Chapter 8: London

CHAPTER 8: LONDON

Togo remained peaceful after the election. 

The summer hiring fair ended with no offers. No where we wanted to go wanted an unmarried couple. We began to grow in our new identities as a couple of middle aged educational professionals with children from previous relationships and marriages.  I won’t write much about my children in my memoir. I don’t think I will need this to remember the joy and love they have brought to my life. We decided to try London for six months. It was a compromise for proximity to children. Carolyn  knew she could get work as a supply (substitute) teacher in London. I had a six month visa and started looking at ways to get an entrepreneurial visa. I played with ideas of being an educational consultant and leading educational tours to the UK.

There is no moving on the life journey to wisdom without resolving career achievement. Running a school was enlightening and a career goal. There were moments of considerable pride in what we achieved, but there were many people trying to impose their own agenda  that built up what I had begun to call the bad kind of stress. I had a theory that the stress of getting things done on time to fulfill a clear objective was good stress. Most other stress was bad. In my first experience with school leadership there was a lot of bad stress. 

We arrived in London with several boxes of educational materials and suitcases with all the cold weather clothes we had and quickly found a two week rental. The short let was the bottom  of a house in Chiswick. It was spacious and even had a garden.  The commute to inner London was about an hour. In the first week we looked at apartments as close to the center of London as we could. If we were only going to be in London for six months and then either find  overseas jobs, move to the USA for six months,  or split up , I wanted to live as close to the center as economically possible. The history and culture that gushed from almost every street corner in London was mind boggling. The theatre and art culture was overpowering, and I almost spoke the same language. We found a four hundred square foot sausage of a space with a tiny balcony overlooking an enclosed courtyard in a public housing building on Charing Cross Road. Charing Cross Road runs the very short distance from the West End theatre district to Leicester Square where all the red carpet premieres were held.

The owners of the place we were renting  in Chiswick lived upstairs and said they used the two week rental to check people out. They liked us and offered us a six month lease of their spacious downstairs flat for the same rent as the sausage in the heart of the London. We took the sausage. This ended up working out for many reasons, but immediately it was fortunate because Carolyn got a rather steady substitute job in Hackney which was on the other side of London from Chiswick. 

I spent the first couple of months looking at options and checking the Times Education Supplement for job offerings. We were mainly looking overseas, but a job appeared for a position at Goldsmith’s College. Goldsmiths is part of the University of London system and is most well known for its art students. Damien Horst, famous for his dead animals in formaldehyde, being a Goldsmiths graduate. I applied with little hope, not being British or knowing much  about the British school system. A couple weeks later I received a letter that I was shortlisted for the position. An interview time was set up  for a fortnight in the future. I’m going to start throwing in some of the English I learned in London and some of what they like to call proper spelling. For my American readers a fortnight is two weeks. 

We lugged our boxes and suitcases through the underground system to the Leicester Square Station. We knew where to change tube lines so we only had to cross the platform to catch the connecting line going in the right direction without climbing stairs. At Leicester Square we hauled our boxes up stairs and balanced on escalators. Charing Cross Road was seldom quiet. With plenty of, “Pardon me, Excuse me”, we squeezed into our sausage. 

Learning the neighborhood was an important part of each day. For the first couple of weeks my daily routine started with walking Carolyn to the bus stop. I would then stroll the streets a bit to take in the beauty of London and pick up pub glassware that patrons had scattered along the streets the previous night.The internet cafe in Neal Yard was a daily stop to answer emails. Each day I checked which plays were closing and would search the bins (dumpsters) outside those theatres for wood from sets being torn down. The whiskey shops in the area sold little bottles of scotch. My father liked scotch, a lot. I had never liked scotch and set out to find if there was a scotch I liked. I would buy a few tiny bottles of different scotch and go back to our sausage to wash our new glassware and make furniture.

When I was 27, most of my immediate family had an intervention with my father. He never drank again. He died in 1997 just before my 45th birthday. I was working in Africa. He had been ill for many years before his death. There were many farewells where I would awkwardly hug him goodbye and wonder if that would be the last hug and my last view of him. His foot would usually be bandaged as it was slowly ravaged by diabetic fueled infection. When I was paged to the front desk of the hotel in Abidjan, Carolyn came with me to translate, but I knew what the news was going to be. My sister, Helen, had used her high school French to find me and the hotel. Carolyn arranged the flight for me. I left that night for Paris and then through New York and New Orleans to Picayune. On the flight to Paris I dreamt of my father. I had never dreamt of him before or since. In the dream he comes into a class I was teaching. He asked if he could see me outside. In the dream I was afraid he was mad at me. When we got outside, he told me he was proud of me. He put on his hat, turned and left.

