On my first visit to that brick-and-mortar classroom in a real building, I discovered that my room, A1, was next to one of the few faculty restrooms. Inside A1, the furniture was piled against the far wall. Later, I learned the reason for the mess was that the room didn’t get deep cleaned until after summer school, which had just recently ended. I was in the Marines. I've done deep cleaning and we would have scrubbed that room with toothbrushes several times before it would have passed an inspection.

Here, deep cleaning meant the carpet was shampooed, the desks scrubbed of graffiti that wasn't carved into their surfaces, and the shelves were dusted. When you consider that there were about a hundred classrooms (counting the portables) at the high school to clean and never enough custodians, I doubt they could’ve done much more than what they did.

So, a few weeks before that deep cleaning, I picked up the paper airplanes, spit wads, and crumpled paper that littered the floor before I vacuumed the room. I pulled stick pins and paper cones out of the ceiling. Some of those ceiling tiles were warped and stained brown from the flat, leaky roof. A few had cracks in them or chunks missing and the cork bulletin boards were covered in generational layers of graffiti.

I imagined one of my gangbangers finding graffiti that his father or grandfather had left behind.

If you want to see where I taught, go to Google Maps and search for Nogales High School, Nogales St., La Puente, CA. Once the map pops up, find Northam St., south of the high school campus, and move your eye west along Northam away from Nogales St.

Zoom in and look for the six portables that run between the street and the first brick building. Mine was near the last portable next to the back gate, where the shotgun shooting took place. Zoom in close, and the view switches from above to an eye view at ground level from the middle of Northam St. I understand the aerial view comes from satellites, but the eye-level street view from car-carried digital cameras that have logged more than five million miles—so the street view might be out-of-date.

In the early ’90s, there were twelve portables, but mine was removed several years later as attendance dropped below 3,000. The first portable blocks the view of room A1, where I taught for almost half of the thirty years I was a teacher.

The previous teacher who’d taught out of this classroom had retired after more than thirty-eight years—two years after I moved in, I heard that he’d died.

I refused to teach in a classroom that looked like part of a bombed-out homeless shelter. The dark spots where gum had been ground into the fibers stood out like malignant skin cancer. Before the first day of school that year, I crawled around on the floor for several hours, using ice to freeze the gum and a single-edged razor blade to scrape out those dark blotches embe dded in the threadbare carpet.

The bottoms of the desks were worse—the gum was layered, waiting for cultural archaeologists. I turned each one over and scraped them clean.

After school started, I knew it wouldn’t take long for the students to replace the gum. The school district didn’t allow students to chew gum, eat candy, or drink soda in class, but it wasn’t usually enforced. I enforced it. Keeping it out of that carpet and off the bottoms of the desks would turn out to be a year-long battle. Whenever I caught a student chewing gum, the penalty was either a Saturday detention in the Behavior Intervention Center [BIC] or thirty pieces of gum scraped off the bottoms of the desks or from the sidewalk outside the room.

The previous year—the year of drive-by shootings—had been my first as the high school’s journalism advisor.

The seniors I inherited from the previous advisor ran an overt and covert operation against my expectations and rules—I wanted everyone to meet the assigned deadlines and write according to what I’d learned in my journalism classes.

One afternoon after school, when those seniors couldn’t stand me and my journalistic standards, they rebelled, pouring out of my classroom and into the counselor’s office to protest the mean son-of-a-bitch who expected them to publish a proper newspaper.

To my relief, the principal supported me. He and I were at the front of the room while a dozen seniors sat in a carnivorous pack with crossed arms and stony expressions. If the look in their eyes had been napalm, the two of us would have been roasted.

“If you don’t want to work with me as your advisor,” I said, “the principal has agreed to allow you all to drop the class without a penalty. If you decide to stay, this newspaper will be run professionally.”

Only one of the seniors quit. If they had all quit, there would have been only seven underclassmen to keep the paper going, and only Amanda, a junior at the time, knew how to use the computer program, QuarkXPpress.

After that, the senior editors tolerated me until they graduated. Needless to say, I looked forward to my second year as the journalism advisor.

Now I had a new classroom in a real building and a new editor-in-chief who spoke softly, and had a beautiful smile instead of a rigid scowl.

Training the new staff started July twenty-fifth, earlier than I had expected. Amanda called me and asked for more time to teach her staff properly and introduce them to the new textbook she and the others had selected over the summer. I agreed. We started the training in the portable dungeon with the bulging floor until our real room was ready.

Half of the new staff had been recruited out of my ninth-grade English classes, and I had selected the best—every English class had a few great students who worked hard to learn. I also asked the other English teachers to recommend students, and the rest were recruited by Amanda and her editors.

We had one goal: to build a strong, hardworking, dependable, skilled staff. Every applicant was interviewed by Amanda and her editors. Amanda even assigned a timed news piece for them to write so she could evaluate their writing skills, and her editors rejected a few of the applicants.

On those training days before the regular school year started, Amanda put me to work teaching small groups how to size a story so it would fit into the column inches assigned. If the piece was too short, it would have to be rewritten until it was long enough to fill the space. If it was too long, it had to be cut.

On the last day of training in early August, I asked for volunteers to help me move the furniture from the old classroom. Many said they would help, but when the day came, only two appeared: Ethan and Tucker. Ethan, a new senior, had been on the staff the previous year. Tucker was a new reporter. With their help and a few custodians, we moved everything. Since the air conditioning was turned off school-wide, it was miserably hot.  There were windows, but over the years, they’d been painted shut. I had no choice. I wanted my classroom to be clean and ready.

“Crazy is Normal” goes on a promotional tour starting October 1st that ends in the middle of November, 2014. During the promotion, the e-book of the memoir will be on sale for 0.99ȼ. The price will return to $3.99 at the end of the promotional tour.

Scenes from "Crazy is Normal, a classroom  expose" will appear here Saturdays in thirteen installments covering the first ten percent of the memoir or 12,455 words.

The Introduction, which comes before the Prelude, may be found at: