Missing the Big Picture by Donovan, Luke (great book club books txt) 📕

his students that in the ideal world, on the first day of class he would assign a large amount of homework, then the next day if somebody hadn’t completed the assignment he would, quote, “Shoot him.” Another time he told the class, “I think you should know by now not to mess with me.”

There were very few students who did. If anybody ever tried to be comical, he would always yell, “Clown, clown, clown!” In other classes, many of the students whose parents didn’t pay enough attention to them tried to be rude and obnoxious in an attempt to make everybody laugh. This never happened in Mr. Fuller’s class—although Mr. Fuller was himself kind of a comedian. The difference was that whenever he made a joke, all of the kids were too afraid to laugh.

Mr. Fuller was a stickler for spelling. Two words that every ninth grade student at Saint John’s had to memorize were archaeologist and anthropologist. If a student got one of these words wrong, he made the student yell out the window, “I can spell anthropologist!”

One time, Mr. Fuller observed a student smoking a cigarette in the parking lot. When it was time for global studies, Mr. Fuller walked up to him and said, “So how was that cigarette this morning? Pretty soon you’ll be working at Mobil for the rest of your life selling cigarettes to shitheads like yourself.” He then proceeded to call the student “shithead” three times in front of the other classmates. The student transferred a few months later. Oddly enough, the students once observed Mr. Fuller smoking a cigar on a school field trip.

Mr. Fuller enjoyed teaching and liked to add his personal opinion to history. He referred to Massachusetts as “the state that keeps hiring a murderer as U.S. senator” and said that the only thing JFK did that was noteworthy during his administration was die. During the second or third day of school, he told the class that global studies was the most important class—the only class that mattered. He dismissed math, saying we should just use a calculator, and who cared about rocks in earth science? As for Spanish, if anyone was going to visit a Spanish-speaking country, he could just simply say, “Two dollar, two dollar.”

However, Mr. Fuller worked all of his students. His homework usually took an hour to complete. At the end of the first semester, the class had a ninety-three average. On average, 97 to 98 percent of the students would pass the global studies Regents at the end of sophomore year.

Saint John’s was founded by the Christian brothers, but at the time, there were only nine brothers on staff and only three or four in teaching positions. Most of the brothers were middle-aged or elderly, although one stood out at only being twenty-five years old. The campus minister was only thirty-two as well.

School was only six hours long, which was nice, but I received transportation from my home district, so its bus would pick up the Saint John’s students and drive them home. On the way back, the bus would stop at another, co-ed Catholic high school and pick up additional students, most of whom were girls.

The daily bus rides were nothing but negative experiences. Since the ride was a minimum of thirty minutes for each student, most of the older Saint John’s students would sit in the back and torment the other students, mainly from the co-ed Catholic high school. Two of the boys, almost on a daily basis, would walk up to the girls with paper towel dowel rods in front of their genital areas to stimulate erections, and then shove the plastic rods in the girls’ faces. This went on for weeks before officials addressed the situation.

There was also a girl named Gale who, since she had short hair and wore a tie to school, many of the boys assumed was a lesbian. The boys would call her “Ellen,” as 1997 was the same year that Ellen DeGeneres came out. Finally, the associate principal of Saint John’s went on the bus and said he had received phone calls from several mothers saying that most of the girls refused to ride the bus home.

In late October, less than two months after I began attending Saint John’s, the school received media attention. On a Saturday night, a Saint John’s upper-level math teacher was arrested for purchasing crack cocaine from a police officer in a school parking lot while his three-year-old son waited in the backseat.1 The math teacher was in his first year of teaching and was only a few courses away from earning a doctorate in mathematics.

Saint John’s often received media attention. The school was also involved in a lawsuit with a former teacher during my freshman year. Two years earlier, a thirty-two year veteran social studies teacher, who was also the varsity football coach, was terminated for allegedly discouraging alumni from making donations. He sued for $500,000, saying that he was terminated as a result of age discrimination, and that the administration and Board of Trustees slandered him and made comments that he “lost control both on the field and in the classroom.”2

A week after the arrest of the Saint John’s math teacher, the school had some drug-abuse professionals come to the school and give a presentation about how to resist drugs. One woman came from an organization called the Albany Diocese Drug Education Ministry, and her job was to lecture at all of the Catholic schools in the Albany diocese and provide drug education. In her closing statement, the woman described how when she would tell people about what she did for a living, she would often be surprised that many individuals thought Catholic school students came from perfect families and had stable home lives. As she was making this statement, the Saint John’s students murmured statements of disgust. In fact, most of the students had anything but normal home lives and weren’t perfect at all. In June 1997, it