A Teacher's Labor Day Plea to School Reformers
Even an oil field rookie, "a worm," knows that his life is in the hands of his tool pusher. So, in my first day as a roughneck in the oil patch, it was unnerving to hear Dwayne shout into the radio, "Frack after dark! Frack after dark! Call Western! Eddy Chiles (subsequently the owner of the Texas Rangers) loves to frack after dark!"
By today's terminology, we actually were being told to perforate a well after dark, but it still placed everyone's lives at risk. It meant we would be working with explosives that could be unknowingly detonated by a trucker 100 miles away as he spoke on his CB radio. That winter, had such an explosion occurred a few seconds earlier, our entire crew would have died; even so one roughneck was pronounced dead at the scene.
My tool pusher told me, "John, I'm a high school dropout so I'll do what I'm told. But, you have a future." If we have to frack after dark, Dwight told me to quit this job and hitchhike home.
This may be the single most unnerving of my experiences in the blue collar world, but it's hard to believe how many times the bosses, in so many different workplaces, gambled with our lives. Whether it was being required to handle explosives or radioactive materials without following procedures, unloading trucks full of toxic fumes, hefting too much weight around machinery without the legally-required security protectors, or just taking the risks required to deal up with a sped-up assembly line, our health, safety, and survival was unimportant to the big boys.
As a teacher, our real danger was stress. Gangbangers threated their classmates but not authority figures. The stress from counseling traumatized students, visiting them in the hospital, attending their funerals, and worrying over unconscious teens could threaten our health, but it was nothing compared to what our kids had to handle. My last couple of years in the regular classroom, I started to get sick at my stomach when A Teacher's Labor Day Plea to School Reformers | John Thompson: