Losing My Faculties: A Teacher's Story Read online

  Miraculously I find copies of the warning slips in the pile of crap that covers my desk. I give them to the principal and never hear anything further about it. Apparently the parents continue to make a stink because somehow the necessary credits suddenly appear on the student’s transcript. It’s a strange and miraculous occurrence. One day he can’t graduate without credits from my class, the next he is buying his cap and gown. Go figure.

  Other than these two encounters, though, I don’t see much of the parents and, as I said, my classes generally go pretty well. Caroline has stopped “floating” and now has a classroom on the third floor, so we see each other a lot and actually talk about teaching, and it just helps enormously. This is probably another reason why I feel like I’m in the groove here—I finally have regular contact with someone with a similar philosophy who I can talk to about what’s happening in our classes. I also have somebody to sit next to at our insufferable faculty meetings.

  I have my first level-three class in four years. Like my most difficult class at Newcastle, this is a ninth-grade group composed almost entirely of special-ed students. Unlike that class, this one actually does something, and I guess this, as much as anything, is a measure of how far I’ve come in five years of teaching. My big success is that I get most of them to read Ender’s Game, a four-hundred-page science fiction novel about a misfit kid who makes good. The kids love it. Many of them tell me it’s the first book they have ever finished. Certainly it is the longest book any of them have ever read.

  Not that it’s an easy class. My “no grades till the end of the quarter” thing flops horribly here. They still do only one draft of a paper, if that, but with these kids the behavioral stuff is much more important than the academic stuff. Particularly difficult are the two Bretts. One is thin, one is fat, and both are loud and out of control a lot, though they are both good-natured and I like them. Both can stop the class dead and do so about three times per period.

  On the third-to-last day of class I completely lose it with fat Brett. He is saying something, I can’t remember what it is, but he just keeps saying it over and over, and I ask him nicely to stop, and he won’t, and finally I just lose my mind. I get right in his face and scream, “Shut up! Will you just shut up!” He looks at me like I just hit him. I wonder if he might be used to this kind of treatment. The other kids laugh. The next day I apologize to him. I will feel guilty for years about this.

  On the last day of school, thin Brett is one of only two kids who bother to come. He has to come because he got suspended last week and was required by the vice principal to attend the last three days of school as a condition of his punishment. If he blows off school today, he’ll have to go to summer school.

  So here he is, early even, but he is untouchable. Grades are already in, and there is no detention tomorrow; the only possible punishment he could get today is to be arrested for something. So he runs into the hall and eventually finds a wheeled garbage can that kids have been using when they clean out their lockers.

  He gets a running start, then flops on top of the can, arms out, and rides it down the long hallway. For about ten minutes I feebly tell him he has to stop. Come on, Brett, please, really, it’s not safe, hey, come back here. Eventually I just give up. Later he discovers the handicapped-accessible ramps and spends the rest of the day going “Wheel” and flying down the ramps atop a garbage can. It’s probably the best day of school he will ever have.

  28

  Even though things are going well in most respects, I am not happy here. At the end of my fourth year both Kurt and Jesse leave Northton High. They both live far away and so have good reasons to leave, but the bottom line is that this is just not a place where they can see themselves staying.

  I feel the same way. In fact, I’ve always felt the same way, which is why I always send out résumés in the spring. In fact, while I’ve gotten better and better at working with the kids, and I even handled the two pain-in-the-ass parents okay, the other teachers here are driving me nuts. I have started to just really hate them. It gets to the point where I write a thinly veiled attack on them that I actually read to one of my writing-workshop classes. I call two of my colleagues “weasel boy” and “the eggman” in this masterpiece.

  So it is October of my fifth year at Northton High. I have two very high-energy classes of sophomores who talk about getting drunk all the time, but I don’t really feel like it’s anything I can’t handle. I have what may be the best writing-workshop class ever. And yet …

  I can’t sleep. Every night I lie down, tired to the bone, and I can’t fall asleep. It’s like I have forgotten how to fall asleep. I lie awake for hours. Sometimes I get up and watch TV. Once I see the Ben Folds Five on Conan O’Brien and there are only three of them, and they rock, and, like the old men when I was a kid who thought Molly Hatchet sure had a deep voice for a girl, I thought they were a five-piece piano pop band, and here they are rocking with guitars on late-night TV. I question whether there is even a guy named Ben Folds in the band. Probably not. Am I dreaming this?

  If only. I won’t dream anything until I finally fall asleep. Usually this is somewhere between two and four in the morning. I get up at quarter to six.

  I go to the doctor. He gives me a prescription for Ambien. I take one and sleep for six hours in a row, though I wake up feeling not very refreshed. I am too familiar with both Valley of the Dolls and the life of Elvis Presley to be really comfortable taking a pill to fall asleep. I take it one other time, then flush the rest of the bottle down the toilet.

  I go to a therapist. We have some nice talks. He tells me I need to get a book on “sleep hygiene.” I don’t.

  I go to a homeopathic doctor. He gives me a dose of sulphur, or rather of lactose powder, which once touched something that touched something that touched a molecule of sulphur.

  Friday nights I sleep fine. Saturday nights I sleep fine. Sundays I can’t sleep, and won’t sleep again until Friday. The same thing happens every weekend. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this has something to do with work. So what is it? Well, fortunately, I have a lot of time to think about it. Here is what I come up with.

  I have done okay at Northton. Actually I have done better than okay. I have gone from a second-year teacher who knew nothing to a sixth-year teacher who is, mostly, very good at his job. My classes used to be easy—now I do actually bust kids’ butts sometimes. I created a writing elective. I love my students and have been really lucky to build some nice relationships with a lot of them.

  And yet Northton is a totally white suburb of Boston. I am spending two hours a day to get there. I now have a nine-month-old daughter, and time is getting more and more precious. I feel strangely disconnected, like I am disintegrating. I’m hopping between two cultures. At home, I live in this diverse neighborhood (though we liberal white folks who like to crow about this never talk about how, for the most part, it is carefully segregated street by street. So when we say we really value the diversity, we mean we see people browner than us at the supermarket, but very few of us live on the same street or in the same building as them). I am part of the city, I want to make the city a better place, and yet I am using the only skills I have to do that twenty-six miles away. I meant it when I said I belonged in the city, but I couldn’t get a job there, and I got one here, and working in the city was the reason I got into this, and after five years, I feel like my dream is slipping out of my reach.

  My students come from a culture that is getting more and more foreign to me. Yes, we are all white, and yes, economically I have a lot in common with many of them. But I have never lived this kind of life, never lived in the world of basement rec rooms and hanging at the mall, and every day when I drive through the long rows of identical ranch houses to get to work, I think to myself, what the hell am I doing here? Some of my students laugh openly when I mention the neighborhood I live in. Many more ask me if I’ve ever been shot at. They are not joking. In some fundamental way, I just don’t fit in, y
et it looks like I am stuck here.

  Of course, many of my students feel sort of the same way, which is why I bond especially to the kids who don’t quite fit in the rigid social atmosphere here, the kids who, like me, think it’s creepy that cheerleaders are assigned a football player and have to bake cookies for him and decorate his locker before every game.

  And, as I said, my colleagues are driving me insane.

  Some are incompetent. Besides the guy who requested the level-three classes so nobody would care if he wasn’t working, there is a teacher who calls everyone “sweetheart,” and nobody gets below a C in her class. (Her relentless friendliness also hides a passion for the status quo and a fear and loathing of anyone different. Caroline and I develop this personal litmus test where we figure that the few kids who see through this lady are really something special.) Captain Jack only periodically showed up drunk and then stopped drinking when he got cancer, so he’s still there and sober and in remission, though he is still not really doing much teaching.

  Some are racist. Last year, a teacher who should have packed it in years ago, a walking cloud of bitterness, was finally given the gate for saying to the one Hispanic kid in his class, after the kid wasn’t paying attention when he asked a question, “Why don’t you get welfare to buy you a hearing aid?” Caroline was actually instrumental in getting the kid to report this, and as a result she is a total pariah with most of the faculty now. She’s also looking for another job. In my second year, the lady who runs the student community-service club has kids pretend to be dead on some drunken-driving-awareness day. As the day goes by, more and more kids “die” from drunk driving. They signify that they are dead by painting their faces black and not speaking. I complain about the incredibly racist symbolism, talk about Ralph Ellison and black invisibility, and she listens politely. Dead kids continue to wear blackface annually thereafter.

  Many more are just old, tired, and bitter. They complain about everything. All the time. They don’t show any passion for their work, and I wonder if they ever did. The school lets out at one forty-five. It’s an absolute ghost town by two, though our contract requires us to stay until two-thirty. The people who are quickest to file a grievance when the administration doesn’t adhere to the contract, including our union rep, are impossible to find by two.

  Some young people have been hired, but by the end of this year everyone under forty who was there or was hired since I was will have left. Why not? Why stay here? These are not people who are in teaching because they love it—they are in teaching, by and large, because they wanted a dependable civil-service job, or they wanted to be able to spend their entire summer on the Cape, or they wanted to coach hockey. Teaching is an inconvenience.

  And you can’t ever talk about it. They are all so insecure that they view any talk about teaching as an attack. (Though from the little I know about the history of this place, sometimes it really is an attack, so maybe they’re not as paranoid as I think.)

  So the people I work with feel more like the people I work against. When I see the students for between forty-five and ninety minutes, and I try to get them to use their minds and open up, they are coming from hours of lackluster classes in which they are either beaten down, bored to death, or insulted with easy work.

  And the worst part—and this is the part, I think, that is keeping me from sleeping—is that I am turning into one of them. On my worst days—days like tomorrow, for example, when I will be barely functional due to lack of sleep—I am doing a better job for these kids than most of the people I work with. So why try to be excellent, when even good enough is better than most? I am starting to mail it in. In another year, or two, or five, I will be mailing it in every day. And I will be bitter because I am stuck in a job I no longer love. I will be bitter because I hate myself and the people I work for and with. The burnouts’ victory over me will be complete. I will have become them.

