Losing My Faculties: A Teacher's Story Read online

  Luckily, the job itself is much better. I’m supposed to team-teach one class with another teacher, which makes me very nervous, but it quickly becomes clear that it’s going to work out—Zach and I have almost identical temperaments and philosophies and even taste in music, and I am still, as much as I’ve tried to purge this remnant of my adolescence, a terrible snob who judges people by the music they listen to. The only big difference between Zach and me is that he’s nicer than I am. Working with him here turns out to be a great experience, one I’ve never really had before in teaching. I’m used to working pretty much in isolation, and so it’s very nice to work with someone who sees the same kids I see every day and thinks pretty much the same things about what we should be doing with them.

  So that’s fun, as is the fact that we’re teaching the kind of kids who choose to go to school for six weeks in the summer, so the work is very easy. Also, we get a free lunch in the host college’s cafeteria every day, which means unlimited fries—probably not a good thing for my waistline, but it does take a lot of the sting out of working in the summertime.

  One day after class Zach and I get some actual diversity training. We are talking to some students, and one of our Haitian students reveals that she would never look an adult who was angry with her in the eye, because that is considered very disrespectful. Now, this is a pretty fundamental difference between Haitian and American culture in terms of dealing with authority (can’t you just hear the angry teacher yelling “Look at me when I’m talking to you!” at a kid who’s been trained her whole life not to do that?), a piece of information that could prove very useful in working with these kids, and the kids have to tell us themselves, while our “diversity training” consisted of trying to make us feel guilty about Aunt Jemima. Oh, well.

  Classes are a real joy. I have one class of three students that I end up conducting in the campus coffee shop at least once a week, and this makes us all feel supercool and collegiate, and the kids really rise to the occasion. I have a group of seniors that I really like (and they like me because I get their references to American Pie, which has just come out).

  One day Zach and I are walking out of work together and have the strangest experience. Two large, older teenaged boys approach us and say, “Hey, you guys know anything about people beating up faggots around here? ’Cause we’re faggots and we hear that people have been messing with faggots here, and we ain’t down with that. I mean, you know, we’re faggots, but we ain’t bitches, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  I am so very confused. I don’t know how to play this. Zach and I say that we don’t know of any gay-bashing incidents, and the one guy says, “’Cause, you know, you guys don’t have a problem with us being faggots, right? ’Cause then we’d have a problem with you.”

  So clearly the script here is (a) we say, yes, we do have a problem with you being faggots, and they kick our ass, or (b) (I think this is the one they are really hoping for) we say, no, we don’t have a problem, in fact we are faggots ourselves, and they reveal—aha!—that they are not, in fact, faggots! They’ve only been masquerading as faggots so that they can find some faggots and kick their asses! And then they kick our ass. It’s clear that they haven’t planned for option (c), which is that there are actually two men walking together who are both heterosexual and not homophobic, so we say, no, we don’t have a problem, I offer how many people from my church are gay and I have a good friend who’s a lesbian if that counts, and Zach tells a very moving story about how one of his former students recently came out, and how he felt very honored that the kid would share that information with him, and that, you know, these guys should be happy and proud to be who they are.

  They insist on walking us to the corner, and I’m pretty sure the wheels are turning in their heads trying to figure out exactly how they can move the conversation back to an avenue that leads to ass kicking, but they don’t manage to and eventually send us on our way.

  Once again I am glad to have been with Zach. I was fighting the instinct to tell them to cut it out, come on, what’s this really about, but Zach’s sincerity—which was unfeigned despite the fact that he also knew these guys were fucking with us—carried the day. Whew.

  This is about as hazardous as working here gets, with the exception of one day when we are all at lunch (they feed us and then make us have this pointless daily meeting during lunchtime at which nothing of substance is ever discussed) and somehow the subject of Famous Athlete Youth Programs comes up. The remark comes from a teacher I barely know, but I am suspicious of her because I knew that she worked at one of the program’s “partner” schools, and my interactions with them had not given me a very high opinion of either place, and also all the kids hate her. (I’ve found that the kids are never wrong about stuff like this. That is to say, they can sometimes be fooled, en masse, into liking somebody who’s a fraud or no good at their job, but they are never wrong about who they hate.) Discarding social graces, and knowing that I worked at this place, she pronounces that it was a horrible disgrace that kids came from her school and did nothing with us and got promoted to high school anyway. Though I’m saying all kinds of really choice things in my brain about how they didn’t seem to do too fucking much when they were in her school either, I try to steer the conversation back to relatively neutral, impersonal stuff about how the program was screwed up from the start and how it was a shame because these kids had all these needs that the program was just not set up to address, but for reasons that are unclear to me—I mean, this is literally our first conversation—she wants my head. So I offer, “Those kids got screwed,” but she will not be pacified because this was obviously a personal insult to her, and she comes back with, “Those kids got over.” I am angry for the rest of the day about the fact that my manners are too good for me to have told this woman off in front of a table full of people, and it is certainly news to me that anybody but Alan got promoted, but in the end I think, Well, good for them. I hope they did get over and get promoted, and I hope that some of them are seniors in high school this year and that they beat the odds. But I have to confess, I suspect that most of them came out of this a lot worse than the adults involved.