A very weird thing happened at the funeral. We were trying to take a picture of the family attending. This stray dog kept coming up and sitting in front of the picture. We tried to run it off, but it kept coming back.  This was way out in the country in a place called Henleyfield. My mother knew the neighbors’ dogs and this was not one of them. She had never seen the dog before. We finally gave up and took the pictures with the dog front and center. After the reception the dog left and never came back.

My father drank blended whiskey. His brand was Dewar’s White Label. Blended scotches had never appealed to me, but the world of single malt scotch was a revelation. It took me a little while to find a favorite (Balvenie 21 year-old port wood cask), but it was a fun and tipsy journey. Along the way I wondered why my father never drank single malt. It occurred to me that because he smoked heavily he possibly couldn’t taste the difference.

Our apartment was across the street from the half-price ticket booth in Leicester Square. A couple times a week we would luck into tickets to extraordinary performances. A passion for theater was ignited. I signed up for a course on how to write screenplays and entered the throng of people looking to climb into the entertainment industry. By the end of the course I had a job at Goldsmiths. The screenplay I wrote as part of the class was loosely based on my African experience. I sent it off to Kristin Scott Thomas as she was the person I pictured playing Carolyn. I am still waiting to hear from her or her agents.

As the interview at Goldsmiths approached I prepared a PowerPoint on all the issues facing education in general and primary science education specifically. During my previous years in education I had had many professional development courses including a week long course on presentation skills. I had presented several times at various conferences.  I was the only one of the three applicants being considered who had a doctorate, but the other two finalists were British. After a day of delivering our presentations and having various sessions with different members of the faculty, the three of us were having our final meeting with the head of the education department, Sir Clyde Chitty. I don’t actually know if Clyde was knighted. I just always had the impression from his bearing that he should have been. At the end of the meeting, Clyde asked if we had any questions. Although my presentation had included a kitchen sink full of tertiary understandings of major issues affecting science education, I didn’t really know much about the British school system. I felt a need to come clean. I asked, “Why are you considering an American who really doesn’t know very much about the British educational system?”

Clyde stuttered a little and then replied, “Well, if you get the job, we figure you will learn about it.”

I assured Clyde that I would, and I did. A couple days later the job was offered and Goldsmiths started the process to obtain my visa. Thinking it must have been something in my wonderful PowerPoint that had swayed the decision makers, I asked why I had been picked. The answer was that I had done statistical research for my dissertation. Goldsmiths needed professors to do peer reviewed research. My ability to stay at Goldsmiths would depend on what I published in education journals. The job started the beginning of January, and I would have two years to publish or perish.

Before my job at Goldsmiths started, I agreed to be part of an accreditation team evaluating a school in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The association evaluating the Bishkek school was the same group that evaluated the school in Togo. I was to meet the lead evaluator in Kazakhstan. He was leading a team assessing a school there, and then we would be driven to the school in Bishkek. I arrived in Almaty late at night. Every piece of everyone’s luggage was fed through one x-ray machine upon arrival. I couldn’t face the scrum that formed around the machine, so I sat and waited. When my suitcase was finally spit out of the clanking x-ray machine and I walked out into the Almaty night air, there was no one to meet me. There were no taxis. There was only two guys in their mid-twenties and their old beat-up car. 

I had been brushing off my high school Russian for the trip, so I understood when they asked me where I was going. They said they could take me to the hotel where I was staying. I had been expecting the leader of the evaluation team to have someone meet me. I had no Kazakh money. My new Kazakh pals did not want to be paid in British pounds. They knew someplace where I could change money. It was 2 a.m. The airport lights were turned off as we talked. There seemed to be no other choice. We were the last ones in the cold desolate parking lot. I put my suitcase in the trunk - oops, boot of their car. (Forgot I was including all the new British words I learned.)

We drove through the dark streets until they pulled up in front of a small wooden structure. It was set back from the road. There was some signage indicating it was a neighborhood convenience store, but it was dark and shuttered. The driver came with me to the building and tapped on a shutter. A light clicked on. 

I was not feeling good about this, but could not think of another option. The driver had told me how much money he wanted to take me to the hotel. I was fairly certain the exchange rate was not going to be great. I had a few fifty pound notes in a pocket over my left breast. I carefully peeled off two and slid them to the shopkeeper as the driver closely watched. A fistful of Kazakh tenge were passed back to me. I stuffed it in my pocket without counting.

Back in the car we drove through the empty dark streets until we pulled up to a small hill with the hotel about a hundred yards away at the bottom of the hill. The driver turned to me and asked for his fee. It was now twice what he had originally asked for. I asked him to drive to the hotel. He refused. He said pay him and get out here. I asked him to get my suitcase out the boot. He said pay him first. I ended up giving him half and then the other half when I got the suitcase. The ride ended up costing almost all the money I had exchanged. When I met up with the accreditation team leader the next day, he apologized. He had the wrong day for my arrival.

Our drive through the Kazakh and Kyrgyz mountains and countryside to Bishkek was beautiful with an easy border crossing. Our welcome was a surreal meal at an American style barbecue restaurant with a Dixieland jazz band. The next day we began exploring the disconnect between the document the community had created and what the school was actually doing. When we talked to the head of school about why the school was not doing what the document said it should be doing, he explained the document was written the year before he came. The school was operated by Quality Schools International. Their schools started in Yemen and spread to many obscure parts of the world. The instructional program was based on a philosophy of mastery learning. Students had to demonstrate they had mastered concepts before they moved on. There were in theory no grade levels, and each student was to evolve into their own individualized program.  The school director found the document unworkable. He was ignoring the document. 

It wasn’t a big school and we finished collecting what we needed in two days. The difficult part of writing the accreditation report kept us up late into the night of the second day. On the morning of the third day we delivered the denial of accreditation to the disappointed school community. We cushioned the news by explaining that what they were doing was creating a successful learning environment, but it was not what they wrote the school would be doing. We left after delivering the report and flew back to London out of Almaty the next day. Within five years I would be working for Quality Schools International in an obscure part of the world.

The resolution of my struggle to find a life partner meant going back and re-resolving many parts of who I was. My identity would be different. I was not married. I was in a relationship. My career was in a mid-life flux. Would I be able to measure up in the world of educational research? 

On the first day of my new job I was escorted to the science classrooms by Leslie Jones. She was head of the whole primary (elementary) education department. Leslie became and still is a good friend. I was introduced to the three other people in the room. Carol was the only other full time lecturer. He had been at Goldsmiths for decades and was a patient and limitless source of advice. Gary was a part time lecturer and science co-ordinator for a London borough. Gary could have been the model for the Geico gecko. They have the same south London accent, wit, and charm. The final cog in our wheel was Denise. She was our very efficient lab technician and a gentle mother to the team. After introductions we sat down at one of the round student tables with our cups of tea.  Everyone stared at me. I smiled. They looked at each other. Denise leaned over and said, “You’re the head of the department.”

I asked if they were sure. I tried to remember if there had been anything  written or said about the position being the head of the department. Nothing was coming to mind. I went to see Leslie. She said she thought Clyde would have mentioned it. She explained what was required of the head of the department which wasn’t a lot extra for the upcoming semester. We were half way through the school year. I would have to prepare a package of material at the end of the semester for the external inspector who did an annual evaluation of the program. She said the following year would be a little more difficult as the government had just released hundreds of standards for teacher training programs. All the curricula would need to be rewritten. Instructional objectives would need to be matched with the new standards and each standard would need to be addressed. That would end up taking my summer break. Research efforts would have to wait.

We had about three hundred adults mostly in their early twenties on various parts of the course. There was a group of seventy post-graduates. They had already gotten a degree in something and were coming back to get teacher certification. We saw these students once a week for one semester. If they chose science as a subject specialty we saw them once a week for the next semester. The other students were on a three year course. These started with a year 1 group of ninety. We saw these students once a week for part of a semester as an introduction to science education before they went on a teaching practice. By year 2 there were about eighty students still in the program. We saw this group twice a week for a whole semester. By year three the group was down to about seventy. In this year they picked a subject area specialty. They had this class twice a week for a semester. Every student needed a mark and that mark needed to be justified to the end of the year inspectors. I was given a little leniency my first semester and excused from being evaluated on my research and publication performance.

