My Way

My Way

As a teacher with more years behind him than ahead of him, I’m beginning to pull together some remembrances from the classroom; tales of the unusual and stories of the bizarre.

Field trips are always grand opportunities for unscripted action and excitement. Over my career, I’ve experienced sick kids, lost kids, and lost parents; but one child, Jay, holds title as having the most unusual field trip experiences with me. His trips with me are inexplicably bound with me.

Normally when I write stories about times in the classroom, I change the names of the children so as not to exploit their true identity in public; however, in this case, I am going to use Jay’s real name. I feel I can do that because, due to a string of unusual circumstances, I forged a bond with Jay and his parents.

I had the “honor” of teaching Jay two separate years. In third grade, Jay had my trailer neighbor, Mr. Donald Barbour as his main teacher. Each day, Mr. Barbour and I would regroup our kids for Math and Social Studies/Science. So day by day, I got to know Jay. Basically, Jay gave an excellent first impression to strangers. He was well-spoken, fine looking, well dressed, sported a winning smile, and had a clever sense of humor. Jay, however, had one very real impediment to a successful classroom career. He would not and absolutely could not submit to any authority in his life other than himself; for Jay lived by one creed, “My Way.”

Mr. Barbour, in a gentle voice would always ask Jay each morning, “Jay I see that you don’t have your homework today. Why not?”

“I didn’t want to.”

Sometimes Jay’s reply was simply a smile and a shrug of his shoulders. As the third grade year went on, Mr. Barbour and I tried all kinds of behavior contracts, punishments, rewards, and bribes. On top of that, Jay began to fail all of his classes, act out in the classroom, and concoct silly and mean little things to pick on his fellow classmates. Soon, Jay’s smile and shrug wore very thin. His classmates despised him, loathed him. He became a complete outcast and no amount of parent conferences with his mother, Deborah, seemed to be able to get him back on track. Jay lived by a very simple mantra, “I’ll do it My Way! Screw You.” Hence, Mr. Barbour and I began calling him “My Way Jay” during those private moments of teacher desperation. Soon, we were calling him simply by the name “My Way.”

Despite his stubbornness and rude behaviors, Jay was a likeable guy. When no work was on the line, both Donald and I established a pretty good relation with the guy. Jay had a marvelous sense of humor and a very broad understanding of the world for a third grader. He liked to be the butt of practical jokes from us (not his fellow classmates) and he enjoyed dishing the stuff back at us. Donald and I figured that our best approach with My Way was to get him to really want to please us. Donald, a natural clown and hack magician, especially struck a positive relationship with Jay. So on a professional side, My Way was a huge pain in the neck, but on a personal side, Jay was a really cool kid that was fun to be around.

During the spring of that year, we decided to try out a new place for a culminating field trip. Just up the road from Roanoke was the relatively new Virginia Safari Park near Natural Bridge (Link on the side). This place was basically a huge farm that sheltered all kinds of immigrant animals from all over the world. From Camels to giraffes to Watusi Elk, these animals roamed free and wild over the 300 acres of the park.

To explore the park, visitors had two options. You could either drive your car through the meandering dirt road or you could ride in the flatbed of a trailer pulled by a farm tractor. That spring, Donald and I, along with the two other third grade teachers took our kids to the safari park and gave them the unique experience of cruising through the park on that trailer.

One of the big draws to this place is that part of the experience involves feeding the critters from one gallon buckets. Before the ride starts, each kid is given a white one gallon bucket of feed. They are instructed to feed the animals as they drive through and cautioned to beware of the llamas, camels, and bison. Those guys can get a bit greedy and rip a bucket out of a kid’s hand. As we pulled away from the station and proceeded toward the main gate, the tractor driver looked ahead and saw that we had a welcoming committee of all kinds of foreign animals on the other side. Donald and I were sitting at the front of the wagon right behind the driver. My Way was strategically placed right next to Donald while I placed my most challenging kid, “Sam-O!” next to “My Way.” I sat just opposite Donald and the boys, relatively buffered from their shenanigans. The rest of the 40 kids were spread through-out the huge trailer interspersed with some parent chaperones. As we were about to blast through the gate, the driver leaned back and instructed Donald and me to make sure that the kids were careful around the camels. They were waiting for us at the gate and the largest one, Omar, was extremely aggressive with buckets, the driver alerted.

As soon as were crossed the cattle guard (for those of you who have never lived on a farm, a cattle guard is a clever negative bridge built into a road. Basically, it’s a series of solid narrow iron bars stretched over pit dug across a road. The edge of either side of the road is then fenced normally. Animals may try to cross the bridge of steel bars, but they quickly realize that their hooves may fall through and shy away while a treaded vehicle can roll right across), we were in the land of the wild, roaming, and hungry beasts. The kids were delighted. They were screaming, laughing, and pointing. Some kids began holding their buckets out for the camels and llamas to mooch some feed. Our trailer was covered in wild, frenzied beasts pushing and shoving to get kid buckets of feed. The children were climatic in their ecstasy.

