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Home and family life -- even in middle-class suburbia -- is not what it used to be. With divorce commonplace, youngsters frequently careen back and forth between parents like shuttlecocks. "We used to send one report card home with each student and deal with one set of parents," recalls Kay Grady, a counselor at Hillview Elementary School in affluent Menlo Park, Calif. "Now we send two to two households and sometimes arrange for separate conferences." That is, if the parents have time. Single parents and two- earner couples are often just too fatigued at the end of the day to show much interest in open-house night or Johnny's science project. Students often reflect their parents' indifference. Says Hillview science teacher Ken Capie: "It's like they're always asking themselves, 'Why am I here?' They don't see the need to learn."
"Expectorate -- to spit." Barry Smolin points to one of 20 vocabulary words he has written on the blackboard. The class titters.
"I had a student last year who used to call his spit 'luggies,' " he tells his tenth-graders. "He could lean out my classroom window and gather enough spit to reach down to the ground and then suck it up again."
"Gross, Mr. Smolin!"
He perseveres, pointing to another word. "Ubiquitous. Sometimes when you are walking around downtown L.A., the police are ubiquitous." Polite laughter. "Resonant. Many opera singers have a resonant quality to their voice." He breaks into a baritone, singing scales with a mock gravity.
Smolin, 27, graduated from Fairfax High himself in 1978. But his classroom reflects a taste for the cultural artifacts of earlier eras. Jimi Hendrix posters keep company with theater reviews from West Side Story. His unusual methods -- using song lyrics to teach literary themes, for instance -- are popular with students. But he fears he may soon wilt under the pressure to entertain. "My first year I used to come home hoarse," he says. "I can't keep up five shows a day and not get burned out."
Burnout. It can happen as easily at the blackboard as in the boardroom. "There are days when I go home with a migraine," says Chicago's Bertha. "It's a stressful job." Especially for those who work with learning- disabled or troubled children. Last spring, after three years of teaching special ed, Michael Pugliese asked to be reassigned to a regular classroom. "When you give your all, and there's no hope -- that's too much," he says.
Many teachers do not bother to request transfers; they just quit. Fully half of all new teachers leave the profession within five years. The trend is more pronounced among minorities, who frequently work in schools with the most complex social and academic problems. Given attractive options in private industry, blacks -- as well as women -- no longer feel forced to endure jobs they consider unsatisfying. "The old days were different," says Chester Finn, former Assistant Secretary of Education. "A lot of our finest teachers were women and minorities who had no other place to earn a living."