When I was asked to student teach at the Point Park College Laboratory Classroom’s Primary Classroom, many eons ago, I was honored and quite proud of my skills and accomplishments as a college student. This was back in the late ’60s and education was on the move, trying its hardest to get past the black and white of life, do not EVER draw outside of the lines, immediately classifying your intelligence from your year in Kindergarten assigning YOU, from the age of 5, a future based on not much else but if you could read Dick and Jane and See Spot Run! This was an Open Classroom, ages 5 to 8, as liberal as one might imagine in curriculum, with imagination and creativity as boundless and bountiful!
One of my students was the Dean of Education at Point Park’s granddaughter. I will call her Emily because she actually decided that would be her name as long as I student taught. Hmmm, I thought isn’t she cute! During my first semester of teaching Emily and I became quite a couple, and none of this was my intention, but the necessity of Emily’s need to have a male figure in her life, as her grandmother The Dean, felt an absent father, no male relatives, left a gap in Emily’s development. (How times have changed since then, THANK GOODNESS)…but that was how life had been perceived. Many moments of madness ensued, but I was NOT going to give in or give up. Often times Emily would tell the other classmates her GRANDMA WAS THE BOSS, at which the very confident kids would reply, she IS NOT THE BOSS OF ME. Often times Emily would bully other kids for attention, and way too often she would find herself in “TIME OUT,” which she thought just brought more attention to her. Once, for Show and Tell, Emily brought a garter snake, placed in her LONG, LONG hair. The snake decide to coil and Emily screamed; and FUCK, I had to touch the snake with my bare hands and uncoil it and pull it out. (THIS, and I remember it until this day, took about 2 hours.) But the one thing I recall most when I think back at those days is the game called MY RULES, in which Emily conned the very insecure 5 students to play. The rules of the game were that there were NO RULES until Emily made up the Rules while the game was being played. Emily figured she would win every game that way! I will end this part of my trip down memory lane by saying, by June, I won the trust of Emily and she then told me her real name.
MY RULES…so during President Biden’s address to Congress, (love saying President Biden), Liz Cheney, I cannot believe I am commenting on a CHENEY in a positive light…fist-bumped President Biden. I think if not the only GOP anti-American politician to do so, one of the few, and she caught un-imaginary FLACK for doing so. A simple outreach to the president of all Americans and this act of respect drew the IRE and WRATH of the GOP. And we are told that President Biden and the Democrats are to respect the Republicans and demonstrate a BIPARTISAN approach. HUH, WTF, and then I remembered EMILY, playing her made-up game MY RULES, and I just sighed…realizing just how hard it had been to tell EMILY, her rules did not RULE!
