In this issue:

· What I Learned

· Charlie Brown and the Alien Grave Robbers

What I Learned

Fine Print

Somehow I had failed to read the fine print. Actually, it wasn't even that fine - I just didn't read the ad carefully.

The offer was intriguing: make one-hour science presentations to kids in after-school programs for $25 per presentation. Not a bad pay scale. And there was something about training and a mileage allowance.

The part that I was ignoring was something any schoolteacher could have told me: prep time will eat up as much or more than actual teaching time. Add in travel time and I'm pretty much down into minimum-wage territory. The travel allowance kicks in for very long hauls, and the customer area encompasses much of eastern Massachusetts.

We teach out of kits - huge plastic tubs of equipment. Some of the stuff is old and balky, like the strobe light that worked only upside-down or the laser pointer with the loose battery compartment.

It is possible to make more money if one does birthday parties and in-school workshops. Some of the teachers have been with the organization for a long time. But I really wasn't looking for that much involvement.

As I write this I'm about two weeks from the end of an eight-week gig, and I've already told the organization that I won't be continuing.

So my first lesson in all this was to read more carefully and think about what I'm really doing.

Problem Kids

I have three classes in three schools on three afternoons a week. Two classes are first- and second-graders and one is fourth-graders. Each class has 10 to 16 kids in it.

The youngest I had ever taught before was at the graduate-school level. What was I thinking!? I knew it would be a challenge facing young kids for the first time, and that actually was part of what attracted me to the job.

Here are some things I learned, or relearned:

· Kids are loud. Get enough kids together and the decibel level can approach something needing OSHA intervention.

· Kids are random. They don't sit still. They carom about in a kind of Brownian motion that is dizzying to behold.

· Some kids are less well-behaved than other kids (duh).

· The behavior-problem kids are not bad or evil.

I learned the most from the "problem kids." They were often brighter and funnier (and cuter, for some reason) than the less rowdy ones. I can see how the impish scamp can become a stock character in folk tales. Also, yes, the boys were a bit more physically active and therefore more disruptive than the girls. But not by much. Schools that don't provide a physical outlet for active kids, both boys and girls, are shortchanging everyone. Classroom management can consume gobs of teaching time trying to tamp down naturally active kids.

All in All

All in all, this was a good experience, but not one I'd like to repeat.

I've been wondering how the lessons could be generalized. Here's what I've come up with:

· It's a great idea to read the fine print, or at least think things through. I felt trapped in something that was simply too much work for the pay involved.

· Even if it's easy to bail out of a less-than-optimal situation, it's also important to keep one's commitments. I always had the option of walking away from this job, but my co-workers and my students would have been disrupted.

· Eight weeks can be a very long time. But the series was self-limiting and had a definite end. Putting a time limit on my commitment helped keep things in perspective.

· Small rewards add up, even short money for a challenging, time-consuming job. I netted around $500 from this experience.

· Anyone who works with young children must be crazy or a saint - or both. This includes teachers and parents, but teachers deal in larger quantities.

I had the opportunity to be open to a new experience, learn from it, and move on. I'll probably accept other small jobs, more carefully I hope, if only to learn more about the world and how I interact with it.

Charlie Brown and the Alien Grave Robbers

In Plan 9 from Outer Space, a cheesy low-budget sci-fi thriller from 1959 written and directed by Ed Wood, Jr., a couple of aliens has made repeated attempts to get the attention of the stupid Earthlings who seem bent on destroying their planet. After eight unsuccessful attempts, the aliens come up with Plan 9: to dig up a graveyard and reanimate an army of the dead to march on world capitals.

How often do we have a Plan B, let alone C, D, E, F, G, H, and I (that's nine) in our attempts at dealing with life? And how do we know when to quit, or even if we have the option to quit? The aliens in Plan 9 were ultimately unsuccessful, and there was no Plan 10.

And how often do we have to put up with cheesy settings, plots, and dialogs just to get through the day, week, month, or year? Or life?

Charlie Brown didn't have a Plan B. Think of the ultimate pathology behind Lucy Van Pelt and Charlie Brown with the football in the running gag in Peanuts. Lucy holds the football for Charlie to kick, and then yanks it away at the last minute, as Charlie whiffs the kick and lands on his head. Apparently, all Charlie needs to continue this farce is Lucy's repeated assurances that she won't yank the football away. The gag was repeated dozens of times over the life of the comic strip.

One definition of mental illness is the unvarying repetition of an unsuccessful act. At least the aliens in Plan 9 kept trying different stuff. They may have been stupid, but Charlie Brown seems to have gone a bit beyond stupid into crazy.

Both of these situations are played for laughs. Charles Schultz knew that a good comedy routine, especially slapstick like the football whiff, could be repeated; in fact the repetition itself became part of the shtick. Ed Wood may have had some serious intentions when making Plan 9, but his low budget and corner-cutting have, over the years turned the movie into a camp classic.

Ummm . . . let's see . . . what are the life lessons we can take away from Peanuts and Plan 9? I thought I could come up with some ideas, but mostly they're just questions:

· What unsuccessful things do we do over and over, especially if they involve an unreliable friend or partner? Would Charlie have been better off with a kicking tee, at the cost of ending a piece of drama in his life? Charlie had an unproductive relationship with Lucy, but at least he had a relationship. Do we sometimes need the drama, or the human connection, more than we need the solution? Maybe Charlie wasn't so crazy after all.

· Charlie didn't have a backup plan; the aliens did. How many backup plans do we need for any new undertaking? Do we need a backup plan even (or especially) if we succeed? Or are our lives just a series of backup plans so that when we die, we're in the middle of "Plan 34,927 from Inner Space"? How do we know when to quit? Can we know? Should we know?

And finally: How much of our lives are basically cheesy B-movies and slapstick kick-whiffs? Do we live mostly in a world of cardboard props, improbable plots and dialog, and two-dimensional cartoon characters? To the extent that we do, maybe sometimes we can take a step back, look around, and just . . . laugh.