Schneider's Last Stand

During the years I've chaired an English Department, I've worked with dozens of student teachers. Looking over the current staff, I count about half who first showed their mettle by doing practicums within the department. Those, of course, were the best of the best, invited to stay on by virtue of their academic and pedagogical excellence.

There were others. One young man turned to me after ten minutes in front of a class and said, "That's all I've got." Another couldn't make himself talk above a whisper. A young woman had to be told (not by me) that the senior boys were much more interested in her amply revealed bosom than in anything she was saying about Geoffrey Chaucer. A woman from Harvard Extension Division responded "But I'm from Hahvahd" any time anyone offered her advice.

Then there was Schneider.

Schneider was the archetype of the student teacher who approaches his practicum as a second chance to do high school, and, this time, not be a dink. His status as a student teacher lent him a bit of credibility that he mistook for popularity. One of the Christian Brothers at the Catholic high school he had attended had told him that he would be a natural as a teacher, and those words became Schneider's mantra.

The problem was that he was...well, terrible. His own English skills and knowledge base were barely better than those of the average students he was teaching. He was heavy, and his usual attire consisted of a short-sleeved white dress shirt with one tail out, the top two buttons open, and a tie spanning the gap. On most days, you could see right through to the Superman logo on his tee shirt. He would do just about anything to ingratiate himself to students, including mocking veteran members of the staff. The students, of course, could hardly wait to run those teachers and throw Schneider under the bus.

When Schneider finished his practicum, I thought I'd seen the last of him, but for two years he worked for a local catering company and dropped in occasionally to "see if there might be an opening." He didn't seem to notice that there had been three or four openings filled in the interim.

Some time later, I heard of Schneider again, this time from a colleague in another town. They'd had a sudden resignation. Schneider had been substituting there, and so he was hired to fill the unexpected vacancy. It only took a few weeks before Schneider reverted to form, and they realized their mistake. At the end of the semester, he was summoned to the office, thanked for his service, and released.

Schneider was not one to go quietly. He stalked out to his car, shirttail flapping in the January wind. He began slowly driving around the circular driveway in front the school, stereo system cranked, horn blaring wildly, right hand extended through the open sunroof, middle finger brandished. He continued his drive into ignominy until the local constabulary arrived to escort him back to the world of catering and--presumably--therapy.