One December on the day before the last day of school before the winter holidays, I jokingly told one of my classes that the best Christmas present for me would that none of them show up for class tomorrow.  The next day I enter class to find only one student sitting there.  We were both very confused and I began to wonder if there was an assembly that I didn't know about or maybe I had missed a fire drill.  The lone student and I began to investigate.  We noticed there were students in other classrooms (not many considering what day it was)  I asked other teachers if they had seen my kids and the answer was no by all except one English teacher.  I looked in the window of the door of her classroom and there sat my class.  When I entered they all began to laugh as did the teacher who was in on the joke. The lone student who did show up was upset that he was not told about the caper. I really loved my students.

MY OLD NEW FRIENDS.
when each new technology came out, my wife and sons had to drag me, kicking and screaming, into a modern era.  I didn't want to get a computer. I got one. Got so I couldn't do without one.  I used Commodore 64 primarily for word processing, usually for tests and study guide for class.  Amazingly, my students seemed to love it, because now they could almost read them.  There were still an amazing number of typos, transposing and misspellings making some sentences hard to understand.

Then I bought a PC and began to use WordPerfect, didn't understand it, hated it, cursed it, screamed at it and sometimes refused to use it.  Eventually  I got pretty comfortable and my students began to appreciate that I had spell check and grammar check.  So did I.

One thing I took to very quickly was cellphones.  But being the careless, forgetful and unorganized person that I am, I have lost three or four and murdered at least two.  One was while running across the Seneca courtyard in the pouring rain and the phone slipped from my pocket and into a deep mud puddle.  It was instant, the phone never felt a thing.  The other was while visiting my son and his family in Philly.  I washed it in the washing machine with detergent.  I insisted that all I wanted to do was make and receive calls.  When we went to teach in the Czech Republic we bought really cheap European phones and learned to manage texting with a keyboard because it was a lot cheaper.  Now I have a really nice phone and enjoy always having the internet and Facebook  available.  With lots of apps for work and entertainment.  Then Facebook came up and all I could think was, "Why in the world would I want Facebook?"  and as usual I was forced into it by my tech savvy family and I began to collect friends many being my former students.  In fact, of the 850+ friend I have, probably 600+ are former pupils I had at Seneca and Manual High Schools.

This brings me to my point.  I have, for years, felt a very personal relation with many of my pupils and worried about them, wondered about them and really wanted to know how they were doing.  Facebook did that for me.  I still fret, I still worry, but now, at least in many cases, I know some of these things.  I also love speaking with you as adult and not in the student-teacher relationship.  Many of you still call me Mister McAdams, and that is fine but I am very comfortable with Charlie, if you are.

There are times when I receive disturbing news about you, including the loss of parents, serious illnesses and even the lose of children which is really difficult for me.  There have been the occasional loss of life by some of my former pupils.  I laugh, I cry, I mourn and I celebrate with you and all is better than it was.  I am so glad that we are able to reconnect.  Facebook, with all its problems has been a true blessing to me.

Theo

I want to tell you about someone I'll call Theo.  Theo was born into poverty and lived in the west end of town.  I knew a couple of his brothers and they had dropped out of school and had been in and out of jail a number of times.  Theo told me that it happened often in his family and that his home, usually shared by 15 or twenty relatives at a time was always in an uproar, some had jobs, most did not.  Theo had a number of bad years at Seneca and had been in and out of school.  When I first met him in his ninth grade home room that I conducted, he was quiet, untrusting, often surly, and frequently sleep deprived and angry.  We had our bad moments but for the most part we had made a silent pact of agitated co-existence.  I really didn't hold out much hope for him but really wanted him to do well.  His home life was a really bad influence.  Many were on drugs, had babies without support, others were violent without warning.

I thought about theo a lot but was powerless, it seemed, to help him.  After his first year I would see him on occasion and would tell him that I hoped things were going well for him.  He would reply with a quiet "think you" without any embellishment.  He eventually showed up in a senior Psychology class of mine and I noticed that he had come out of his shell a bit and was more alert, less angry and, for the most part very nice to have in class.  He still didn't participate a lot but he did what I asked and turned in his worked and did well on tests and was no trouble.  He improved the entire year and and the end of the year I spoke with him one-on-one and I stated how pleased I was that he come along so well.  He had been accepted into a good college and it looked like things were going to work for him.  I just bluntly asked what had happened and he said that sometime late in his sophomore year he decided that he did not want to live his life in and out of jail, nor did he want it to end prematurely.  He went to live with a relative that had a much better home situation.  He thanked me for my interest through the years and said that Seneca had been good to him.

Theo has graduated and is doing well and living somewhere in the Northeast and is raising his own family, and I am sure is raising them well.  This the kind of story that makes me feel that it is worth the effort.  The strongest kid in the room was always Theo and I didn't know it.

THE PURLOINED FILE CABINET AND WHITE GOLD

I always found that the requisitioning methods in the school system was put in place by a demented person at the central office in order the keep teachers busy during all their free time and designed to never work. The best example I can provide is my quest to get a file cabinet that had drawers that opened, locks that worked,  and one that didn't have layers of wood splintering falling off and one that wasn't ready to fall over and crush a student or me.

When I started teaching, I had a classroom that had a file cabinet donated by General Grant after the Civil War. It was made of wood and had a general list to the right. I realized immediately that that side had to go against the wall to keep someone from getting hurt. While pushing it against the wall, I received wound from two splinters that peeled from the side wall. There was actually a hole in the left side where I could see through to one of the four sagging and sticking drawer. Over the years the drawers had deteriorated to the point that they were no longer square and one had to yank very hard to get them to come out and often on trying to get them to go back in made a horrid sound like a red tailed hawk on the hunt.

