THE LOS ANGELES TEACHERS’ STRIKE : Sub Gets Lesson in How to Teach Amid Chaos of Strike’s 1st Day

Edison Junior High School on the rim of South-Central Los Angeles is a long way from Osoyoos, British Columbia, where Ann Wright grew up and might have wished to return Monday on her unpredictable first day as a substitute in the Los Angeles school district teachers’ strike.

By the time Wright arrived at Edison at 8 a.m., many of the students had already departed--diverting the gate guard by throwing a gum-wad and claiming an unscheduled day off while bullhorned administrators cruised the corridors, corraling charges.

“My specialty’s math,” the ebullient Wright explained gamely, materializing Mary Poppins-style in the school office with a box full of “teaching tools.” Scanning the horizon, she added, “But I imagine today it’s supervising and baby-sitting.”

Flexibility, as it turned out, was in demand. Little at Edison seemed to go according to plan. The result was a curious mix of anarchy and serendipity for the skeleton crew at Edison and for the intrepid Wright, who lives in Santa Fe Springs.

Rose Before Dawn

Wright had risen before 5 a.m. to await her summons to duty. When the telephone call never came, she took the initiative: Dialing district headquarters at 7, she was informed that she had been assigned to Edison--and was expected to be there, oh, half an hour ago.

Detaching her 3-year-old daughter from the television and spiriting the screeching child into the family Toyota, Wright ferried her to nursery school. Then she headed west through the thickening traffic, nose pressed to a map of the unfamiliar urban terrain.

“ Junior High? Oh yuck!” Wright had muttered into the phone, explaining to the district official that she had requested Bell High. “Have you any idea what I’ll be doing?” she asked. Pause, grimace. “Then I don’t have any idea what I’ll take.”

Wright is no neophyte in the substitute-teaching trenches. A 39-year-old mother of two, she has filled in for several years in surrounding cities. She’s had her purse stolen, her sweater “inked,” her head used for target practice by students. She nourishes few illusions.

As for the strike, she says she supports the teachers’ aims, “because I think the system is lousy and needs a shakedown, because there’s no discipline. And unless they do something about the discipline, the teachers deserve to be paid more than they are.”

Wright traces her interest in teaching to her upbringing in the Okanagan Valley. Early on, she became the math coach for her friends, went on to study math, physics, electronics and chemistry in college and then ended up working as a bookkeeper.

On a trip to Utah in 1974 for a conference being sponsored by the Mormon Church, she met her future husband. She says the Lord inspired her to stay in the United States, to marry Harold Wright, and later to give birth to a son, now 13, and her young daughter.

In the ensuing years, Wright began substitute teaching--a task she finds potentially rewarding but only occasionally satisfying. The last time she had “an ideal class--a class that wanted to learn,” she figures, was about 18 months ago.

The Los Angeles strike offered Wright new opportunities. The district on Monday raised pay for substitutes during the strike from $137 a day to $165. That figure is more than twice what Wright could make elsewhere. And she figures the students need to be taught.

Those students had begun filtering onto the Edison campus on Hooper Avenue shortly after 6 a.m., arriving early out of curiosity and a vague excitement. Meanwhile, most of the 80 or so regular Edison teachers stayed away, many of them gathering along the sidewalks with signs. By 7:30, about 10 teachers and several dozen administrators and aides set about implementing their plan for a streamlined school day.

From the start, it didn’t work quite as intended. Assembly in the “canteen area” unraveled into chaos. Rob English, a math teacher, watched from a classroom as students “stormed the gate. It was like lemmings going out to sea.”

The remainder were then herded off to class.

Ever optimistic, Wright had arrived armed with educational tools neatly packed in a cardboard file box: five-step lesson plans, lists of behavioral objectives and disciplinary methods, even a treatise on “teaching in a pluralistic society.”

Brought Along Some Help

But she had also brought along more practical tools--flash cards, paper and pencils, a piece of chalk in its own plastic case. Stashed in the small white handbag slung over her shoulder, she carried a whistle--invaluable for crowd control in case of emergency.

“Oh crumb! When I went to school, you could hear a pin drop,” she exclaimed, recalling her days at Osoyoos Elementary, Junior and Secondary schools.

Wright’s first assignment Monday was Room 400. Seven students were picking their way through an acrostic specially printed up for the day. One of the school’s regular history teachers--in a sweat shirt that read “Are We Having Fun Yet?”--paced around the room, gently hectoring the class.

Wright assisted briefly. Then an administrator with a walkie-talkie summoned her to another classroom, where she assisted a former aerospace engineer who was conducting a seventh-grade math class.

At 10 a.m., a 40-minute nutrition break rolled around. Wright joined a sparsely attended staff meeting. The topic under discussion, as one teacher put it: “What are we going to do when the masses come upstairs after nutrition?”

Wright was dispatched to Room 210 until lunch. There she conducted a “language arts” class. Several dozen students attempted to construct paragraphs or small essays on such issues as their favorite TV show and what makes them “feel terrific.”

Later came a final period in which the assigned activity was a screening of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” in the library. Growing restless, the students made a stab at an essay on the movie they had seen, then headed home for the day. Eventually, Wright did the same.