Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (23 page)

THE MAJORETTES, THEIR BLACK-AND-WHITE COSTUMES FALLING
just below the buttocks, twirled and beckoned as the bandfifty-four clarinetists, fifty-one flutists, thirty-six cornetists,
twenty-six trombonists, twenty-five percussionists, eighteen saxophonists, fourteen French horn players, nine baritone players,
and nine tubaists-belted out "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy." The
color guard waved its flags to "Barbara Ann." The master of
ceremonies made the introductions with the flare of a circus
ringmaster asking the audience to direct its attention please to
the center ring. "Ladies and gentlemen, the very best football
team in the state of "Texas!" From all around came whoops and
cheers for the two rows of players at the front in their black
jersies, from the stunningly dressed girls over in the corner
with their leather skirts and Vuitton bags and blond hair that
rose to a rounded peak and then fell like the fanned plumes
of a peacock, from the clean-cut boys in their pleated pants
and stone-washed jeans and short haircuts, from the teachers
dressed in black, from the parents who brought along toddler
sons in black football uniforms and toddler girls in cheerleader
outfits, from the rows of Pepettes in their white tea-party
gloves. The lights went off for a flashlight show, little rings of
light twirling around, once again like something from the circus. There was a skit in which the Panther mascot moved about
ripping up paper tombstones symbolizing Permian's fallen op ponents. The sports director of one of the local network affiliates came forward to give the Superstar of the Week award to
the Permian defense, and twelve of the boys in black jersies
coyly swaggered forth out of their metal chairs to accept it to
more wild applause and whistles. The lights dimmed and the
players went to find their Pepettes so they could put their arms
around them for the singing of the Permian alma mater. Up in
the bleachers the rest of the students locked hands.

The lights went back on. A couple of Pepettes stayed around
to take down the black and white streamers and black and white
balloons arching across one side of the bleachers to the other
like a covered bridge and the beautiful hand-crafted posters
ringing the walls. It was time to go to school, at least for some
students.

Understandably heady from the experience of the Friday
morning pep rally, lion Billingsley's focus was on the game
ahead, not on school. Not all the weekly pep rallies were as
rousing as this one had been, but it was always hard to concentrate after them. "I don't do much on Fridays," he said as he
sauntered off to class in his black jersey with the number 26 on
it, and even if he had felt otherwise about it, there wasn't a heck
of a lot to do anyway. School was just there for Don, a couple of
classes to fill up time that offered virtually no challenge whatever, and he was the first to admit that if he was learning anything his senior year it was a miracle.

His schedule that day included sociology class, in which he
watched a video of a Geraldo Rivera television special succinctly titled "Murder" while munching on fresh-baked cookies that he
had been given during the pep rally. As his class instruction
that day he listened to an interview with the noted criminal
theorist Charles Manson and heard relative-, of crime victims
make such intellectually stimulating comments as "I would like
to see him die in the electric chair. He doesn't deserve Lo live."

It included photography, with the class spending the period
learning how to feel comfortable in front of a television camera.
When it was his turn, Don dutifully rose to the challenge by
successfully mouthing the scripted words, "This is Don Billingsley. Headline news next ...

It included English, where the class spent the first ten minutes going over the homework assignment for Monday and the
next forty-five minutes doing the homework assignment for
Monday.

It included food science, this particular lesson being on Correct Menu Form and the question of what one should place first
on the menu when writing it out, shrimp cocktail or Jell-O
salad. "This is what I do all day," said Billingsley as he grappled
with the shrimp cocktail versus Jell-O issue, moments before
plunging into the far murkier ground of the appropriateness
of listing cream of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich on
the same line. "All I do in class is show up. They should make
these classes fifteen minutes long. Last year in English I had
to work. This year it's like, teach me something before I go to
college."

Not all classes were like this, but even in accelerated courses
the classroom at Permian was hardly a hotbed of intellectual
give-and-take. It was not uncommon for teachers at Permian to
teach for only a quarter or a third of the period and then basically let students do whatever they wanted as long as they did it
quietly. It was also unusual to find teachers who demanded
from students their very best, who refused to succumb to the
notion that there was no reason to challenge them because they
simply didn't care. When there was a novel approach in the
classroom, it was geared for a generation indisputably weaned on the fast foods of television and the VCR, not the written
word. To get students to learn history, one teacher played a
version of "Jeopardy." Another teacher in an honors English
course, instead of having the students read The Scarlet Letter one
year, showed them a video of it.

