Losing My Faculties: A Teacher's Story Read online

  “Well,” Mary Pat says to me, “you and I are about as far apart on the style spectrum as two people can get. So if your style didn’t work for Jeff, and my style didn’t work for Jeff, maybe it’s Jeff and not us.” Although we are sitting here complaining about a kid (well, really a parent), which is something that I thought was sick and evil four years ago, what I really like is that implicit in what Mary Pat says is the recognition that what I do is valid and that she respects me. This is really tremendous because most of the other old-guard teachers are horribly insecure and feel like maybe the teaching world has passed them by—nobody writes any articles in English Journal about how you should give lots of reading quizzes and lecture about symbolism for forty-five minutes—and their reaction is to belittle everything that’s not what they do, because they feel like they’re belittled all the time. When’s the last time anybody told them they were doing a good job?

  Terri and Mary Pat both agree that I should leave, but they caution me that I shouldn’t resign until I have another job lined up. “But that’s just how I’ll get trapped,” I say. But, they say, how can I take the chance? What if I don’t land on my feet?

  It’s something I worry about too. I now have a kid and a mortgage, and I am asking a lot of my family here. Giving up my job security has the potential to really fuck things up at home. But then, so does living with a self-loathing burnout.

  It’s a terrifying leap into the unknown, but I know it’s the right decision. Once I decide, really decide, that this is my last year at Northton High even if I have to go haul garbage bags full of fish stock again, I can sleep again.

  So I scan the ads and plan to resign just before February vacation. In late December I’m looking at the ads in The Boston Globe, even though nothing is ever even advertised this early, and see an ad that says that Famous Athlete Youth Programs is looking for a teacher for its new truancy-prevention program for middle-schoolers.

  I throw a résumé in, just for the hell of it. I get called for an interview.

  Famous Athlete Youth Programs is located in a part of town I never go to and shares a building with a medical clinic. I arrive at the same time as a tall black woman, and we sit there in awkward silence for probably twenty minutes until I finally say, “So are they interviewing us together, or what? That’s kind of weird.”

  “Yeah,” she says, “I’m not into the whole group-interview thing.” Then she says that she is actually interviewing for the aide position. They are, according to their ad, hiring a teacher, a “tracker” (van driver), a social worker, and an aide.

  Some guy comes and takes the tall woman away for her interview, and I am interviewed by two women—one black and one white. I don’t know who they are. The black one laughs at all my jokes, which is usually a good sign. They explain to me how these two guys at the Boston Public Schools got this grant for truancy prevention, and how they are excited to be “partnering” with Famous Athlete Youth Programs to create a pilot program; that the position is funded by this grant administered by the Boston Public Schools (Famous Athlete, whose name is on the door and who brags in interviews about his involvement with “his kids,” is not actually funding this program at all); that I will be working for Famous Athlete Youth Programs and not the Boston Public Schools, so there will be no fabulous union pay scale and benefits; that the grant funding for this program goes through June, and that there is no, I mean zero, guarantee that anything will be happening as of July 1. I talk about how I am committed to urban education, that being a city dweller and a homeowner gives me a stake in things, and I basically try to sell them on the idea that I can do this job. (Later I will find out that I am the only applicant who is even remotely qualified, and that I should have let them sell themselves to me. Oh, well.)

  I say the short guarantee is okay—while I’m not looking at this as a stepping stone (a lie), if nothing else, it will give me some urban experience that might get me noticed at an urban school in a way that my current, suburb-heavy résumé just doesn’t.

  A few days later I get a call that terrifies me. Edward, the education director at Famous Athlete Youth Programs, offers me the job. It pays six thousand dollars less than what I’m making now, there is no health insurance, and they need me to start so soon that I won’t even be able to give Northton two weeks’ notice.

  I think about it for thirty seconds. I ask if they can raise the salary by a few thousand bucks to cover the cost of extending my insurance coverage through COBRA. He says okay. It still amounts to a pretty significant pay cut, but it is working in the city, ten minutes’ drive from my house; I might never get this opportunity again.

  I take it. I conduct this entire transaction on a phone in the Northton High librarian’s office.

  31

  That night I toss and turn and do not sleep at all. First thing in the morning, I go to the secretary and tell her I need fifteen minutes with Joan, the principal, today. She pencils me in for third period.

  This is a long time to wait. Finally I head into Joan’s office and give the speech I have been rehearsing since about 2 A.M. I tell her how I’m really sorry, how I know I’m putting her in a terrible spot, but this opportunity to work in the city has come up, and I just don’t think I can turn it down.

  I cringe and wait for the abuse that I feel is my due at this point. It is January. The caliber of teachers available in January is not high. I have royally screwed this woman. More than that, I have royally screwed my students. After half a year of getting used to my idiosyncrasies, of figuring out how to succeed in my class, they are going to have to get used to someone else, and probably this will be somebody who’s not very good.

