An earlier version of Bluto was published in The Great Outdoors, 2019
Walter Segar was better known to his students, and even to the other staff, as Bluto, because of his supposed resemblance to Bluto of the Popeye cartoon, Popeye’s hulking black-bearded nemesis. Bluto the maths teacher and rugby coach had worked at Matauranga Area School for nearly thirty years and had been a good front row forward himself in his day. Photos of the staff and the rugby teams in the foyer of the school chronicled his steady decline over the last twelve years from a robust athletic figure to a flabby middle-aged man, whose prodigious bulk had degenerated from bulging muscles to bulging fat. His hair was still black, but thinning and dishevelled. I’m not sure whether you’d say he had a short beard or that he had long stubble. This was at a time when the unshaven look was beginning to be considered fashionable for men but you wouldn’t call the black growth on this Bluto’s doughy face designer stubble. There was no suggestion of anything fashionable about his appearance. He wore T shirts and track pants to work, a concession normally allowed only to PE teachers. He looked grizzly and unkempt and seemed to care little about his appearance or what anyone thought of him generally.
Bluto was a creature of habit and would always sit in the same place in the staff room, on an office chair next to a small table, with a potted begonia, and rarely spoke to anyone, though he would occasionally talk to the pot plants he had arranged around the room. He had gardens and indoor plants at home and fertilized them with diluted urine, his own urine, which he collected in bottles.
When our school recently hosted an interschool sports day there were lots of visiting staff and parents in attendance, all gathered in the staffroom for refreshments at the end of the day. Bluto didn’t stay and socialise and before he left he told me not to drink the tea. “Don’t drink the tea,” he said furtively. “I’ll explain later.”
The day after I asked him, “What’s the story with the tea?”
“They used the big tea pot from the cupboard,” he said. “The one I’ve been using to water the plants with my fertiliser.”
Bluto liked having lots of plants around but his real passion in life was his music. He played saxophone in a jazz band and played jazz music on his iPod through a pair of head phones he usually wore in the staffroom and even in the classroom. He would never allow students to wear their head phones in class and whenever any were bold enough to challenge his dictatorial rules he explained that he was perfectly comfortable with his double standards and that he was the teacher and they weren’t.
Bluto could have been Head of Department but he had no interest in taking any responsibility for anyone else’s work. However, with his years of experience, he was still expected to help with mentoring new teachers like me and I observed him teaching a couple of classes. He gave me advice about problems I was having with some of my students, the ones who were unmotivated, uncooperative and disruptive. We’d had PD sessions with school advisors on class management, where we got a lot of the same sort of stuff I had at Teacher’s College, about class dynamics, learning styles, Te Kotahitanga, supportive learning strategies, scaffolded learning, differentiated teaching, students’ self esteem, and so on. All of which Bluto summed up as a load of bollocks. “Behaviour management was a lot more straightforward back in the day. You pull out a couple of trouble makers early on and give them the cane and it’s over and done with. They fall into line and so do the rest of the boys because they fear the cane. They know you mean business and they respect you for it. A lot of kids these days don’t respect teachers or parents or anyone or anything.”
“What about the girls?” I asked.
“Girls could be a bit tricky but we could strap them too. In the past, a kid who was failing because he wasn’t working would get a boot up the arse, not literally, not usually anyway, and he’d have to take responsibility for himself. Nowadays everything is the teacher’s fault. If a kid’s not succeeding, the teacher’s not teaching properly. The kid’s not working; you’re failing to motivate him, or failing to form a relationship with the little shit. As for all that self- esteem bullshit. Why should a kid feel good about himself if he’s just being a dick and not doing any work?”
“Now we’re supposed to be more supportive and use different strategies,” he went on. “It shouldn’t be up to the teacher to try to jolly the kids along or trick them into learning. It’s up to the lazy little snots to get motivated themselves and just do the work. You can’t force them to learn if they don’t want to and you can’t stop them from learning if they really want to learn. What happens out in the real world, when they’re in a job, if they can get a job? If they don’t feel like working they get the sack. We should be able to sack them from our class.”
