STEVE SMITH -- What’s Up

Yvonne Schwartz was my high school English teacher. During my three years

at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, she taught English to me three

times. In my junior year, I wrote an essay about a schizophrenic who was

the patient of a psychiatrist with his own personal problems. One of the

patient’s two personalities was trying to kill the other and the

psychiatrist was trying to stop him/it/them. Trouble was, the “good”

personality was the one trying to deep-six the bad one, but the shrink

couldn’t tell because he himself was leading a double life. I guess you

had to be there.

Mrs. Schwartz liked it enough to read it in front of the entire class,

during which time, I shrunk down in my seat. As she signed my yearbook in

my senior year, she said: “Be a writer, Steve. You can write.”

Mrs. Schwartz was not the last teacher to have inspired me. That honor

belongs to Dr. Harlan Hahn, a political science professor at USC whose

passion for urban politics became mine too.

There were others. In the fifth and sixth grades, Lois Buttwinick and

Mervin McLeod, about whom I have written in this space, inspired me so

much that for a very long time, I wanted to teach kids at a public

elementary school.

So it was very painful for me to read the personal letter from a teacher

who was very upset at my comments last Saturday about the pressure being

put on local kids to prepare for the Stanford 9 test, which they have

just completed. I wrote that the kids were “being whipped into a frenzy”

over the test and that a friend in Irvine reported the same problem.

Prior to writing the column, I had a lengthy discussion with my

sister-in-law, Linda West, who teaches elementary school in San Diego.

Linda agreed with me that the test preparation was out of control.

I never assumed that anyone would believe that I blame teachers for the

test preparation press, but someone did, not because I pointed out

teachers, but because I did not exclude them. And because sometimes an

error of omission is greater than naming names, I now realize that by not

excluding teachers from my assault, I actually included them. That was

not a nice thing to do only hours before Teacher Appreciation Week.

My brother, Larry, is a teacher. Two of my brothers-in-law are teachers,

as are their wives. My wife’s father was a math teacher at Valencia High

School in Placentia for 24 years. Our daughter’s first teacher was a lady

named Tammy Meador, who worked so hard and cared so much for the kids

that we made a major lifestyle decision that we continue almost six years

later. We do not attend professional sporting events or support the

inflated salaries and egos of professional athletes by buying licensed

sports products. Each year instead, I have made a donation to a

school-related charity in lieu of the money we would have spent for

tickets, food and clothes.

My feeling for teachers run very deep. That I would consciously point the

finger of blame at them for what I know to be a mandate from the folks at

the state level is inconceivable. Or so I thought.

This column is a responsibility I take very seriously. That

responsibility is why I occasionally check in with an editor for a story

idea and make sure that when I grouse about something, it is never on a

personal level.

One recent letter writer to the Pilot wrote that “It is easy to sit back

at a word processor and cast dispersion [sic] at a bureaucratic

institution.” The writer was responding to one of my other diatribes, but

it matters not -- she is wrong. Anyone who does this for a living as I do

no less than 12 hours a day will tell you that it is not easy, as my

Stanford 9 mistake indicates. It may look easy, but try upsetting someone

you admire, someone who has to appreciate getting paid in smiles as well

as some cash and you quickly discover the tightrope a columnist must

walk.

That’s not an excuse. I should have made a point of excluding teachers

from the mix of test culprits, but I did not and to all teachers, I am

sorry. I wish I could blame it on my other personality, but I cannot.

This is also a good time to write something to this teacher and to all

the others who day in and day out wrestle with language barriers, sick

kids, parents who don’t care, disappearing budgets and untold rules and

regulations as they work tirelessly to prepare our kids for life. To all

of you, “Thank you.”

Thank you for teaching me how to read and write, especially write, and

thank you for teaching me how to add and subtract. And thank you for

teaching the same things to my kids.

* STEVE SMITH is a Costa Mesa resident and freelance writer. He can be

reached via e-mail at [email protected], or call our Readers Hotline at

(949) 642-6086.