Under-Aged?
You can’t vote, and if a guy comes on,
You can’t consent or will it,
But if after having too much fun
You find you’ve made a little one,
You’re old enough to kill it.
It was during the 1997-1998 school year as I recall. I had survived a couple of changes of administrations in my very political job working jointly for the Washington office of the Governor of Puerto Rico, which goes by the name of Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, and its Representative in Congress, the Resident Commissioner. But my luck had run out with the election of a new Governor in Puerto Rico in the fall of 1996 with whom I had no personal contacts, and I was out of a job.
With my Ph.D. in economics, I eventually got a nice position with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, where I worked until my retirement in 2009, but in the short term, I needed something to do. I signed on to do substitute teaching for Fairfax County Public Schools. I had teaching experience. Before going off to San Juan to work for Puerto Rico’s Economic Development Administration, I had taught economics in college for six years.
As I recall, I had had a half dozen or so one-day gigs in high schools and middle schools that were not far from my home in Chantilly. That came to an end after a day at Ormond Stone Middle School in Centreville. After teaching a class, the subject of which I have now forgotten, I found myself presiding over a study hall of only a few students. I think it must have been a news item that had prompted me to compose it, but I thought it was insightful and worth sharing with my captive audience, so I recited my newly composed “Under-Aged?” to them.
I don’t recall if it was by letter or by telephone that I first heard from the county supervisor of substitute teachers, but a day or so later she told me that there had been a complaint about an “inappropriate” poem that I had recited at the school. I took her to mean that the poem was racy or off-color. I mailed it to her. In her view, apparently, the clearly pro-life, anti-abortion poem was, indeed, inappropriate for students in their early teens, and she summarily ended my brief substitute teaching career.
My main thought at the time was that this is what one should expect from the sort of intellectually challenged folks who are engaged in public education in the country. If a full-fledged professor of English at public university in Georgia should think that it was a good idea for the sportscaster Jim McKay to recite A.E. Housman’s poem, “To an Athlete Dying Young” upon the occasion of the murder of several actual athletes, then I can see how a secondary-school sort might think “Under-Aged?” was somehow offensive. The damned thing was just over her head.
Now that I hear about Centreville High School likely having encouraged and facilitated abortions for students (click on the link at the end of the poem), I’m wondering if there might have been more to my termination than I realized at the time. Were they worried that I was onto what was going on in the county school system?