He asked me what I’d been doing with my trouble makers and what my strategies were (with mocking emphasis on strategies) and why the strategies weren’t working. I explained I give them a detention and I have to give up my time to supervise them. Some of them don’t turn up for my detention so they get a school detention. They blow that off too and eventually they get rewarded with a stand down, a day or two off school. Parents get called in, or mothers get called in if there’s no dad at home. Pressure from parents works for a few cases but some parents don’t care and some mothers have no control over their teenagers. Some are even afraid of them. Willie Cannons falls asleep in my afternoon class because he stays up all night with his computer, watching movies, playing games, or watching porn or whatever. This came out at a parent conference and I suggested to his mother that she just take his computer off him at night but she said she couldn’t do that because he would get angry.
Bluto was sympathetic about my struggles with dealing with problem kids. “I know,” he said. “You’ve got all this responsibility and bugger all power to do anything.”
I asked him what he did now that he can’t hit them, and he got on to some practical things like seating plans. You’ve got to have a seating plan, keep the trouble makers apart from each other. Bluto’s seating plan was to group the workers together so he could get on with teaching them and leave the rest to do whatever and not interfere with his teaching or the kids’ learning. The slackers could opt into the learning group at any time and occasionally one or two would get bored with doing nothing and join the workers. More often, kids in the out group would be sent outside for being disruptive. That might work for him but not for me. As a provisionally registered teacher, I was closely monitored and I wouldn’t get away with just excluding groups of students or sending them out without referrals and follow-ups and endless documentations.
“As for strategies, public humiliation works a treat. Show them up in front of their mates,” Bluto advised. He would order miscreants down onto the floor and shout, “Give me twenty!” That was if he knew they were not capable of doing twenty press ups. Those who would be able to do the press ups were given different tasks like, “Get down on the floor and cross the room on your hands and knees.” I could see why some of the kids hated him.
Bluto took his turn doing lunch time duty once a week like the rest of us and while he was patrolling the grounds on one particular occasion, wearing his Dirty Dog sunglasses with the mirror lenses, as usual, two boys confronted him. Well, actually it was Alex Panapa who confronted him and Haki Robertson quietly went down on all fours behind Bluto so Alex could push him over. Bluto got back up and punched Alex in the face. Alex’s left eye puffed up and closed.
This time Bluto got stood down and suspended. Jackson, the principal, interviewed the boys and Bluto separately and called in Te Atawhai, our PPTA rep. A meeting of the Board of Trustees was convened, with Alex’s parents in attendance, and Bluto’s job was on the line. From what I heard, the school and the board had mixed feelings about the prospect of losing Bluto, or the opportunity to get rid of him, as some would have it. Ron Braithwaite was keen to get rid of any of the old guard. There were those in management who would have liked to have got rid of Bluto long ago and saw this situation as an easy out. He had assaulted a student. There would be criminal proceedings and he would be deregistered. It would be out of their control. Cynthia Wimset agreed he had overstepped the mark and would have to go. But there were also those who valued his contributions and loyalty to the school. There were always good numbers of his students who achieved Excellence and Merit in Mathematics. And let’s not forget his ongoing support for rugby in the school. Bluto had taught and coached some of the Board members and other parents of our present students back when he first started working at the school.
Jackson added his sonorous voice to Bluto’s detractors. He didn’t like his cavalier attitude to the dress code, and to professional development, his neglect of underachievers and his generally unprofessional behaviour. He felt he could be quite candid in criticism now that Bluto had crossed the line and would be sure to leave the school. There was a lot of discussion, which Jackson was confident was going against Bluto. However, in the end, Alex’s parents didn’t want to press charges. They felt, in the circumstances, Alex had it coming and, considering the provocation, Bluto had not acted unreasonably. The Board voted by a small majority against sacking him. There was a restorative justice meeting with apologies from both parties and it went no further. Bluto had got two weeks off work on full pay, which was more than the offending students got, and I don’t think he minded the time at home. He lived on his own since his wife had died about twelve years ago. He had always lived in the same place just out of town on what you might call a lifestyle block, with his gardens, and chooks and a few other animals.
Bluto returned to school on Monday morning. Looking around the staff room, he was pleased to see his begonia and all his other plants were still thriving, thanks to my watering them in his absence. All was in order except that someone had left a pile of books on his table. With one shovel-handed sweep, he dumped the books onto the floor and took his seat for the morning briefing. He then put on his headphones and turned up the volume on his ipod.