My predecessor had left a syllabus of topics to cover with the twelve third year students who had chosen science as their subject of focus. I came from a philosophical approach that laid out how grades could be achieved and as specifically as possible matched grades to expectations as laid out in clearly written rubrics. The students liked the system. They were motivated. They could see clearly what they needed to do to get the percentage grade they were willing to work for. They, also, saw it as educational methodology they could employ.

My first semester passed without me bumping up against my ignorance of the British system too often. I came from a system where below 70% was not satisfactory. In the British system the first class degrees started at 70%. I had a lot of students achieving well above the 70% level and this was just not how it was done. I had some difficult moments with a couple students trying to explain why my ignorance of how obscurely difficult I was supposed to make getting a first class mark, so that there would be a bell shaped curve of marks, had resulted in their not getting the grade they had achieved.

Asides for planning and delivering instruction and managing the primary science department budget, I had student teaching supervision. This often required setting off on a cold and rainy London morning, taking a train across the Thames, and then a bus to some previously unvisited part of this massive magical city. If I got there early, I would find a cafe’ for a cup of tea and an English fry-up. The typical fry-up had two fried eggs, a sausage, a strip of thick British bacon, a scoop of runny baked beans, and two pieces of toast placed in a little metal toast holder. At first I ignored the baked beans until I discovered the little packets of aptly named “brown sauce” on the table. Brown sauce transformed my emerging eating style of a backwards turned fork of brown sauce covered baked beans mixed with egg yolk and a piece of inexpensive British breakfast sausage or fatty British bacon into a culinary delight. Each bite offered a new flavor to a palate that had previously eaten and enjoyed everything from the Louisiana delicacy of boiled crayfish to Ecuador’s meat of choice, guinea pigs. With the tea the fry-up was seldom more than three pounds ($5). Fortified and well greased I would try to get to the school as it was opening.  It would give me a chance to talk to the student teacher before class started, and as a previous school administrator I liked to watch how schools opened.

A theory a professor put forth in my doctoral program is that the head of school should be the first to arrive and the last to leave. Being the head becomes your life. There are very few parts of you that exist outside what you do for a living, and for most heads even those parts become connected to the school. In Togo we had security twenty-four hours a day. I was never going to be the first one on site. In London the schools opened in various ways. Some were very organized. Some seemed chaotic. After an explanation in the office of why an American had shown up at their school, I would meet the teacher trainee usually in the classroom. I would try to get some thoughts from the supervising classroom teacher. Some of them were very interested and positive. Occasionally there was a supervising teacher who had taken a dislike to the student teacher or was just busy and didn’t want to be bothered.

Dr. Hampton Williams, the director of my doctoral program, inspired my approach to instructional improvement. I begged Hampton to take over my program when Dr. William Hetrick left the University of Southern Mississippi for a job in his home state of Michigan. Hampton’s views on instructional supervision, which I am now claiming as my inspired approach, was to mutually agree on an instructional improvement goal. Usually for teacher trainees it involved classroom management. An example would be you want more pupil on-task behavior. I would have a seating chart and code for various student behaviors. Every minute I would scan the room and record what the students were doing. The first visit would set the baseline. We would discuss the results and what could be done to improve on-task behavior. The next visit I would record data, and we would compare and discuss. It was not very threatening, usually.

My most excellent partner and proof reader, Carolyn, told me that nobody wants to read the educational jargon parts of this chapter. I have pondered cutting it out. This chapter is in part about my struggles resolving my career direction. The jargon spurs powerful memories and reflection on these struggles.

The UK was introducing the “Literacy Hour”. It was very specific about what every pupil would be doing at each part of the morning language arts instruction. The “Literacy Hour” required that pupils start the day sitting on a carpet . The student teacher was to round  up the twenty four six year olds after they unpacked from their trip to school on a cold rainy day and brief moments of play with their friends on the cement playground and seat them with their legs crossed while she spent fifteen minutes talking about what they were going to learn about the letter T. Yes, there was trouble. The poor teacher was being set up to fail. I was telling her you have got to get classroom management under control, and no one can do it constructively with this group of six year-olds crowded onto a carpet at 8:00 in the morning. She correctly replied that the government guidelines required her to do this. The new Labour government’s minister for education, David Blunkett, was just getting started in his aimless assault on education. It continues to baffle me how we allow politicians to legislate destructive educational practices.

