When Mr. O’Sullivan takes a job at teaching at Miami-Unified School District, he has no idea just how interesting it will be.
One day a tiny girl sends her classmates scattering as she effortlessly flips a solid oak library table and screams that she sees Satan in the room.
One evening, a friendly colleague from the classroom next door appears on the news, in the form of a mugshot, an accused rapist.
Then there is the 14-year-old who the teacher forces to listen to Tony Bennett ad-nauseam? He turns out to have been carrying a loaded handgun the whole time.
And then there are all the conferences where parents make their kids look pretty damn good, by the contrast they offer.
And of course there are those administrators who couldn't handle life in the classroom. They tell teachers what to do in the classroom now.
Every day is different in this profession.
A humorous novel which feels true to life, A King of Shreds and Patches takes the reader on first-person odyssey of thirty-three and a half years. It may not be a textbook hero’s journey, but it’s well worth the trip.
When Mr. O’Sullivan takes a job at teaching at Miami-Unified School District, he has no idea just how interesting it will be.
One day a tiny girl sends her classmates scattering as she effortlessly flips a solid oak library table and screams that she sees Satan in the room.
One evening, a friendly colleague from the classroom next door appears on the news, in the form of a mugshot, an accused rapist.
Then there is the 14-year-old who the teacher forces to listen to Tony Bennett ad-nauseam? He turns out to have been carrying a loaded handgun the whole time.
And then there are all the conferences where parents make their kids look pretty damn good, by the contrast they offer.
And of course there are those administrators who couldn't handle life in the classroom. They tell teachers what to do in the classroom now.
Every day is different in this profession.
A humorous novel which feels true to life, A King of Shreds and Patches takes the reader on first-person odyssey of thirty-three and a half years. It may not be a textbook hero’s journey, but it’s well worth the trip.
“You know, usually if the results take this long to come in, it’s because the test is coming back positive.”
“Oh good,” I responded..
Mr. Norton slid his black framed glasses up to the bridge of his nose. “Positive means you have drugs in your system.”
“Oh. No. I mean that’s bad. Negative. They will be negative.”
“So can you speak any Spanish?”
“Yes, I can. I’ve studied and worked in Mexico and Colombia.”
“Yeah, big deal.” He muttered.
Was he messing with me? I was answering his question. I looked around the room. Air conditioning duct-work snaked along the ceilings. This school was one of the oldest buildings in Miami. Ducts, wiring, and sprinkler systems were all add-ons, crammed up there, lowering the profile of the original ceilings. If I wanted I could reach up and touch a sprinkler. What if I did? What if I broke it and it started spraying water all over the place?
“So,” he said, “What are you going to do?”
“Excuse me?”
“I said when they come back this late, the result is almost always positive.”
I noticed that there was a fish tank to the side of the room. It was too blue, like there was dye in the water. Were the fish being treated for some kind of disease? Maybe they had ich. After the aquarium, framed photos of a husky brown-haired fellow lined up on a shelf. He was with a US senator in one of them. This stoked my suspicion. It wasn’t Norton’s office. He was skinny with white hair. This was the principal’s office. It said so on the door. If I had heard right, the secretary had said I was meeting an assistant principal. Was he playing principal? Was he trying to trick me? Did he know something I didn’t know? Did I actually have drugs in my system?
Maybe he was waiting for me to confess and walk out of there.
I couldn’t. I had a new wife and baby to support. Thirty-three years old, time to get serious in life. I said, “Maybe they lost the results? I’m sure I will pass; I mean it will be negative.” Why did I feel like I needed to act like I wasn’t on drugs? I wasn’t on drugs. One more glance at that blue water.
Mr. Norton stood up, so I stood up. He shook my hand, so I shook back. He said, “Go talk to Ms. Willis. She’s your department head. She’s in 200-A, the back of the library. If she doesn’t answer the door, shout her name because I know she’s in there.”
“Thank you.” Was I hired? What about the drug test? And where was the library?
In 1990, the district had money allocated for things that would seem impossible in the coming years. Ms. Willis told me that as an English teacher, I would have an extra planning period as part of the Writing Initiative. Even for ESOL, English for Speakers of Other Languages, there was an emphasis on writing. If students were required to write more, teachers would have extra time to go over their work. That made sense. I was starting to like the idea of working at this place. Also, funding existed for helping new teachers to get a smooth start. I was assigned to a veteran teacher who would be paid to take me under her wing and show me around the school. Ms. Willis had been in the school since 1960. Before that, she had worked at the United Nations. She even had a job at the League of Nations. That’s how old she was. She was about five feet tall. I told her about my meeting with Mr. Norton.
“Well, are you on drugs?” Fortunately, she was smiling.
“No, no no. I swear.”
“Don’t worry about him. He is frustrated because he is in his sixties and still not a principal. You get the room with the murals.” She laughed. She told me about her own shaky start at Tuttle High, about her interview with a previous principal, Jay Winston Pearl. He mentioned the shade of her skin and inquired about her background. She told him that her parents were Greek.
“Greek,” he said. “Well, that’s OK.” So she got the job.
I, on the other hand, was still in limbo. “So, do you know if I am hired?”