  Over the course of several sleepless nights, I come to a conclusion. I have to stop working here. I would rather not teach than continue to teach here, because I will soon be the kind of teacher that gives teaching a bad name. This must be how people feel when they decide to end a problematic relationship (I was always on the receiving end, so I am only speculating here, analogy-wise). It breaks my heart, and I don’t use that loosely, I mean it really makes me sad in the way that saying good-bye to someone you love makes you sad, to think that I might not be teaching. But if teaching means staying here, I can’t do it. I’m still in love, but this relationship just isn’t working. Come January, I decide, I will send in my letter of resignation. This is well before the teaching job hunt gets under way. So I will be committed. I won’t let myself get trapped by the security, the insurance, the pension, and I will not tell Northton High that we can still be friends, though I will say it’s not you, it’s me.

  29

  I am seriously afraid that I won’t get a teaching job, at least not in Boston. As I get older, I cost more to employ because of union pay scales, which is great for me but makes it a tougher call for someone to hire me because they’re gambling more money on a teacher they don’t know. Also, there is this weird urban/suburban divide in education. Suburban districts think urban teachers are burned-out hacks who do little more than crowd control in their classrooms, and urban districts think suburban teachers are pampered wusses who have gotten so soft they could never handle the challenges of urban teaching.

  All I want professionally is to teach in a small school in the city, but every year I’ve spent in Northton has put me farther up the pay scale and farther on the suburban side of the divide.

  Last year I finally got an interview with the Boston Public Schools, and even got really close to getting hired, but I have no idea if this is going to help me or hurt me. Caroline hooked me up with a Boston principal, Brian Watkins, who agreed to set me up with a job interview at the main office in Court Street, something I had never been able to accomplish on my own. You have to have a contact. I took off work to go have my interview with the human-resources lady. She was in Florida. Nobody had bothered to contact me. I went to the bagel store a few blocks away and huffed and puffed and clenched and unclenched my fists. Then some guy came in with a bunch of urban high school students and they sat two tables away talking about whatever field trip they had just been on with their cool teacher, and I just stared over at him, wondering how it happened that that guy has the job I want and I am still working thirty miles away. I went back a few days later and the human-resources lady emerged, covered in gold, hair bleached blond, nails as long as her fingers. She never apologized for standing me up. Her first words to me were “You can thank Brian Watkins for this interview.”

  “I have,” I said, “and I will again.”

  She sort of smiled at me in a fuck-you way and started the interview.

  “Let’s imagine that you are teaching a class and a student refuses to do his work. What three things do you do?”

  “Well, I mean, that depends on who the kid is and what the situation is. I mean, with some kids, you can—”

  “No, but what three things would you do?”

  “Well, which three is going to depend on the kid. I mean, I would probably try to talk to the kid alone, I mean, you know, you want to avoid having a big confrontation in front of an aud—”

  “Okay, so talk to the student is number one. What two other things would you do?”

  The interview continued in this way. It was completely pro forma, just to see that I wasn’t a complete idiot or psychopath, or that I could at least disguise my idiocy or psychopathology for twenty minutes.

  She told me that I would be put on a list of potential candidates, but somebody told me that the list was bullshit, and you had to apply to the principals individually. So I sent a résumé and cover letter, clearly indicating that I had been cleared for employment in the BPS by the fingernail queen at Court Street. I ended up getting a couple of phone calls and one interview.

  The interview went s
trangely. The guy asked me about discipline, and I mentioned the fact that I’d worked in Newcastle, and that it was a pretty tough school, which is something many people don’t know because rich people sometimes vacation in Newcastle, and then I gave my answer and he said, “Well, I see your tough school taught you nothing about classroom discipline.”

  What a dick! And I, for my part, was a disgusting sycophant. Instead of telling him to go fuck himself, I cravenly agreed that I had a lot to learn, and needed strong mentoring such as I had never had, blah blah blah. It was a really disgusting performance.

  But I guess it worked, because at the end of the interview, he said how he really liked me and would call me in a couple of weeks. He didn’t call, and I pestered him with daily messages until I finally got through to him, and he told me that he wasn’t allowed to hire any white people, that the BPS was below its quota of minority staff again and sorry, because he thought I’d do a good job.

  30

  I announce my decision to leave to the people I share my twenty-three-minute lunch with every day. For the last two years, this has included Terri, who, like Mr. Stevens, is still going strong after more than twenty years as a teacher and who, along with Caroline, is one of the only people here I can ever talk about teaching with. Whenever I feel ground down by the stupidity and evil of this institution, I look at Terri and feel some kind of hope. She is a mentor and a hero to me. (And, echoing the voice in my head, she always tells me I need to get out, that this isn’t the place for me.) Mary Pat, who teaches next door to Terri and who I have really come to like, is my other lunch companion. I hated her my first year here—she was always saying the nastiest, most horrible things about kids and colleagues—but I have come to see that she is basically a really kind-hearted woman who puts on this front of being tart-tongued and frequently says whatever mean thing she can think of without fully checking it out for acceptability. I identify. Now she brings me stuff from her garden, trades recipes with me. This year she has Jeff the C-student football player, and, of course, Jeff’s mom too, so we bond about that experience. Apparently Jeff’s mom is telling her that her style just doesn’t work for Jeff.