THE ALCOHOLIC

Some say it's the pressure of the job that causes so many teachers to become alcoholics. One Wilbur Wright teacher had a particularly strong craving for the bottle. He got smashed at every party and drank before, after, and some say during school hours. Before long, he was unable to control his classes and sent large numbers of students to the office for disciplinary action every day. Then the administration did to him what mould cause most teachers to become alcoholics. They assigned him six straight study halls a day.

It's awfully bard to have respect for a man who allows a drinking habit to ruin his teaching career, and it's easy to assume that the individual probably never had any ability as a teacher. Then one day someone asked a teacher at Wilbur Wright whether Mr. A (the alcoholic) taught at his school. He nodded a reluctant, "Yes," feeling that the person was going to comment on his drinking problem. "I had Mr. A at another school fifteen years ago," he stated. "He straightened me out and got me started on my career. He showed more interest in me than anyone else did in my whole life. He was the best teacher I ever had," he concluded. All you social drinking teachers take note to what happened to Mr. A-- it is not unusual.
 

THE PHOTOGRAPHER

For a number of years in early June, the male teachers at Wilbur Wright had a stag weekend at Indian Lake. A relative of one of the teachers owned the cottage, and so the weekend was free except for food and booze. After a few drinks, everyone started living it up. There were jokes, pranks, people being thrown into the lake, and the loud, jovial, vulgar dialogue typical of a stag weekend. One drunken teacher walked up to the principal and said, "Holmes, you're an S.O.B." Neither one of them remembered the remark the next day.

One year, a new teacher took pictures of all the activities. He was a young fellow, right out of college, and he somehow still thought of himself as a student. Seeing how teachers sometimes act outside of the classroom was too much for him. He shoved his classes slides of all their teachers in various stages of stupor. He even had one of the principal staring vaguely at a whiskey bottle. Odd, but that teacher wasn't at our school the following year.