“Oh, you bet; we have an open position to fill. Plus, I like you. By the way, you owe me one.” Ms. Willis told me that she stood up for me in the faculty meeting. She also said that the teacher I was replacing, Ms. Fairchild, suddenly left to pursue a career in modeling. “Like a hot potato.”
“What?” I asked.
“She dropped this job like a hot potato.”
In my mind I tentatively thanked Ms. Willis, and Ms. Fairchild for the job, then I caught myself and said it aloud. “Thanks.”
I had experience. At least I thought I did. I taught university level for a year as a graduate student, I taught for three years at a bi-national center in Colombia, and I worked with the nuns at Archangel Gabriel University in Miami Gardens for nine months. All adult students. Motivated. Around my age. Now I would be working with adolescents. Totally different. Scary. “What books do you use?”
Ms. Willis showed me a dusty, crowded book room on a second floor landing of a central stairwell. Some of those textbooks were ones I had used as a student in the 1970’s. A huge box marked, Do not open this sat in the middle of the floor, so we walked around it. “This is the ESOL office.”
It was a little surreal; a cast iron clawfoot bath tub sat, staring out the office’s bathroom door. “A bathtub!?” I said.
“This used to be the live-in janitor’s room. He had to bathe somewhere.”
I saw something familiar, gazing at me from the top shelf. “Hey! This is the same book I used in Colombia.”
“Great, you can just use that. Now you need to talk to someone about discipline. How were your students at Archangel Gabriel?”
“They were nice.”
“Why didn’t you stay there?”
“The pay is better here,” was all I said. I didn’t yet know her well enough to go into details. At Archangel Gabriel University they promised health insurance, and then took a huge deduction out of my check. They squeezed thirteen four week sessions out of a year. We planned lessons and graded papers at home. Once an administrator’s secretary told me to be content, that God would pay me the rest with interest. I was pretty sure she meant after I died. Still, I didn’t want to make the nuns sound like villains by telling Ms. Willis too much.
Now we were walking across the library. “Mr. Thomson has good discipline. Let me introduce you to him.” He was blond, skinny, yet with a double chin. A flow of stubble cascaded from around his mouth down to his Adam's apple. Most interesting about this visit was that I would be teaching several periods in his classroom—my classroom; we would be sharing the one with the murals.
Back when janitors bathed in the school, the murals greeted people in the main entrance: showing scenes of mathematics, science, history, arts, and sports—all populated by kids from the 1930’s. Then they disappeared for a couple of decades. Someone found them crammed under the stage in the auditorium and decided to use the heavy canvas as dividers in the library. A bell rang and Thomson’s kids paraded out, past the backdrop of the two dimensional mural students. The real students said hi to Ms. Willis, and looked me over. “I’ll leave you two,” she said. “Tell him about discipline, Larry. Oh and you’ll be sharing this room. See you.” Hanging from curtain hooks and hastily nailed into the walls, they would surround me, thinly separating my classes from the rest of the library. The mural kids were my walls.
“Wow.”
“I wish they never found them.” Thomson looked grumpy and spoke in a slightly pissed off monotone. “It’s still not a room.” He leaned back in his chair. “So you want to know how to maintain order?”
“Yes, I have been working with adults up to now and—”
He picked up a little square of paper. “Give them a detention. Somebody gets up without your permission, give them a detention. Someone talks, give them a detention. Someone looks at you the wrong way, give them a detention.” The piece of paper in his hand was a detention slip. He handed it to me, gave me a detention.
John O’Sullivan captures the essence of teaching with rare honesty. In his book, A King of Shreds and Patches, he writes: ‘The special thing about teachers is that we choose a career, not for the big money, or because we think it will be easy, or for the love and appreciation, we do so with the purpose of touching the future. We’re conscious of what we are doing. We want to help.’
I absolutely love this book. It’s honest and thorough. It vividly brings to light the events both inside and outside the classroom. Whereas it’s declared a ‘work of fiction,’ I find it an inspiring, reveal-it-all memoir of an extraordinary teacher.
The story follows Mr. O’Sullivan as he balances his family life and teaching, moving from one school to another as his family expands. In his experience, ‘teachers must resort to all kinds of strategies to get the students to listen.’ His career takes off in the old days, back when there were no phones and computers, and he cuts his teeth deep then. And he’s lived it all, nearly everything imaginable and unimaginable that could ever happen before a teacher’s eyes. He’s been challenged to a fistfight by his student’s guardian, urged to award grades inappropriately, caught up in the administration’s internal wrangles, attended an interview he later regretted, and has been there when gunshots sounded in the school.
O’ Sullivan’s story breathes. I found myself in the classroom as an observer, seeing the students and the teacher. There are moments of laughter, such as Mr. Christianson and Mr. O’Sullivan’s standoff. There are moments of pain as well, when O’ Sullivan is weakened and needs a shoulder to lean on. Even as the computer era disrupts the learning process, he adopts and continues to serve. In addition, he believes ‘experts on education’ are those in the systems, those who know the systems well enough. Preferably teachers. Not some rich people with money to throw around.
To summarize, courtroom dramas have entertained and educated us until they created a division within the genre. Legal drama. We also have medical dramas and many others. A King of Shreds and Patches doesn’t belong to either of the categories above, but it has reminded me to ask one question. Is there a subgenre about classrooms, teachers, and students?