by Jose Moreno
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Barón struggled to get the attention of the students; he had problems making sure they were under his control every day for the following three months. During that time, painfully, he performed, by trial and error, many classroom operations in order to study their behavior; after all, their creativity was limited. Furthermore, because he controlled the amount and type of class work that the students had to do, he experimented with different “lesson plans” to see what would be the best way to “attack” them. He paid close attention to the settle ways in which they communicated to one another to determine how that led to confrontations among them.
However, during those first three months, Barón soon found out that he had to deal with administrators as much as he had to deal with students. Every time that Barón referred students to the office, he was suspiciously questioned about the reasons why he had referred the students. Because of the ODFs in the classrooms, administrators played the recordings and reviewed together what had been wrong with Barón’s classroom management. Moreover, students had learned in that institution that the best self-defense against a referral was to blame the teacher for wrong doing. Sometimes, it was not clear what was being observed by the ODFs; the students knew the blind spots of the ODFs and the subtle actions that could not be captured by them; consequently, in those blind spots, students could lie in their favor, claiming an inappropriate action taken by the teacher. Unaware that those administrators could be fired if teachers referred too many students, Barón was surprised to notice that administrators often took the side of the students when they were being referred.
Furthermore, because he was technically a prisoner, he was not allowed to talk to the other teachers. If he needed ideas, training, or instructions about proper classroom management, he could only obtain them from an administrator. Nevertheless, he did not feel supported at all. He quickly learned that he could only support himself.
Fortunately, after those three hellish months, they all began to show signs of improvement in their behavior mostly due to Barón’s remarkable ability to predict who was going to act up before they acted up, his subtle unprofessional actions, and his understanding of the “rules” that guided the place. Knowing the academic weaknesses in all students, he often gave special assignments in order to spitefully destroy the ego of those students that showed sign that could misbehave; once those students were struggling, Barón used body language to imply to those students that the assignment was a stealth punishment that passed under other’s radars—Barón had also learned the blind spots of the ODFs. Also, Barón became a master of slick humiliation without seeming unprofessional so that no administrator doubted that he was following school regulations; He learned the art of humiliation watching how students were constantly bringing self doubt to other students in subtle ways. Also, he learned the art of making sure students were against one another in order to make sure they did not unite against Barón; in this way, students took care of other students in their cells [20]. Most importantly, often, Barón read old law books lost in his dusty book shelf, in the painful solitude of his room, in order to look for loop holes in the laws so that he could put pressure on administrators whenever they did not want to take his side on referrals. As a result, after the first three months of radical actions performed by Barón, the students began to become more and more afraid of him watching how things seemed to go his way. On the other hand, many times, hypocritically, he acted like a “compassionate” teacher, trying to maintain a positive image to make sure they did not unite out of fear [21]; it was just a way to fool them. After just 3 months, he had become an effective tyrant, a gangster, a hangman committed to getting himself out of that jail.
Barón’s “reign of terror”—an expression used by the students—destroyed every piece of humanity in him for the next two years. He no longer saw any significance in the pursuit of the “higher humanity” that he had been looking for when he had arrived at the woods. Those students in prison were nothing like Carl, Mary, or Martin. He only felt contempt for every student in that “fetid” prison. His philosophy in jail had become “survival of the troglodytes”. He felt that he had woken up from a dull dream into a nightmare every day for two years. He was not willing to sacrifice for whom he considered to be just bunch of “savages”.
Nevertheless, he still believed that their environment had helped in the growth of their “bestial character”. He was aware that those “savages” had been the result of their stringent environment. For two years, he often thought that those “savages” could be better off being far away from a technological society, such a jungle, where they could adapt to more a “primitive environment.” He thought that they could be better off forming their own society.
In this way, he reckoned, “why do they have to be anybody’s burden?”The answer to the question made Barón felt guilty; nevertheless, eventually, the guilt disappeared, and prison transformed Barón into a committed misanthrope, not knowing that he was going to find out soon, outside of prison, the meaning of everything happening in the world.
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