Many teachers felt that no matter how creative they were in
the classroom, it wouldn't make a difference anyway. They
talked about a devastating erosion in standards, how the students of today bore no resemblance to the students of even ten
or fifteen years ago, how their preoccupations were with anything but school. It was hard for teachers not to feel depressed
by the lack of rudimentary knowledge, like in the history class
in which students were asked to name the president after
John F. Kennedy. Several students meekly raised their hands
and proffered the name of Harry Truman. None gave the correct answer of Lyndon Johnson, who also happened to have
been a native Texan. .

In 1975, the average SAT score on the combined math and
verbal sections at Permian was 963. For the senior class of
1988-89, the average combined SXF score was 85 points
lower, 878. During the seventies, it had been normal for
Permian to have seven seniors qualify as National Merit semifinalists. In the 1988-89 school year the number dropped to
one, which the superintendent of schools, Hugh Hayes, acknowledged was inexcusable for a school the size of Permian
with a student body that was rooted in the middle class. (A year
later, with the help of $15,000 in consultant's fees to identify
those who might pass the required test, the number went up
to five.)

Some teachers ascribed the drop in academic performance to
the effects of court-ordered desegregation as well as a rapid
increase in the town's Hispanic population. In eight years
Permian had gone from being a virtually all-white school to one
where the proportion of minorities in the student body was
about 30 percent. In hush-hush tones, some teachers blamed
the school's woes on the "Mexicans," or on the blacks, even though the school still very much had the look and feel of a
white suburban high school, its parking lot filled with new and
shiny cars, the majority of its students dressed in striking
outfits.

Some teachers blamed the erosion on the effects of the economic downturn in the oil patch, which had dealt Odessa a
crippling blow. Some blamed it on the breakdown of the family
unit; more and more kids were living with single parents who
had to work morning, noon, and night just to make ends meet
and didn't have the time or the inclination to promote the virtue of doing well in school. Some blamed it on parents who
seemed much less interested in pushing their kids in the classroom than in football or band or choir. Some blamed it on
themselves, acknowledging that the passion they had had for
teaching twenty years ago had run dry. Some blamed it on recent educational reforms passed in Texas that instead of making the classroom more stimulating, more creative, had done
just the opposite by turning the teacher into a glorified clerk
forced to follow an endless series of rules and procedures.

Despite the litany of possible reasons, it was hard not to wonder if the fundamental core of education-the ability of teachers to teach and the ability of kids to learn-had gotten lost. Its
problems didn't make Permian a bad school at all, just a very
typically American one.

"It still amazes me when I give a test in grammar and the kids
can do it," said English teacher Elodia Hilliard with more than
a touch of sadness in her voice. "It used to be the other way
around. I used to be surprised whenever they didn't know it.
Now I'm amazed when they do know it." When Hilliard looked
around the classroom she saw students with no direction, and
she wondered if they saw any point at all in being well read and
intelligent. She listened to parents who, rather than promising
to try to motivate their children, made excuses for them-the
homework was too hard, or the book they had been assigned
had too many cuss words in it. Even when she got them to read, the leap to conceptual, creative thinking seemed as far off as a
trip to Jupiter. It almost seemed to her and other teachers as if
students were scared of it.

There was a time when she had had unflappable faith in her
profession, when she had encouraged the best and brightest to
follow in her footsteps and spread the gospel of literature and
grammar with evangelical zeal. But not anymore. "I really felt
we made a difference," she said one clay in her classroom, devoid of' the usual corner shrine to Mojo but instead decorated
with lovely posters illustrating the meanings of hyperbole, oxymoron, metonymy, and personification. "Now I'm beginning to
wonder. I don't know. I'm really uncertain." She bent over
backward not to be negative, but she had a view of students she
could not suppress. "'they like to have cars. They like stereo
speakers that are fancy. They like to go skiing. They like to
wear good jewelry." In her mind, students seemed in search of
only one thing: "Having fun is what it's all about."

Jane Franks, who had been teaching for thirty-one years and
eagerly counted off the days until her retirement at the end of
the year, felt the same way. Today's students had become enigmas to her. They weren't disrespectful. They weren't obnoxious. They weren't demanding. It wasn't that they were good
kids, or had kids, or any kind of kid at all. That would have
been much better than what they were now, deadened to themselves and to the world around them.

""These kids don't take responsibility, or don't know how," she
said. "Kids used to worry about where they were going to fit
into the world. Kids today don't seem to worry if they are going
to fit in society, because they don't give a hoot.

"Twenty years ago I was working my kids to death, and now
I have to remind my seniors to use capital letters and put periods at the end of sentences.