  Incredibly, the abuse never comes. Joan says she is sad but not really surprised, that she knew I wanted to work closer to home, that she knows that when an opportunity arises you have to jump on it, which is what she did when she wiggled out of a multiyear contract to come here, and she has enjoyed having me on the staff and wishes me luck.

  Years later I will still marvel at this. Joan treats me kindly as a fellow human being rather than abusing me as somebody who is breaking a contract and putting her in a very difficult position.

  Three days later I will be summoned to the office of the superintendent, and incredibly, though Joan is the one who really should abuse me, he will abuse me instead, telling me I’m unprofessional, that he’s never heard of such a thing, that this move is going to cost me financially because the contract says I have to be paid at an hourly rate if I don’t work the whole year (this means the paycheck I think I have coming in two weeks will never arrive because I owe it all to the Northton Public Schools), and he doesn’t know what I think I’m doing, but he’s pretty sure I’m not going to like this new job.

  He calls up Edward, my new boss at Famous Athlete Youth Programs, and yells at him too, with the result that I have to stay an extra six days at Northton High. I am baffled by his hostility—is he angry because I am just the latest new hire to leave, because the fact that everybody who comes here leaves maybe says something about how fucked up this place is, or is it just a personal thing? Is he mad because somebody else has dared to steal one of his employees? I will never know. I have always thought of this guy as a wimpy, harmless phony and have never understood the venom my colleagues direct at him, but I think I’ve just gotten a glimpse of what he’s really like. “Ohhhhhhhh,” I think, “so that’s why they hate him.”

  The next two weeks are, I hope, the closest I will ever come to attending my own funeral like Huck and Tom do in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I tell my writing-workshop class, the best writing-workshop class I’ve ever had, and I kind of start to choke up. Once the news is finally out of my mouth, one girl speaks. All she says is “Mr. Halpin …,” but her voice is full of sorrow and surprise, and I will still be able to hear it years later.

  The kids are devastated, horrified that I have inverted the natural order of things by leaving school before them, and so they respond to the news that I have
selfishly placed my own interests above theirs by showering me with love. On my last day I get visits from many of my former students—they stop by just to say thank you, just to say good-bye. One girl—one of the outsiders I have always bonded with, and someone with a lot of similarities to me in her biography—gives me a beautiful card with her artwork on one side and a really nice, heartfelt note on the other. “Is it out of line to ask for a hug?” she asks. I have always been very scrupulous about not touching my students, just to be careful, to not give the wrong impression, particularly as a young man with female students, but I’m leaving anyway, so I give her a hug, probably the first one I’ve given in four and a half years here. It’s nice.

  Another girl from my sophomore class comes by and cries and cries and cries, really she sobs uncontrollably, and I get the feeling that I am just one more in a list of adults she’s cared about who have left her. And, I mean, you know, I’m not her parent or anything, I see the girl in a class of twenty-five for forty-five minutes a day, and yet my leaving is genuinely making her sob with grief. I feel like a shit.

  The kids in my writing workshop, which was a semester class and so scheduled to end a week after I leave anyway, shower me with stuff, including a commemorative mug with a picture of me with them wrapped around one side and the words THANKS MR. HALPIN on the other. They make a binder with a note from each of them and their favorite piece they wrote in my class. It’s awesome, it’s heartbreaking, and it’s wonderful.

  So I am sad, but this is also really one of the best days I have ever had as a teacher. I feel so appreciated, and what is colossally unfair is that I am able to get all this love by leaving in the middle of the year and totally screwing my students over. Had I held out till the end of the year and then left quietly, which would have been the considerate thing for me to do, I might have gotten a few cards, but nothing like this. It is amazing.

  My colleagues, too, give me gift certificates and stuff, which is especially touching given the fact that a couple of them really hate me and have nonetheless kicked in five or ten bucks—it’s an example of the same kind of class that was at work when the staff gave a nice sendoff to a principal many of them hated. Later, when I work with people with no class at all, I come to appreciate this even more.

  As I walk out the door of Northton High forever, Mary Pat calls after me, “There goes another one over the wall!”

  Part Four

  Famous Athlete Youth Programs

  32

  Due to my old boss winning his pissing contest with my new boss, I am two days late to orientation at Famous Athlete Youth Programs. Initially I’m very upset about this, because I figure the team will have done all kinds of bonding. Surprisingly, though, I’m not at all nervous about the job itself. Money is going to be tight at home due to my pay cut, and this job is substantially different from anything I’ve ever done, but I find myself feeling strangely serene about the whole thing. I drive to work through three neighborhoods of Boston, and unlike when I drove past the ranch houses to Northton High, the landscape here feels familiar, and I feel at home.

  It also doesn’t hurt that it’s much closer to home in a literal geographic sense. On my first day of orientation there is a terrible snowstorm, and, driving at about ten miles an hour the whole way, it takes me half an hour to get home. I stagger inside and begin to complain to Kirsten about the horrific, slow drive: “It took me half an hour to …” I stop midsentence and start to laugh—I never made it home from Northton in less than forty-five minutes.