By August I was mostly ready for my first full year as head of the primary science department with new curricula for each year. Objectives were tied to the new standards. We even created a distance learning module for post-graduate students. It was time to get my research efforts rolling. My PhD dissertation had examined primary teachers’ attitudes toward teaching science. I had approval to use an attitude assessment instrument that had already been tested for reliability and validity. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do but felt it was important to get some data. I administered the attitude instrument to all new students in the year 1 and post-graduate groups. I had all sorts of questions about the students’ background. I was weakly hoping that something significant and interesting might pop-up when I entered the data in a statistics program.

Five minutes into the survey of a post-graduate group one of the new students objected to the question about race. He indignantly demanded to know what I was doing with the survey. I was raised in south Mississippi in a racist society. I sincerely felt I had purged that horribly wrong mental construct from my mind. Over the years I had taught students of many races with no thought of their race. I begged the incredibly intelligent and courageous African-American professor of education, Dr. Hampton Williams, to be my doctoral adviser. During my two years in Africa I even had what to this day feels like a very enlightening experience. 

When I first started walking the streets around my home in Togo the children in the neighborhood would cry out, “yovo,”  when they saw me. Yovo was the word for white person. As they became used to seeing me in the neighborhood this stopped. For about two weeks I didn’t see any white people. The school was a few blocks from the Peace Corps office. One afternoon John, the school messenger,  and I were coming back from a trip to look for basketballs. I saw a white Peace Corps volunteer a block ahead. I turned to John and in amazement said, “Yovo.”He gave me a strange look, but didn’t say the obvious. I had forgotten I was white. My race had become the culture I lived in and not the color of my skin.

The post-graduate student’s objection to my survey was challenging what I thought was my enlightened views on race. I told students not to answer any questions they were not comfortable with. After the class the student who challenged the survey came to talk to me. I explained that I needed to do research to keep my job. I confessed that I was just fishing with the survey, but if I found a significant difference in the attitudes of students of color toward teaching science I would write about it. He smiled filled in the square for his race and would end up choosing science as his subject area specialty.

Goldsmiths offered no support for statistical analysis. I had to code the data and then enter all the information on the one hundred and sixty surveys into the program myself. This took awhile. The new school year was moving quickly. The curricula were designed to deliver science subject matter while modeling instructional methods. We tried to model how to teach what we felt was important in science instruction. The student teachers were required to carry out a science fair experiment. Gary and I began to plan the next semester’s experience for our third year science specialist. We were going to have them lead a science fair in a class in the borough where Gary was the science adviser. By the time Christmas break arrived I was just finishing entering the data from attitude surveys. I spent the first few days of break looking for something significant to write about and thinking this is not the way research is supposed to happen. 

As I write this and retrace my life as viewed through reflections on my development through the conflicts described in Erickson’s theory, I see Goldsmiths as a challenge to my sense of professional competency and confidence. I was a fairly self-confident guy with an advanced degree from the University of Southern Mississippi. I had been hired by Sir Clyde Chitty at a not un-prestigious university in London. I knew there were publication expectations. The hurdle to get something in an educational peer-reviewed journal in a year was looking pretty high. At USM there was a statistics person in the educational department to help with research. He was listed as part of the research team on the publication, but it made the process so much easier. As the second semester started I began to think of the direction for a research project. Since my doctoral research involved teacher attitudes towards teaching science, I needed a good question related to that. I didn’t have time to recreate a lot of the research that would be needed to substantiate discussion of my hypotheses. What was an important question involving primary teacher attitudes towards teaching science that I could ask,  and then collect valid reliable data from a significant population of primary teachers, process the data, write the paper, submit it to journals, get the paper accepted and published in eighteen months while running a department that developed, delivered, and participated in the evaluation of programs that taught about three hundred teachers-to-be how to teach science to children?

There were so many questions to explore and so little time. Gary and I were on fire, too. We got money to run science fair programs in schools. We used our science specialists to work with various teachers in schools to set up science fairs. They had the unique experience of working with several teachers teaching science, and Gary and I were spreading the gospel of what we thought science teaching and most of education should be - discovery through the scientific method. Science is a way of thinking. It is not a body of facts, concepts, and terminology. I wrote a book on how to complete a science fair project in one day. I self-published or rather the primary science department at Goldsmiths published. We used it as our textbook with the student teachers. We planned a class for our second year teacher trainees to lead student groups during an annual day long science celebration at the London Museum of Science. We had classes on how to manage students on field trips. The classroom teachers were amazed at how well our students controlled their kids. Our own students complained about travel to the museum before the event, but thanked us for setting it up when it was over. We involved our science specialists in creating interactive webpages for exhibits at the London Museum of Science. Denise took this on and extended her own lab technician responsibilities to include technology assistance for webpage construction.  There was a national contest for webpage design with science content and several of our students were being recognized. We were the first individual department at Goldsmiths to have our own webpage.

