I was assigned to 37ECB, a county school on El Cajon Blvd. (b/t/w el cajon means narrow canyon in Mexican Spanish, and there are lots of narrow canyons in SD). A county school is the only option for a student, the last resort when a student is not accepted by any school in the SD district. When I was subbing at the East County Blended Community school in El Cajon the day before yesterday there was an Afghani boy who had brought a knife into school and so was kicked out. Two other boys had been kicked out of two schools before they wound up at the Blended Community school. 37ECB provides education for 7th through 12th grade. It dawned on me when I was peering out the window on the second floor of 37ECB what "the strange code" meant. I was looking at the green street sign, 37th St. The building I was in is located on the corner of 37th Street and El Cajon Boulevard. ECB is one of those streets that goes on for block after city block and goes in to Balboa Park and the SD Zoo, a long spine wracking ride on the city bus. Across the street was a shop for printing t-shirts and one of those small shop front establishments with an ubiquitous, yellow sign indicating car insurance for a trip to Mexico. There was not one sign with a corporate logo for blocks as I was searching for a Starbucks where I could get my usual tall hot chocolate without cream. I found one about five or six blocks from 37ECB. All those blocks of nondescript low buildings excluded from the bright temples of corporate America. The school building had a two hour parking zone in front of it, so I looked for parking around back down an alley. There was no evidence that the building was a school and the back of the building was just as non-evidently a school. I had only the street address to go by and the fact that from my pickup truck I could see through the window that there were tables and chairs inside. As I was slowly driving down the alley, a big black man dressed in grey appeared from around a corner and he was drawing and tying the strings of his draw-string pants. I was not the first to arrive. I was greeted at the back entrance by one of the teachers. I held up my SD Co. Dept. of Ed. ID tag that was dangling from my neck and he exclaimed, "Oh, credentialed!" (Ever since arriving in California I have noticed that Californians are inclined to use shorthand language such as acronyms and abbreviations in their speech, as well as lacing it with official jargon such as "credentialed." They seem to want to defuse any kind of casual conversation with it, as if they are reading your pedigree and stifling any kind of human warmth. At the same time as talking he was flashing "plastic dentures," which phrase my son uses to refer to the superficiality of Californians and the smile plastered on the face. His words bombarded me with a disarming frankness that was like a dog sniffing a strange dog in an encounter for the first time, his words coming at me as if a dog was licking my face.) I am certified to teach French as a "single subject" in the state of California, credentialed in other words. How he was able to deduce this from glancing at my tag, I haven't the slightest idea. He gave me a tour of the inside of the school after we chatted for a few minutes in lounge chairs. The inside was spanking clean and new, and the floor was not carpeted with the usual dark, dingy, dirty, virtually ply-less affair of industrial nylon weave. The floor was bare cement. The whole building had the atmosphere of an artist's loft in a converted warehouse. He showed me the aquahydroponic contraption in the large area adjoining the office space and reception desk. The plants were fed by the water from a large aquarium with fish in it. He gleefully remarked that the project gave the students the idea to use the contraption to grow marijuana, heaven forbid he seemed to be implying with his raised eyebrows. Next the principal and I chatted, and he remarked in response to my query about the laxness of tardiness I observed at the East County school for juvenile delinquents that there were no punitive measures taken against tardy students. They could come to school whenever they pleased. Neither the words 'juvenile delinquents' or 'punitive' were used in the conversation. Many of the students did not have guardians and lived in a group home. There was a great deal of tolerance I observed throughout the whole day I spent there. A euphemism for 'juvenile delinquents' was not used unless 'students' was the euphemism for them. What I observed of their behavior certainly did not betoken the comportment of students in a normal classroom situation. All of them were behaving as if all of the regular teachers there at 37ECB were substitute teachers. They were not really students and needed to be frequently reminded to be focused and on task. The teacher in the law pod often had to pause and get the attention of a student by telling him or her that she was teaching and to pay attention. The nearest I can come to as an apt description of their behavior in general is the typical experience I have had in "Special Day" classes I substitute teach for in the Chula Vista Elementary school district. Most of the students cannot stay in their seats in Special Day classes because they have mental disabilities that prevent them from doing so, or simply they do not have a sufficient attention span to allow them to sit still for any length of time. They have to be continually active and manipulating objects. The difference is that these students were older and they used their phones throughout the day, usually listening to music, and they were constantly distracted from the task at hand, which involved either writing (typing), math (there was one "pod" [class] for integrated mathematics), and reading and highlighting (there was another pod for law).
There were three pods that went on at the same time and three periods during the day and three different groups of students that rotated to the pod after about an hour and fifteen minutes in the pod. This length of time is commonly called a "block" schedule of classes. Students arrived at 9 and there was a half hour lunch break at 12. The day ended at 2. There was a ten minute homeroom at the beginning of the day and ten minutes at the end of the day. Many of the students had been excused for a field trip and the total list of students equaled 70 in grades 7 through 12. There were about half of them there today because of the field trip. Each pod was team taught by two teachers. There was one sub besides me. I was subbing for the special ed. resource teacher. A resource teacher is a teacher that helps certain students during the class with whatever they need help with. The math pod teachers were hipsters with beards. The sub had a beard too, as well as the teacher I had met when I arrived. The law pod teacher wore pants and had short blonde hair. Her partner in the team was a petite Indian woman that probably was Mayan. The partner for the sub was Hispanic. Their pod I think was science.