  The orientation turns out to be total bullshit, and the team doesn’t seem to have done much meaningful bonding. The four of us who will be working with the kids meet each other. Sandra is the woman who was here when I interviewed, and she’ll be my aide (I don’t have the first idea what to do with an aide). Mariette is the social worker, and Devon is the “tracker.” I really don’t like the implications of giving somebody a game-hunting title, but anyway, what it means is that he will drive the van and go pick kids up, and if they don’t show up, he’ll go looking for them.

  Our boss, Edward, the Famous Athlete Youth Programs education director, arranges for some guy to come in and give us a photocopied sheet with pictures of bugs on it so we can write on each bug something that bugs us. It’s supposed to be some kind of team-building thing. He has a guy who works at the alternative school for violent youth talk to us about security. He scares the shit out of me talking about metal detectors and pat-downs, and Edward says he is going to use some of the grant money to buy a handheld metal detector like they use at the airport when you set off the walk-through detectors. He never does. As it turns out, none of these activities will really have any relation at all to the work we do.

  One day the two bigwigs from the Boston Public Schools who wrote the grant for this program come in with Tashina, who is a much smaller wig there. They have this air of authority—fair enough, the money is coming from them—but it is kind of uncomfortable, racially speaking. These two guys are white and everybody else is black except for me. So they come in in their suits and pinky rings (!) acting sort of haughty, like they are dealing with their servants, and even though they haven’t actually said anything that’s made me uncomfortable, it creeps me out.

  They have the school administrator’s gift for talking big about their expectations, and making it seem like this is a real and important program. Well, it is important—they had to spend their grant money for this year or they won’t get their grant money for next year, when they hope to get a much larger grant to set up an actual alternative school for kids who are truant. Whether it’s real or not will become clear later.

  Tashina talks about how she and Devon will “go on sweeps” to pick up truants they might find hanging out on the streets of Boston in January. (Assuming they’re going to find these kids on the streets in the dead of winter is a terrible underestimation of the kids’ mental capacities, in my opinion. I mean, okay, they are truant from middle school, but they do have enough sense not to hang on the corner when it’s twenty degrees out.) If said frozen truants attend one of our “partner” middle schools, they will bring them down here to the dingy basement occupied by Famous Athlete Youth Programs and get work from our partner schools so we can educate them. (I should be suspicious about the fact that there haven’t been any representatives from our two partner middle schools at our meetings, but I am still all aglow with the excitement of this new career challenge. Moron.) For, um, a period of time. Until they are ready to go back to school. But no longer than three weeks. That should be enough time for us to “fix” whatever’s wrong with them so they will be ready to return to the schools they couldn’t stand to go to in the first place. Sure, why not?

  They tell me not to develop any curriculum—that will come from our partner schools.

  So we sit and wait. Orientation ends after three increasingly boring days and Tashina comes by the next morning to take Devon on a sweep. Sandra, Mariette, and I have donuts and read the paper. Edward disappears into his office.

  Devon and Tashina do not find anyone hanging on the icy streets that day. Or the next day. Or the next.

  33

  Finally, after three days of doing nothing, except for Devon, who has been doing sweeps with Tashina, and Tashina herself, who has some other kinds of duties at the Boston Public Schools, we get a call from Devon in the van. He and Tashina have nabbed some kid on his way to the store or something, and he attends one of our partner schools, and they are bringing him in.

  I’m excited. I’m terrified. What am I going to have him do? Well, whatever it is, it’ll only be for a few days, because soon we’ll have some work from his partner school. He is a chubby, curly-haired kid named Jorge, pronounced in an Anglicized way—“George.” He comes in looking kind of scared.

  He and Mariette, the social worker, disappear into her office for a while, then she comes out and says she’s going to go do the home visit. This is part of the established protocol: the initial intake inter
view will be followed by a visit to the student’s home, and then a report will be written.

  Jorge is turned over to me. I am as nervous as I was when I taught my first class, because I have no map—and no idea what this is going to look like. We talk some about why he’s here. Then I have him do a writing assignment and some silent reading with the young-adult books I’ve bought. Then it’s pretty much time for him to go home.

  I call over to the woman who’s supposed to be the liaison at Jorge’s school. She isn’t there, and she does not return my call. She will not return my call the next day, or the next. I continue to improvise with Jorge. He says they were doing fractions in his class, and at this time the stock quotes are still printed in fractions, so I start a little stock-market game with him. I give him a thousand make-believe dollars and tell him to “spend” it all on stocks of his choice. We have to convert all the prices into fractions and divide up his thousand bucks, and then every day we check Jorge’s stocks and graph how much “money” he currently has in his portfolio. We continue with the independent reading. I give him some writing assignments, and he revises them on the computer.