Losing My Faculties: A Teacher's Story Read online

  When I tell Mr. Stevens what the placement lady at the university told me, he says, “Yeah, I remember that. That kid was nuts. We were all terrified of him.” Luckily, none of my kids are what I would call nuts—that is to say, I’m not afraid of them in any real way—they’re just making mischief. They remind me and everyone in the school’s main office of who’s in charge in this class at the end of every period, when they buzz the office intercom on their way out of the room. An annoyed secretary’s voice comes on and says, “Yes, 205, what do you need?” and every day I have to say, “I’m sorry, the students pushed the button.”

  So I am completely on my own in terms of dealing with any kind of disruption. The school has no organized form of detention—I could ask a kid to stay after school, but there are no consequences if he doesn’t show up. The school’s discipline policy seems to boil down to: don’t commit any crimes on school property. To be honest, I am not really sure about that one either. The school has a security guard, a pudgy forty-five-year-old woman who both the kids and I think is really cool, but she isn’t really much of a deterrent.

  One Wednesday night in our student-teacher seminar, we are talking about discipline, and my friend James, who is teaching in some wealthy suburb, says, “Well, I really didn’t want to do this, but they just gave me no choice—I had to start writing names on the board.”

  I manage not to laugh, but I can’t stop myself from one-upping him. “My kids threw a basketball at me,” I say, because it is sort of true and it sounds better than what actually happened.

  “Oh my gosh, Brendan, I don’t know how you do it,” my classmates say, and some come up to me after class to tell me how much they admire me for sticking it out in a tough situation. I guess it’s pathetic that I need the ego strokes, that I need for my classmates to see me as the Heroic Inner City Teacher, but it does help me to find the energy to walk in every day knowing something is going to fly through the air and not knowing what it is.

  Despite the daily disruptions, this class is actually where some of my first great successes as a teacher happen. I also have a senior class that gives me no discipline problems at all. This is partly because of their advanced age and maturity, but it also has a great deal to do with the fact that class begins at seven-thirty, and while it’s not unusual to have ten or twelve students there by the time class ends at eight-fifteen, it is rare to have more than five out of fifteen at seven-thirty. I have to say that if I could have gotten away with this kind of attendance as a senior in high school, I totally would have.

  The sophomore class, though, is after lunch, which may have a great deal to do with the bad behavior I see. Kids go to lunch, they get wrapped up in the stuff that’s really important to them, and then it’s hard to come back and focus on class. I don’t mean to put them down at all in saying this. Remember high school? Lunch was the highlight of the day. Betsy sat near me today! And she offered me a chip and laughed at one of my jokes! Does that mean she likes me? Come on, get real, she doesn’t like me. Then why did she offer me a chip? Answer me that! A lunch like that could keep my head out of class for the whole rest of the day.

  And so it is with many of my students. And yet, somehow, I don’t really know how, in spite of the stuff flying through the air and the daily performance of the Angry Teacher Show (now in its tenth smash week!), the students feel comfortable enough to allow the class to get real. The class is predominately black, with three or four white kids and a handful of Hispanic kids, and these kids want to talk about race. When I hand out Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Juan looks at me, disgusted, and says, “So is this the black book? When do I get a Hispanic book?” Latoya, who in her introductory letter to me identifies herself as “a Nubian Princess,” makes no secret of her hatred of white people. I, of course, am a guilty white person and feel I must Honor Her Rage, whereas if one of the white kids said the same thing about black people, I would probably—well, I was going to say kick the kid out of class, but of course I can’t do that, but I would at least want to. So I don’t give any speeches about how we need to respect everybody who’s in the room, but luckily the other kids step up to the plate. Whenever any subject at all comes up, Latoya steers the conversation to something negative about white people, until her classmates start rolling their eyes as soon as she begins to speak and tell her to get over it until she tones it down.

  Let me say that I am fully aware that my reliance on a bunch of fifteen-year-olds to keep the conversation appropriate is a really abject failure on my part.

  One day Latoya is going off about how terrible white people are because they move out of neighborhoods when black people move in, and one of her classmates, who is also black, says, “Latoya, do you want white people living in your neighborhood?”

  “Hell no!” she answers, and everybody, including her, laughs.

  The kids write every day at the beginning of class and then share what they’ve written, and Terry always comes up with a “your mama” joke—Your mama’s so fat, she wears size “continent” kind of thing, except usually funnier than that. He breaks up the class with these jokes, and his success inspires a host of lesser imitators, including John, who is one of the class’s three aforementioned white kids. John has no success at all—his jokes are incredibly lame and inspire only groans and sometimes angry disgust in his classmates. One day John busts out with “Your mama’s so black, she went to a night class and got marked absent!” I am getting ready to yell at him, and I’m really afraid I am going to have to pull Latoya off of him in about two seconds. How could a white kid be so dumb as to make such a totally racist joke?

  The class explodes with laughter. Latoya says, “Good one, John,” and he gets high fives all around the table. I have no idea what just happened.

