together, with an exclusive emphasis on rote recall. True to form, the principal probed no further into the classroom than the staff politics of the Compact allowed. Only the immediate anomaly required action.

When I apologized to the class, however, their only response was, "Don't worry. We know what happened." I vowed that it would not happen again. We went on as before and finished the course, but I was able to reach the end of the blessed text more than two weeks before the jock did. I then announced that we were going into an exam cramming phase for the remainder of the term. The class formed up committees whose job it was to unearth facts and invent games to memorize them. Nothing was too picayune for our attention. (I did extract a promise from the jock to leave European geography alone).

The class slaughtered the final exam. I neither sought nor was offered credit for the end result, but I must admit that the experience was almost worthwhile. By that time, however, I had decided to leave the district, to the mutual relief of myself and its Mafia. The principal smiled when I told him; getting rid of me may have been his crowning professional achievement.

I was on my way back to university in order to become a librarian. By the time I graduated and found my way back into the school system, the audio-visual revolution was under way, and I found myself in Saskatchewan in charge of a library which, in theory at any rate, had had a school built around it and the new resources. Much of value was to be accomplished, but, in the end, it would be a casualty of the Compact, much as the previous regime had been.