My war against the Zoot Suits

My war against the Zoot Suits

fiction
edward w pritchard

I am just a substitute teacher here in my elderly years; low status, low income. This Fall term I got a long term assignment because the regular Social studies teacher was in a car accident on her way home from teaching the first day of the school year. She would be off with a broken hip for five or more months.

It is at an inner City school here in Akron, Ohio with the normal problems of not enough students achieving an acceptable passing rate on the state mandated standardized tests. I am about normal as a teacher in skills but because of my voracious reading habits on historical materials and my writing social studies is a very easy class for me to teach. As such I was a little bored in my new assignment and as people are want to do in such situations I began to mettle a little. As I was by chance the teachers union representative for special projects this year, because the Lady with the broken hip had volunteered for the non paid extra duty last Spring; I had a  circumstance to become involved in the students lives in an extra ordinary way for the next five months.

Through a series of events, initiated naively by me, I became at war with about twenty per cent of the older male students here at Goodyear High school in what was later to be called "My war against the Zoot Suits.

Here's what went down that Fall of 2011;

end part 1