7/12/2005
Yesterday I got paid to see the King Tut exhibit at LACMA. One of the schools that I sub at in La Colonia, Oxnard, has evidently fallen in love with me. They call me weeks in advance whenever a teacher has an absence planned ahead. The kindergarten teachers, with whom I have the closest relationship with, actually fought over me — in a nice way — when two of them wanted to be absent on the same day and the one that couldn’t have me rearranged her schedule so that she would miss a day that I could work. The principal gave me an official school coffee mug and a few popsicles. The secretary paid me for a full day when I only worked half, and one day she paid me at the special rate of $28/hour for no apparent reason.
Anyway, last week the school called and asked me if I wanted to take a 6th grade class on a field trip to see King Tut in LA. I have no idea why the teacher didn’t want to go. He’s one of those superteachers that wins $10,000 grants every year for teaching his kids about energy efficiency and takes half the class on fieldtrips to Sacramento and Washington, D.C.
I despise 6th graders, but these kids were OK. Most of the boy spent more time looking and tits and visible panties and bra straps than they did looking at the perfectly-preserved 3000-year-old Egyptian treasures. On the bus ride back, two boys yelled across the bus arguing in Spanish about the color of the underwear of a girl who passed by on the back of a motorcycle. "!Morados!" "No, !rojos!" They thought I couldn’t understand. Anyway, both of them were wrong: they were crimson.
You should all see Mr. Tut’s exhibit. Sure it’s crowded, expensive (if you actually have to pay for it, which I didn’t), and you have to wait in line in the unholy Los Angeles summer heat. But the audio tour is narrated by Omar Sharif, and there are some beautiful ankhs, scarabs, and hawk-headed god figurines. And a wooden mask of a cow’s head that has eye makeup like The Crow.
I was the only "real" teacher ,but there were a lot of other adults on the trip: a stern yard duty lady and two office ladies and one of their husbands. The bus driver was an archetype: un-ironic trucker hat, aviator sunglasses, Vietnam POW/MIA stickers on the dashboard, and a moustache that was waxed so that it curled upwards on each side. You can barely see his perfect visage in the rearview mirror.
After we’d seen all of Tut and were waiting outside near the concessions, one kid asked "Can we buy a hamburger?" Another asked "Can we buy a Heinekin?" And another one tried to top that joke and internally rhyme "Heinekin" by asking, "Can we get high?" while looking straight at me. I had to play the teacher and maintain a stern expression, which was hard to do while watching the expression on his face change to horror as he realized a few seconds later what he had said. I pretended to write a note to leave for the real teacher, and he said, "Aw teacher, don’t be messed up like that." And then he realized that he shouldn’t have said THAT and he got even more scared. I threw the note away when he wasn’t looking.
After the exhibit, we had lunch at the La Brea Tarpits park. The kids, surprisingly, listened to me intently as I gave them an impromptu lesson on tar and ancient animal bones. Large animals and gruesome deaths are always hot subjects. Every student bought at least two bags of cotton candy from a man in a sombrero, and they offered to give me one and some Flamin’ Hot Cheetoes. I gave them some of my carrots.
Posted by paratext on 2008-04-05 22:08:53
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