Empty Classroom

I hope this doesn’t make me a bad teacher (and not in the boozy Carmen Diaz way), but I actually like an empty classroom. I like getting to school pretty much before everyone else, and walking into that quiet space. The light is still low, or maybe it’s even dark out still, and the cross on the mission church outside the classroom windows is just beginning to light up (and yes, that mission legacy is sure complicated these days, isn’t it? Unlike the let’s-study-the-missions-in-fifth-grade approach we grew up with). But here’s the thing about that empty classroom, early in the morning: it’s pure potential. Like a freshly-tapped keg of beer. Or Christmas morning, before the kids are up, and the gifts are still covered by a bedsheet (no peeking!). There is enormous opportunity in that empty classroom, the chance that a kid will have a life-altering experience that day, that he or she will be exposed to something that rocks their world and maybe even sets them on a different path. And that’s part of what gives me an unfair advantage, as a middle school science teacher: science is fun. That’s my mantra, and the kids seem to be on the same page. As I told my principal, I don’t necessarily want to be the best teacher in the school, merely the most popular. Science is fun.

There are a couple other reasons I get to school so early. First, I get up pretty damn early every day. The ultimate FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). Second, as a fairly new teacher, I need all the prep time I can get. A fellow teacher told me it takes six years to get comfortable as a teacher. I’m in year six right now, and that pretty much rings true. I no longer panic at the thought of being caught unprepared, and I’ve learned to be very flexible. Oh, the kids have play practice right now? Got it.

This is a second career for me, or, maybe more accurately, it’s my retirement job. Thirty years as a wildlife biologist for the National Park Service in the can, so I’ve already had my career. Which means, for one, I don’t have to depend on teaching in a Catholic school for a career, which is great, because it sure doesn’t pay well. But I do believe that if you know something, you should pass it on, and this is what I have to offer these kids: a lifelong appreciation and passion for science, and a broad knowledge of the subject material (at least at the middle school level!). I want these kids to know that they, too, can have a career in science. And I chose middle school, because I want to get these kids excited about science now, before we lose them to the uncertainty of high school. In a way, I’m just channeling my dad here. He was a chemical engineer for Chevron for 38 years, which is impressive enough, and then he taught middle school science, in a Catholic school, for 15 years. Dragged into teaching by my mom, a second-grade teacher, he loved it so much that it became a great second career for him. I watched him do it and thought, I should do that, too.

My first year of teaching was exhausting. I was hired to teach middle school science and social studies at a Catholic school in Oxnard; I think they were swayed by my degree from Notre Dame (I don’t have a teaching credential; still don’t). I was surprised, even shocked, at the lack of resources at the school, which was well-established and had always had decent enrollment (some classes had more than 30 students).  The textbooks were 20-25 years old. No Wifi in the classroom, no devices, one computer room with ancient, donated desktops. The school was run by an autocratic principal who had been there almost 50 years. Set in her ways, resistant to change, and harboring some interesting views, she told me that field trips to the beach were not allowed because “the sea might take our children”.  It was a challenging year, but I enjoyed it, and I was endlessly entertained by my seventh-graders. My only classroom rule was the surfer adage “Dude, be nice”, but I found I had to add another one: no lap dances in my classroom. Their libidos were surging, just gaining purchase, and as a result there were girls sitting on guys’ laps, girls sitting on girls’ laps, guys sitting on guys’ laps. A highlight was what I have since called The Great Condom Incident of 2016. Ralph brought a condom to school, supposedly given to him by his dad because it was time “he was a man”, and all the seventh-graders had viewed it – in the coat closet – by the time I discovered Ignacio with it. At which point I picked it up and Jessica said, ”Ew, Mr. Coonan, you touched it!” I said, “It’s still in in its wrapper! You obviously don’t know how this works!” At which she replied, “Ooh, Mr. Coonan, show us how a condom works!”. I beat a hasty retreat. There was quite an interesting meeting in the principals’ office that day.

And yes, I was the first teacher to school every morning there. I loved driving into the neighborhood, which is the oldest and most well-established in Oxnard, with big old homes that date from Oxnard’s heyday as an agricultural behemoth. The trees in that neighborhood are old and well-established, too; many are western sycamores, large and unruly, with palmate leaves bigger than dinner plates, and I loved the first light of morning hitting those trees. But teaching full-time meant prep work every night, and on at least one day of the weekend. The next year I moved over to teach science only at the mission school here in Ventura, lured by my friend Andrew (“I can see three breweries from my classroom!”). This school, too, is old; in fact, it’s 100 years old this year. The school building itself is newish; an enterprising paster, Monsignor O’Brien, built it about 10 years ago, a three-story building overlooking the San Buenaventura Mission church and downtown Ventura.