As my second full year started I had self-published a book and had an article about science fairs accepted in a national educational publication. It was not peer reviewed. My future at Goldsmiths was tenuous. Of the seventy second year students over half chose science as their subject specialty for their third year. The evaluator had praised how we matched our curricula with the new national teacher training standards. Gary and I had pulled in so much money from staff development and projects with schools that it covered a good part of my salary. By my visa I could only work for Goldsmiths, so these efforts were filling the coffers of my employer who said, “You have another year to get published in a peer reviewed journal, or you might have to look elsewhere for employment.”

We gave all the students my attitude survey at the end of the course. No one objected to the question about race. I coded the data and spent part of the summer putting it in the statistics program and pressing buttons and running little tests to see if something significant would inspire some hypothesis that I could claim I had been testing. I think I gave up on the idea of getting published in a peer reviewed journal then. I wasn’t going to get over that wall, so enjoy the climb down. 

The question that I felt was in need of answering was how to inspire primary teachers and teacher trainees to want to teach science and specifically the scientific method. Gary and I seemed to be doing something right, but what we were doing was not something I could stop doing to research, measure, and write about.

I put together an article about the curriculum we wrote in Togo for multi-grade classrooms and submitted it to the national conference for the organization of religious educators. I was accepted to present. My interest in theater had grown during my time at Goldsmiths. I had played the part of a southern evangelical preacher in the play “Greater Tuna” with the faculty theater group in Caracas. For the fun of it I gave my presentation to the religion educators with the accent and persona of Reverend Spikes, a southern evangelical preacher.  The person in charge of religious education at Goldsmiths came to the presentation. 

Since taking the Goldsmiths job Carolyn and I were going to the theater a lot less than our first six months in London, but we still went at least twice a month. The spring of our last year in London I was marking exams. Exams were designed to test the students’ ability to write a lot about a simple concept. I took a stack and wandered to a coffee stand on the south bank of the Thames by Lambeth Bridge and marked three. Then I strolled across the Thames to the park by the Houses of Parliament and marked three. I crossed the street, walked past the tourists in front of Westminster Abbey, and entered St. James Park. I marked three at several stops as I wandered from bench to bench through St. James and Green Park, stopping to see if the Queen was in Buckingham Palace. The flag wasn’t flying, but it was a beautiful day. By three o’clock I was at the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus. I had finished two days worth of marking in one day. I called Carolyn about meeting me for dinner and the theater. She agreed; even though, she was taking the bus in to London at rush hour after a day teaching four year-olds in Hackney and having to do all that again the next day. At the half price ticket booth I scored front row tickets to Jessica Lange and Charles Dance in a “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”.

I had a couple of pints in me when Carolyn arrived. We had a bottle of wine with dinner and after dinner drink with desert. Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece was being performed by unbelievably talented actors. But for Carolyn and me the play became a long night’s journey into struggling to stay awake. Carolyn was nudging me regularly as intermission approached. At intermission I had a coffee and Carolyn went home. Our seats were on the front row. I was not leaving. Midway into the second act I jerked to consciousness as my unconscious self realized an uncomfortable silence. I opened my eyes. Jessica Lange was standing at the front of the stage, silently staring down at me. I gave her a couple of thumbs up, a silently mouthed apology, sat up straight, and led the standing ovation at curtain call.

Goldsmiths was willing to extend my contract another year; even though, I had no research publications that would help their ranking. Gary got us a contract to run an eight week science oriented gifted and talented program for a London borough in the fall. It would pay the same as a semester at Goldsmiths with a fraction of the effort. I resigned. Carolyn and I were going to try to be educational consultants. 

At the end of school year faculty party those leaving gave a speech. The religious teacher came to me and said, “Give your speech like you did at the religion conference.” I knew what she meant. I adjusted my farewell speech to include several Reverend Spikes’s cliches and an accent that dripped like molasses soaked cornbread onto the ears of the esteemed British educators assembled under the leadership of the very proper Sir Clyde. After my speech Sir Clyde presented me with a gift. I maintained my south Mississippi accent and asked, “If y’all knew I really talked like this, would you have hired me.”

He quickly replied, “Most certainly not!”