The scene was broken by a massive shift in the animal’s behavior. From the My Way side, beasts suddenly began pulling aside as a massive camel, the famous Omar, with foul-smelling sagging humps, pushed his way into the picture. First he moved to Donald…sniffed…then slid to Sam-O! sniffed several times…then shifted back to My Way. Jay offered his bucket to the beast…laughing as if he was going to play a game of “Get It Now or You Lose It.” Omar lingered for a moment...as if considering. Then without a moment’s warning the evil camel seemed to grin, opened his stale breathed camel mouth wide, and swallowed My Way’s head. Yes, that’s correct. The camel opened his mouth very wide and tried to swallow Jay’s head. All the kids in the trailer began screaming in horror and fear scrambling away from Jay’s headless torso. Omar managed to ingest Jay’s entire head for a few moments, but he didn’t crunch, much in the same way that President Clinton didn’t inhale.

Needless to say when you are being eaten by an aggressive camel, you’d probably scream and squirm. My Way was no different. He jerked around trying everything his reflexive body knew to pull away from this most unusual predator. Donald and I immediately leaped to Jay’s defense. I remember the bristly sting from his stick whiskers as I punched smelly beast with all my might. Donald and I began to pull Jay’s body from the camel. After some moments of tugging and punching, Omar withdrew his snoot from My Way’s head and retreated a bit, then quickly went in search of easier meals.

Jay was screaming uncontrollably, as you might imagine. He had come within a camel’s hair of being devoured by a nightmarishly huge foul-smelling beast. As Omar withdrew his lip lock on Jay’s head, he left behind foul traces of his conquest. My Way was covered from the top of his head to the bottom of his jaw with oozing camel slime. Although physically unscarred, Jay smelled like rotten, fermented white bucket feed in a smooth case of rancid Vaseline-like skin. He immediately began clawing at his face to wipe away the physical, slimy memory of the attack. Sam-O! began laughing uncontrollably…as he would predictably do. Jay looked up with the oozing slime running down his head, and he smiled. It was at that instant that Donald and I realized that he was Ok and it would be ok to laugh our heads off, too.

The rest of that year, Jay was great in the classroom. All we had to do was mention Omar and bring up the embarrassing camel attack, and Jay would respond appropriately. He ended up passing his classes and moving on to the next grade. Really to reach tough kids, all you have to do is have them swallowed by a camel. Works every time.

The third grade to this day continues to visit the safari park, and the teachers are all very quick to warn the excited children about the dangers in feeding the beasts, especially Omar the camel. I moved on to teach fifth grade after that year, and not surprisingly My Way came back into my life in a more serious way a year later.

Jay ended up in my homeroom during his fifth grade year. It really was a good situation for me because Jay had grown up some, and he was beginning to use his clever intelligence for more academic pursuits. He was still a bit awkward around his peers, but we continued to develop a solid relationship. I began to see that Jay most likely would turn out to be a fine adult, perhaps even an outstanding adult. He’d begun to grow past his “My Way-ness.”

During this period, I was mainly a writing teacher to the entire fifth grade, and I relied heavily on parent volunteers to help me develop a cohesive program. One of my volunteers was Jay’s mother, Deborah. I found her to be delightful and completely reliable. Deborah had Jay’s same great sense of humor, and I looked forward to having her visit my class.

When spring rolled around, the fifth grade decided to visit Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in Charlottesville with a side trip to James Monroe’s Ash Lawn nearby. We weren’t allowed to take any parents, but we did subtly encourage several to follow our charter buses in their cars. One of the eager parent volunteers was Deborah, My Way’s mom.

Within minutes of getting to the Monticello parking lot, Jay had found trouble. He was getting off the charter bus and somehow managed to slice his hand on the step rail of the bus. Obviously, he would need stitches and have to visit the hospital. Luckily, Deborah was right there, and she told us that she would simply take him to the nearest emergency room and have him stitched up, but she didn’t really know the area. Since I had lived in the Charlottesville for about 15 years prior to moving to Roanoke County, I was able to give Deborah clear directions to get to Martha Jefferson, a nearby hospital-the place where both of my kids were born. So she took off with Jay after exchanging cell phone numbers with, strangely, Sam-O!’s mother. Yes, I had Sam-O! in the same class as My Way that year. It was quite a year for me! I figured we’d see Jay and Deborah before we left for home. I was right…

About two hours later, while I was relaxing on a porch at Ash Lawn watching the nearby mountains as a gentle Virginia breeze blew through my soul, Sam-O!’s mother came to me and told me that there was a problem at the hospital. The hospital had called and alerted us that Deborah had collapsed in the emergency room and Jay was there all alone with his her. Immediately, Sam-O!’s mother and I hopped into her car and rushed to Martha Jefferson. There we found My Way roaming the halls with his stitched up hand, obviously nervous but in charge of his world. We were ushered in to see Deborah. Her heart rate was racing to very high levels, and she was slipping in and out of consciousness. Jay, despite his act, was very concerned, as was I. So I stayed there after Sam-O!’s mom went back to Ash Lawn and kept Deborah and Jay company until her husband could get to Charlottesville. The doctors, Jay, and I were all very scared for her. The doctors said she had an irregular heart-beat, and they were having a very difficult time getting it back in synch. Her heart rate would at one moment be normal and she would reassuringly talk to Jay beside her bed then the rate would escalate to very high levels and her eyes would roll back in her head. Eventually, after a few hours, Deborah began to stabilize. Her husband finally arrived there long after the charter buses had long returned to Roanoke, so I drove their car back to the school in Roanoke. Deborah stayed there for a few more days before being released. A year later, when I had a similar heart scare, Deborah gave me some sound advice and comfort.

I’ll never forget “My Way” Jay. I suspect one day he will become some important doctor, naturalist, or animal trainer. Most assuredly whatever he decides to do with his life, Jay will do it his way.