  One day I come in with a brilliant assignment: let’s learn to write a letter to our congressman! We can learn the business-letter format and sound off on an issue that’s important to us!

  The students look at me like I have three heads. They openly ridicule the assignment: “Who the hell is my congressman? Why would he listen to me? They don’t pay attention to people like me!” Hmmm. They are, of course, right, and it is pretty tough to give the “beauty and power of democracy” speech when I know that a letter from one of these kids isn’t going to mean shit to anybody unless it’s stapled to a four-figure check. I am initially annoyed with them for not going along with me, but when I go home that night, I realize that I can spend the next several classes banging my head against the wall, or I can follow them and try to make an assignment that matches their interests.

  Most of our classes feature, in addition to stuff being thrown, a discussion about race that usually ends with me shouting over the three other people who are shouting that we are out of control and we need to stop talking about this now.

  So I decide that we’ll scrap the letter project and write essays about race and racism. The students can’t wait to get started, and they all do the assignment (this is something of a miracle). Many of them have conferences with me about how to make a second draft, and a few kids do really spectacular work. It is a success. It doesn’t solve anything or even get us closer to agreeing, but it does allow them to have a school assignment that actually means something to them and that teaches them something too.

  Several days after the essay comes in, another spontaneous argument breaks out, when Latoya, in a rhetorical flourish that probably presages a career in politics, manages to slip “All serial killers are white; black people just don’t do that” into what I thought was an explanation of comma rules. Karen, a white girl who has never responded to one of Latoya’s pronouncements before, starts screaming about black people and drive-by shootings, and Terry and Kamira both start trying to yell at both of them at once. Dreading another Jerry Springer—style “discussion,” I manage to get everybody silent, and I tell them to take out a piece of paper and write down what they want to say. Everyone will get to read, and nobody will get to react—I, the teach
er, will say “Thank you” after each person reads, and that will be it. Everyone rushes to get out paper and everyone writes. Some don’t want to read, but everybody who does is listened to. The written comments are more thoughtful and less inflammatory than what usually gets shouted in here, and I don’t have to enforce the ground rules I’ve set up. They are just respected.

  So, despite all the problems, on at least two occasions class manages to be serious and real. Nine years later, my memory is that the class with everybody reading their paragraphs and being listened to was my last class with them, but I know that can’t be true. Still, it makes a nice ending, so I will leave them there.

  5

  Mr. Stevens has a conference to go to for two days, so the school decides to use me as an unpaid sub. This is a pretty widespread practice with student teachers. The university warned us about it and said we had the right to refuse, but we are here trying to make connections, network, and eventually find ourselves a job, and refusing to do a “favor” is not the best way to achieve this. Besides, the university has scant moral high ground on which to stand here—all of us student teachers are paying the university thousands of dollars so that we can go and work for free in local schools. I mean, yeah, we do have a three-hour seminar once a week, and it is great, but it is not exactly ten thousand bucks’ worth of great.

  So I take over Mr. Stevens’ full course load, which consists of two senior classes and two sophomore classes. Of course, I am already teaching two of these classes. I am struggling with the sophomores, as I have already chronicled, and struggling too with the seniors, though in a different way—I just can’t get them to do anything. This is a pretty universal problem with seniors in their last semester. Still, some students who did nothing for Mr. Stevens do some work for me, while others who worked for him shut down for me. Why is this? I am certainly not a better teacher than him. I think it’s because part of our job is just personal alchemy—a lot depends on the mix of personalities. So Denise actually writes a paper for me where she never did for Mr. Stevens (then rips it up in disgust when I give her a C+), but Kendrick starts skipping class three days a week. Both students are black. Mr. Stevens and I are both white.

  I go through two days with a full schedule, and it is the hardest thing I have ever done. At the end of the first day I go home exhausted. I have nothing planned for my classes tomorrow and no idea how I am going to fill forty-five minutes. I have to plan, I’m panicking, but I can’t plan, I’m too tired, my brain won’t work, and I can’t believe I have to do this again tomorrow. I turn to my future wife, Kirsten, and start to cry. “I can’t do it,” I say. “It’s too hard.”

  The next day, of course, I do it. I think this is one of those teaching rites of passage—not the unpaid subbing, though maybe that too, but the feeling that you cannot possibly walk into that building ever again at the end of one day, and then walking into that building to do it again at seven-thirty the next morning. That is basically the story of my entire first year of teaching.

