In my hometown of Trenton, Halloween was a handy excuse for teenagers to engage in a night of lawlessness, sort of like a rural prequel to “The Purge.” Sales of eggs and toilet paper spiked at the Hy-Vee. Many mailboxes paid the ultimate price.
It was a bad night to be a high school teacher. My father, a math teacher whose mastery of equations was not matched by his conflict-resolution skills, took a proactive approach to the holiday. At dusk, he plopped down in a lawn chair on our sidewalk, assembled a pile of rocks and leaned an aluminum baseball bat against an arm rest.
If a Camaro or Silverado full of teenagers slowed down in front of our house, he started firing away. The bat was just in case.
Even by the lax standards of the 1970s, throwing rocks at your students was considered counterproductive to creating a healthy learning environment. But even if my dad didn’t teach those kids a lick of algebra, he did impart a valuable life lesson that we all need to learn sooner or later: Don’t bring an egg to a rock fight.