  Let’s go to the scoreboard.

  As predicted, the grant wasn’t renewed and Famous Athlete Youth Programs’ foray into truancy prevention went gentle into that good night, though the program did get to keep the new van that was bought with the grant money. So chalk this up as a win for them. Temporarily at least. More on that later.

  I parlayed this urban experience into a job teaching in a small school in the city, as we’ll see shortly. Chalk this up as a win for me.

  Sandra finished her certification, got hired by the fingernail queen on the spot to teach second grade in Boston, got the “excellent teacher” twenty-thousand-dollar signing bonus from the state, and continues to teach elementary school in the Boston Public Schools. A kid I knew had her as a teacher and said she was awesome. I’m sure it’s true. All of that would have happened for her if she hadn’t worked at Famous Athlete, but she managed to pick up some extra money during that critical end-of-grad-school period, mostly by watching me teach. Or, perhaps I should say, given the quality of my own performance, watching me “teach.” So she was a winner here.

  Devon got a job running a program for recovering substance abusers. He probably could have gotten that without the Famous Athlete experience, though, and he spent six months working at this job with crappy pay and no benefits instead of another job that might have been better in either respect. And he worked harder than anybody else. And he had to deal with that bullshit with Drew’s mom. So I guess this would have to go in the loss column for him.

  Through the good offices of Tashina, Mariette got another job as a social worker. Count this experience as a win for her.

  The recovering crackhead who came to speak to us fell off the wagon. We all saw him on the news being arrested for sexual assault. I suppose this is unrelated to his guest appearance in front of us
, so let’s put his contact with Famous Athlete Youth Programs as a question mark.

  The pinky-ring-wearing guys were able to parlay their grant into a bigger grant for the following year, and did open a real alternative school for kids who are truant. They called me for an interview three days before school was going to open. I got petty satisfaction from never calling them back. Still, they got exactly what they wanted out of this experience, so it was definitely a win for them.

  As for the kids, I have no idea. I know that Alan, the early spotter of Paul Pierce’s talent, got his shit together, began attending school regularly, and got promoted to high school despite the supposedly ironclad draconian attendance policy. He came by, beaming, when he got his official notice that he would be in the ninth grade next year. I have no idea how he sidestepped the attendance policy. A definite win for him—for this kid, the program did everything it was supposed to do. We intervened at a time when he was screwing up and somehow helped him to stop screwing up and start doing as well as he was able to. So I guess that was a win for us too. As for the others, I saw Tina smoking blunts with older guys at the bus stop a few times and looking right through me, and then I never saw her again. I saw Lourdes downtown just a few weeks ago, but she didn’t see me. She is seventeen and looks about twenty-five, and she was nicely dressed, as if she had a job, so maybe things worked out okay for her. I hope so. She was a nice kid. I haven’t seen or heard of any of the other students since they left us. So I guess it’s a question mark for most of them.

  About six months after I left, Famous Athlete, who used to talk at length about his dedication to “his kids” in interviews, shut down Famous Athlete Youth Programs forever. I called an old sports columnist who always seemed to have a special hatred for Famous Athlete just to make sure Famous Athlete got some publicity for it. The columnist didn’t disappoint—he gave the closure a few sentences in his column. It is probably about one one-thousandth of the column inches Famous Athlete got in the local papers for his dedication to the youth of Boston.

  Famous Athlete has sucked horribly ever since he left Boston, but he built his legend well on the three good seasons he had here and the relative pittance he spent on a half-assed after-school program. Incredibly, many local sports columnists still talk about what a shame it is that Famous Athlete left and how much he did for the youth of this city. He’s on his second team since leaving Boston, is no good at his job, and is a millionaire.

  Part Five

  Better Than You

  40

  Most of my early job leads for the fall don’t amount to anything. Finally I get an interview at Better Than You, a charter school with a good reputation. I have been sending them résumés every year since they opened because the idea of the place always seemed incredibly appealing to me. It’s a public school in Boston, but as a charter school, it operates completely independently from the Boston Public Schools through an agreement with the Massachusetts Department of Education. Charter schools, because they can be started by people with new or interesting ideas that might take a decade or more to really get going in a big school system, are supposed to be “laboratories of innovation” or “entrepreneurial education” and thus the salvation of education, or the future of education, or something. Reporters and columnists always talk and write about them in code, saying things like “They are free to innovate without the constraints that a standard public school faces.” So liberals like me hear “They can do sensible stuff because they are not beholden to a ridiculous administrative bureaucracy,” and conservatives hear “They can get those horrible, lazy teachers to actually work, because they don’t have those satanic teachers’ unions.”