  Classes go badly. This doesn’t surprise me; I am overwhelmed. I am also not getting the constant feedback I’m used to. I usually go to Mr. Stevens’ supply closet on my free periods to discuss how classes go, but now, of course, he is not here, and I don’t have a key, so I go to the first-floor teachers’ lounge. Well, actually, it’s a photocopy room. Actually, it’s a little piece of hell. I am stunned by the contrast between the supply closet, where Mr. Stevens and I talk seriously and thoughtfully about teaching, and this place, where the most benign part of the conversation centers on the alleged drunken exploits of Boston’s mayor. “Oh, yeah, Raybo was so hammered he went in the wrong house,” the teachers say, and “things Raybo does while drunk” becomes a ten-minute topic of discussion. It is unclear to me how these teachers—all of whom fled to the white suburbs in the seventies and now commute to teach in a city they no longer understand (there are black and Asian teachers at this school too, but they are not here. Where are they?)—got on a nickname basis with Boston’s mayor. But the conversation takes a dark turn, and I soon long for more tales of Raybo’s exploits once a student walks by, and one teacher says, sort of affectionately, “There he goes, the king of the con men,” and then they are off for ten or fifteen minutes about the specific students they hate. This inevitably evolves into more general complaints about kids today, and how things used to be different, blah blah blah. Luckily the talk finally turns to stock portfolios and how long they have until they retire, and one teacher turns to me conspiratorially and says, “Yeah, this job actually pays pretty well for part-time work, heh-heh.”

  What planet is she on? How is it that I am working my ass off, am completely exhausted from less than two days of working as a full-time teacher, never have enough time to do all my correcting and all my planning, and she can sit there and tell me this is part-time work? It will be a couple of years before I formulate an answer to that question, and it boils down to this: teaching is a really hard job to do well and a really easy job to do badly. This is the dirty little secret that I hate to air in front of all the teacher bashers, but in some respects they are right—there are certainly teachers getting full-time pay for part-time work, six hours a day, with three and a half months of vacation. I guess it’s a pretty sweet deal, but how do they sleep at night?

  The next day Mr. Stevens comes back and things get better, and the next time he is absent the school actually calls a sub (I think this is because he calls in sick and nobody at the school has my phone number handy). I also discover a perfectly good, perfectly isolated, perfectly empty teachers’ lounge on the third floor. The black and Asian teachers aren’t here either. Mr. Stevens tells me the white teachers stopped hanging out in there when the school wouldn’t let them smoke anymore.

  One of the students from the other senior class comes up to me at the end of the day and says, “Why weren’t you our teacher today? We would have much rather had you than that clown town.”

  “Clown town?”

  “Yeah, you know, Mr. Welch. He’s such a clown town.”

  Well, I may not be much of a teacher yet, but at least I know that this isn’t part-time work, and, more important, I am not a clown town. Whatever that is.

  6

  One day I am observing Mr. Stevens’ senior class, and it is spectacular. They are reading Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, and while this particular group of students has had, shall we say, rather limited interest in this work for the last week and a half, today they are inexplicably fascinated and, without any prodding or leading from Mr. Stevens, have a thoughtful, passionate discussion about the morality of Hedda’s suicide and suicide in general. For some reason, the students are totally into it, and they take off with the activity, and at the end of the class we can tell that something wonderful has happened.

  Mr. Stevens, and this is the downside of his perfectionism, is miserable. He is miserable because he doesn’t understand why today’s class went so much better than yesterday’s and (he doesn’t say this, but he’s been teaching long enough to know it) tomorrow’s. If he could only figure out what happened today, then he could reproduce it daily, and he’d be much better!

  He frets and we get into the elevator with another teacher, a tall, fat, Orson Welles—like man, and he inquires as to why Mr. Stevens’ brow is furrowed. Mr. Stevens explains, and Mr. Welles, who is a fantastic raconteur, launches into this tale, which I think is apocryphal and which I can’t make as entertaining as he does.

  “Once Laurence Olivier was performing in Hamlet. On this particular night, he was brilliant. Everyone in the audience could sense that they were seeing something really special. The other members of the cast too felt themselves in the presence of greatness, and they, in turn, stepped up their own performances, so that everyone in the entire cast was performing flawlessly, though none, of course, as brilliantly as Olivier. He simply became Hamlet.

  “After the performance and the riotous curtain calls, the cast and crew heard terrible noises coming from Oliv
ier’s dressing room. Finally one brave soul dared to open the door, and he beheld Olivier standing in the wreckage of what had been his dressing room, a look of pure rage on his face.

  “‘Mr. Olivier,’ the lad said, ‘you were brilliant! What on earth could be wrong?’”

  “‘I don’t know what I did!’ Olivier cried. ‘I don’t know what I did!’”

  The story is spellbinding, but Mr. Stevens is not impressed. “Teaching is not a performance!” he says to me later. “It’s a profession! The things we do have to be reproducible if we ever want to have the respect that other professions have!”

  I understand his point, but I’m with the fat guy on this one. Whether or not that story is true of Olivier, it’s damn sure true of me.

  7

  My student teaching ends a couple of weeks before school lets out. It has been a mixed bag, but I feel like I’m doing the right thing, and I definitely want to keep working in urban schools.

  Many school districts come to interview at my university. I only sign up for one interview. I give up my spot at the Concord-Carlisle interview because Concord is almost an hour from my house, and it is a wealthy suburb. Cambridge and Somerville, the closest urban districts to my university, do not come to interview. The Boston Public Schools are scheduled to come. I sign up, one of only about three students who do. I wonder guiltily if my embellishing my tales of what happened during my student teaching has scared some of them off.