But enrollment is low at this school – less than 80 students – and has been low since the economic downturn of 2008. It’s my observation that once enrollment declines at such a school, it takes years to build it back up. Sometimes these schools never recover. The Catholic grade school I attended in El Segundo, hard by the Chevron refinery where my dad worked, shut its doors for good two years ago. It had been failing for a while, as local Catholic residents began choosing to send their kids to the wealthy Manhattan Beach parish in the next town over. Hard to believe those St. Anthony’s classrooms are empty now; they were so full of life for us in the 60s and 70s. Catholic schools are struggling to keep their heads above water, especially in the LA region, where half a dozen have been shuttered in the past several years, many pushed to the brink by Covid. All the more reason for me to teach; I think the Catholic schools in particular are underfunded in science and need all the help they can get. There’s little to no funding for science equipment. Supplies for my first year of science teaching were funded by my dad; thanks to him I was able to buy some microscopes and slides, some dissecting equipment, specimens to dissect.

Yes, we dissect animals. Though some kids are initially squeamish about this, it’s certainly the highlight of the year for many of these kids. They feel, for one, as if they’re doing real science: gloves, scalpels, forceps, scissors, dissecting trays; the works. And it’s one of the most memorable lessons they’ll have in middle school. Dissecting is part and parcel of my hands-on approach (to the extent possible), and there’s no better way to illustrate the variety of invertebrate and vertebrate body types, and how different species solve basic problems such moving and getting nutrients. There are other ways to illustrate this, which these kids can relate to. I have a SpongeBob poster in my classroom. I love it because almost every invertebrate phylum, as well as some vertebrate ones, are illustrated in the cast of SpongeBob characters.

Part of the thrill for me is blowing these kids’ minds with things they never thought of, things they didn’t know, which challenge the way they think about reality. Such as black holes: there’s one at the center of every good-sized galaxy and they make time-travel theoretically possible, through wormholes. The life-cycle of a star. Stars like our sun have a life-span of 10 billion years, and our Sun has been in existence for 5; do the math: we’ve got about 5 billion years left on this rock, before our Sun dies and the planets go hurtling off into space (there are only two dates I make the kids know:  the age of the solar system [5 billion years] and the age of our ever-expanding universe [14 billion years]). And some of their world views have definitely been shaken. “Mr. Coonan, do you even believe in God?” a student once asked me. “Yes, I do, Vanessa,” I answered. “But I also believe in the Big Bang.”

I don’t stray into belief systems - they’ll get plenty of that across the hall, in Mrs. Palmer’s religion class. Science, as they say, doesn’t care what you believe. The earth is round, whether you believe it or not. And it’s amazing what some of these kids believe. Recently we had a wide-ranging discussion during which some kids tried to tell me mermaids were real, and that Megalodon, the giant prehistoric shark, still exists. Show me the evidence, I told them, and show me the source of the evidence. Evidence, sources. I hammer that into them. Scientists are curious, make observations, observe patterns. And look for evidence. If the kids can get that, I’m good. I want them to know that part of the world, this existence, is indeed knowable, and that’s where science comes in. Granted, a large chunk (say life after death, or the soul) is not really knowable, is in the realm of belief, and science can’t inform that. And it goes the other way, as well – religion can’t inform science, either. They’re in separate silos, separate magisteria, as Stephen Jay Gould wrote. And science can’t tell you what to do, of course, but it sure can tell you the consequences of your action or inaction. Its predictive power is very useful.

The kids take to some of this quite readily. They are so good at the digital stuff, but not so good on the writing; I’ve come to appreciate, over the years, how really rare it is to develop good writing skills. But they are excellent at digital slide shows (we use Google Slides; I’ve been using PowerPoint for many years). And when we were remote, during the depths of Covid, the kids became very adept at Zoom. In fact, they figured out may of its features long before I did.

Our classrooms weren’t empty for that long. The Catholic schools went back live before many others, because they wanted to show those tuition-paying parents we were serious about educating their kids. We had masks, and still do; one consequence being that I don’t really know what many of these kids look like without their masks. When the eighth-graders took off their masks for a graduation picture last spring, I honestly did not recognize some of them; their growing faces had changed so much in the interim.

But I must say that it’s great to be back in the classroom, masks and all. The kids love it, too. They missed so much crucial social interaction, that daily pre-teen back-and-forth tug-of-war, when we were remote. And it was certainly difficult to keep science interactive under remote teaching. Now we’re back, and we can do cooperative, project-based, student-centered science, the way it’s supposed to be, with all the interaction, the barely-controlled chaos, the sound and the fury, that it entails. It might get loud, as I apologetically tell my fellow teachers. Give me that full classroom. Think I’ll keep doing this until they tell me I can’t.