Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

• the Chain Gang

• the Spuds

“I am not sure that I understand your objections, sir,” I said, after pretending to review the list. “First, I doubt that the boys, or even their parents for that matter, will be familiar with the first two. Most people prefer the simpler term mutt, and chain gangs have long since fallen out of favor, at least in this country. That leaves only Spuds, and what, may I ask, is objectionable about the potato?”

He peered at me for a moment, hoping to decipher my tone. “Well,” he said at last. “First, there is the question of why, out of all possible names, you are drawn to a nickname for the potato. There is also the matter of sound, Dr. Daneau. Have you not considered that Spuds sounds a great deal like Duds ?”

“Surely you are not telling me that we must consider rhyming?” I gasped.

“I am not saying that we must consider rhyming per se, but we must consider implications.” He sighed heavily, a familiar enough sigh, for it was the same sigh that I produce when dealing with some particularly obtuse student, Peterson, for example, to whom I had applied this sigh just the day before after a long and unsuccessful attempt to teach him basic test-taking skills.

“Quickly now, Peterson,” I had cried out in a fit of exasperation. “If I were to wad this test of yours into a ball and throw it, where would it land? A. across the room, B. in North Dakota, C. in India.” As you can see, I was not above stacking the deck, but Peterson looked back at me as though I had asked him to calculate the precise distance from his desk to the sun.

“Well?” I pressed him. “What strikes you as obviously wrong?” My point, as it always is in regard to multiple choice, was that he should begin by eliminating; therein lies my objection to the format, for when does life itself proceed in such a fashion, offering us just one correct option presented amid a limited number of others that are so patently wrong?

“I don’t know, sir,” he said. He was one of the politer boys, the type who gets along largely on manners, by jumping up after a movie to reopen the blinds or to rearrange the desks. He added miserably, “I’m sorry, sir. I’ve never been much good at geography.”

That is when I produced the sigh, the sigh meant only to alleviate my own frustration. Still, as I sat in Thorqvist’s office the next day, listening to him emit a similar sigh, I did experience a twinge of remorse regarding young Peterson.

Thorqvist and I are both great believers in civility, and so we chose to disengage briefly, to turn our attention away from the matter of names while we both calmed down. Casting around his office for a momentary distraction, I noticed a new sampler on the wall behind his desk. “More of your wife’s work?” I asked. His wall had previously featured six of her embroideries, each containing a proverb whose message she apparently found so inspiring that she felt compelled to reproduce it in small, exact stitches.

Thorqvist nodded — sheepishly, dare I say? He is no genius, my principal, but neither, I believe, is he the sort to be swayed by the bland, lowest-common-denominator wisdom of proverbs. It is true that he has a fondness for clichés, but proverbs are a far different species. Clichés are a speaker’s convenience, a linguistic shortcut uttered, in most cases, entirely without thought and received in the same fashion. They are like mosquitoes, ubiquitous and annoying but ultimately harmless. A proverb, however, is much stealthier: like the bite of a snake, it is meant to change a life.

I stood before his wife’s seventh contribution, a Slovenian proverb according to the final line of stitches. “Thorqvist,” I said, fumbling for words. “Have you actually read this… this Slovenian nonsense?” I proceeded to read his wife’s sampler aloud: “An ant is over six feet tall when measured by its own foot-rule.” Still he did not reply, and so I turned to him and spoke urgently: “Thorqvist, don’t you see that this message is antithetical to our very mission as educators? Certainly our boys would all like to be measured according to their own foot-rule as it were, but that is precisely the point, is it not? The boys must understand that it is the world’s foot-rule that matters.”

The sampler hit on a sore spot with me, for it reinforced a growing trend in education — namely, the notion that we are the keepers of our students’ self-esteem and, as such, must never allow them to feel that they have failed. Just recently, for example, we were expected to spend an entire day being lectured at by one of these ponytailed pedagogy types hired from the university for an exorbitant fee to beat the latest theories into us. He began the session by waving a handful of red pens about.

“Who can tell me what these are?” he asked, and when enough of my colleagues had taken the bait, calling out, “Red pens,” he announced theatrically, “Ah yes, everybody is familiar with red pens, I see. Well, teachers, I am here to tell you that the red pen, bleeding its way across the students’ work all these years, is finally and fully finished.” With a flourish that underscored his rhetoric, he tossed the entire handful of pens into a nearby trash can.

“May I point out,” I said, raising my hand, “that red allows the student to differentiate his work from my corrections and thus to see clearly his mistakes.”

He regarded me for a moment, yanking on his ponytail as though, I could not help but think, trying to start a motor. “I believe that I hear a bit of the sage-on-the-stage mentality in your comments, Mr….”

“Doctor,” I corrected him. “Dr. Daneau. Mathematics.”

“Dr. Daneau,” he repeated, patronizingly of course, as though I were a child who had informed him that I was not six years old but rather six and a half.

“If by sage-on-the-stage mentality you are referring to the fact that I know math and they do not, then I must confess that I see no problem with that mentality . Indeed, I see no alternative.”

“This,” he said gravely, spreading his hands wide, “is why these professional development days are so important.” The implication, of course, was that something I had said was the referred-to “this” that demonstrated his point.

He consulted his watch. “I was not expecting quite so much discussion on the topic of red pens,” he quipped. A few of my colleagues chuckled — obedient, baa ing laughter — and he glanced in my direction to see whether I had noted it. I looked around at my colleagues, who fell largely into two camps: the older teachers, who viewed professional development as something to be sat through whilst offering up the least possible resistance, and the new teachers, impressionable, enthusiastic note takers who were having their beliefs shaped by ideologues such as this, this sage on the stage as it were.

“Gang,” he called out. “Take ten minutes, and then we’ll reconvene to role-play some of our new ideas.”

I did not partake of the ten-minute break. Instead, I went home and took to my bed for the afternoon, overcome with fever at the thought of role-playing.

* * *

After I had let Thorqvist know my opinion of his wife’s sampler and he had refrained from replying, we returned to the matter of names. I was about to offer up the Penguins as a compromise when he said, “The vice principal and myself have come up with a name for the group in question. I hope that it will be to your liking, Dr. Daneau.” He paused, and I knew what this meant — that the name would be so far from my liking that he hesitated even to speak it aloud.

“Well?”

“The Cheetahs,” he declared.

“The Cheetahs?”