After a number of years of teaching I discovered how these things happened. When a teacher retired or transferred, the school went through the great file cabinet migration. The older teachers had the best cabinets and this is why. They had gotten to know the custodians well and that is the best group to have on your side. Custodians have keys to EVERYTHING and they are not afraid to use them. They are the secret link in this mass migrations

Teacher “A” retires and teacher “B” who has an in with the custodial staff has them open the room and remove the beautiful new heavy metal file cabinets to their room. Now she has an extra cabinet and barters her other “in good shape” cabinet to her friend. He, in turn, gave his to another friend for a promise of a box (ten reams) of copier paper at the beginning of the next school year. There is a continuous movement of file cabinets from one room to another the entire summer and the beginning of the season in August. Needless to say, as the the quality of the moved cabinets continue, each get older and older and sicker and sicker. Thus the new teacher (s) get stuck with General Grants cabinets (s) It take the new comer a few years to realize what is going on. It took me about ten years. I am a slow learner.  In that ten years I turned in 12 request for a new file cabinet, sometime I did more than one in a year, and was rejected 12 times. With only twelve years seniority, I had moved up in file cabinet quality only marginally and was still in desperate need of one. One year I came back to my room in August only to find a mouse had made her nest in my file cabinet and was raising her brood in there. The only consolation I had was that she was scared just a little more than I when we encountered each other.

In 1981, I was walking through a classroom in Our auditorium when I looked through a door window and to my surprise saw five, yes, five file cabinets that had never been taken out of their protective plastic shipping bags. My mouth started to water, my mind started reeling and I began making plans. One custodian told me that those file cabinets had been sitting there through what I calculated to be 5 or 6 of my requisitions. Oh, man, I thought, and I sort of got angry. “Could you get me one of those” I enquired, He couldn't, or more accurately, wouldn't. I determined that the person or person (s) who ordered them had totally forgotten about them, and thus they were considered public domain. I asked if he knew how I could get a master key, he walked to a cabinet, took a key off a keyboard and placed in my hand and said something like, if you or any member of your Impossible Mission force get caught, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your action. I smiled and began to plot my crime.

These cabinets, I could tell, were very nice and heavy so I enlisted the help of a couple of students and, being a proponent of Title IX, employed a male and a female student to aide and abet me in my felony. After school, one day the three of us snuck from my Third floor room down to the first floor with the magic key in hand. I had previously tested IT eight or nine time, I was very nervous. We managed to muscle that 200 pound monster up two flights of steps 250 feet along a corridor, with one ninety degree turn and into my room and then proceeded to destroy all the evidence except for the file cabinet itself. When we finished I looked at my prize and was moved to tears. It was a red letter day in my teaching career and the cabinet got many oohs and aahs, from approving teachers and administrators. As I suspected, the cabinet was never missed, or,  at least, I didn't hear about it. The other file cabinets remained in that room for a couple of years and then were moved to another storage area where my friend told me remained for a few more.

The two juvenile delinquents that I created, did very well for themselves. One is a very successful business executive and the other is a judge. I figure that skill will help the one to make a lot of money and the other to understand the criminal mind.

After learning the system for a few years I became a master of it. I began to hoard, bum and gather many things that teachers didn't want anymore. These commodities could be simple things like pencils and the little pointy erasers that you put on the back end of a pencil (teenagers used them so much because they made so many mistakes. I also bought a large supply from the bookstore of pencils notebook paper and other essentials goodies using my own money. I gave away tissues for free.. I also learned early that when a student wanted to “borrow' a pencil, you were, in essence giving it to them because you were never going to see that item again and on the rare occasions when you did it had teeth marks in them. After a few years I learned that fact and quit giving things away. I sold them. I made no profit but I didn't lose money either. If it were a partially used pencil we would barter in order to pro-rate it. The kid got a very good deal on pencils with teeth marks or funny colored spots that were not originally on them. I even sold note book paper a penny a sheet. If there were complaints, I told them that the bookstore was open during lunch. Or they could borrow from someone else. I sometimes took stuff for collateral like watches and shoe laces. After a few days it went pretty smoothly. I often got about 40 dollars per class per year and then I would go out and buy junk food and had a party at the end of the year. By doing so I was out those forty dollars but I think it gave the students valuable life lessons.

In dealing with teachers, I discovered that there were certain materials that became very valuable as the school year became shorter. The king of the black market and the white gold of the school house was copier paper. When final tests and lesson were due and the other teachers had frivolously frittered away their supply, I was king of marketplace. Each teacher got a budget at the beginning of the year and I always used my entire budget on paper. A typical teacher supply of paper per year was about five boxes that each containing ten reams of paper, 500 sheet per ream. 500 x ten= 5,000 x 10 is 50,000 sheets of paper. There were 187 student days per year time 150 students per day. If each student get 2 sheets per day that would be 187 x = 561x 150 = 84,000 sheets+. This does not include the lesson plans lost and tests messed up where a students needed a replacement. You see where this is going. I did not average that many papers per day I averaged about one sheet per day. With these numbers in mind, paper became the international currency of Seneca High School in the second semester of each year. With that in mind and with my not losing a large amount of money on pencils and such, I was always well supplied for my students. Some teachers complained that I had too much paper and the Administration reminded each one that I had the same budget as everyone else. That was not strictly true because the science department teachers got more.