  I confess to being a little nervous about the lack of a union (I always enjoyed my excellent benefits and automatic raises at my union jobs, not to mention the freedom to speak my mind and, yes, leave meetings at the exact minute they are supposed to end), but Better Than You was started by teachers and is run by teachers, and it’s a chance to work in a small school in the city without having to deal with the fingernail queen or the BPS race quota.

  So when my sixth annual application to Better Than You finally gets me an interview, I am very excited.

  I arrive at the interview and am ushered into a room with about seven other people in it. They all wear these little pins that say BETTER THAN YOU. It strikes me as kind of creepy, in a Stepford Wives way—do they have to wear these, or do they all choose to because they’re on the team? Such a display of team spirit is so foreign to my experience everywhere I’ve worked that it automatically makes me suspicious. And it’s disconcerting to be interviewed by so many people. Who’s the important one? Who’s the one I should be most trying to impress, and who can I forget about? It’s impossible to tell—I think automatically it’s the oldest man in the room, but then this other guy is introduced as the principal. It’s very confusing.

  But the interview goes fairly well, and I start getting comfortable. In fact, I get so comfortable that I lose control of my mouth, and when somebody asks me what I do to relax, I say, “Drink heavily.” Most of the people around the table laugh, and I immediately follow up with, “Whoa, I guess that wasn’t the best kind of joke to make in a job interview,” and a touching story about how hanging out with my two-year-old daughter is actually very relaxing because she totally lives in the moment. So things appear to be going well until this one lady, who’s been kind of giving me the evil eye and not laughing at my jokes, says, “I see you left your last school in the middle of the year. Were you under contract?”

  I stumble and say, yes, I mean, I had never actually signed a contract, but certainly the school had every expectation that I would slay through the year, but I saw this opportunity to make the jump to urban teaching, and I didn’t know when that was going to happen again, so I felt like I had to take it.

  “Well,” she says, “what will you do if we offer you this job?”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “And how do we know that you won’t leave this job in the middle of the year?”

  “Uh … well, I guess you don’t. But I wouldn’t.”

  There may be more questions, but afterward I will remember that this is how the interview ends, with me stuttering and red-faced while this woman grills me.

  I walk out and find Zach waiting for an interview. We laugh and talk and wish each other luck. Qualifications-wise, he is just like me, but because he has more urban experience and is so much nicer than me, I’m sure he’s going to get the job.

  I go home replaying the interview in my mind again and again, especially the snotty gotcha questions about leaving in the middle of the year, and I stew and stew and convince myself that that exchange (plus Zach’s superior experience and personality) is going to cost me the job. Fucking bitch! I mutter to myself. I’ve sent you motherfuckers a fucking résumé every fucking year, and never heard shit until I have some urban experience, and now you’re going to hold that against me! Shit!

  I go home and tell Kirsten how this one woman was an unbelievable bitch and I hate all those stupid Stepford Wives motherfuckers with their ridiculous little pins.

  I send off more résumés. Two weeks later I’m delighted when the stupid Stepford Wives motherfuckers call and tell me they’re checking my references. Three more weeks go by. I call the guy who called me (it was the old guy who I’d originally thought was the person to impress), and he doesn’t get back to me, though I do have a nice conversation with his wife. I call the school and can never reach anybody, so I leave a couple of messages a week.

  Finally, and with no explanation for the delay (during which I have convinced myself three times that I did get the job, no, actually I didn’t, yes, actually I did, no, there’s no way, they would have called if I’d gotten it, et cetera), they call and offer me the job. I am happy and proud in that way that you always are when somebody offers you a job. I’m taken aback, though, when Chip, the principal, asks me what I would like to be paid. I’ve never negotiated f
or a salary before, because it’s just not done in education—in a union school there is a pay scale, and they tell you immediately what you will make, and it’s not open for discussion. Because I am so grateful to be hired, because I have always wanted to work at a school in the city, and because I made so very little at Famous Athlete Youth Programs, I name a figure that’s on the low side. Chip immediately accepts my offer, which of course should be a clue that I have just given several thousand dollars away. Idiot!

  Even still, my dream is finally coming true—I have a job at a small high school in the city, which is pretty much all I’ve ever wanted since I started doing this six years ago.

  Years later I will find that my joke about drinking heavily was key to my being offered the job, and that the old guy put his foot down and insisted that they had to hire “that funny young man.”

  41

  I’m happy to have a job, but a little scared about this place. First there is the matter of the pins. It grows larger and larger in my mind and begins to feel creepier and creepier.

  Then I get a call from Kathleen Shaughnessy, the English-department head and cofounder of the school—it’s the harridan who was mean to me in the interview! Great! She tells me she’s just down there at her house on the Cape with Roberta, who also teaches ninth-grade English, and they’re working on the ninth-grade curriculum, and since I am also going to be using the ninth-grade curriculum, they thought they would call me! I can actually come down if I like, we can work on curriculum and then go for a bike ride to the beach!