Losing My Faculties: A Teacher's Story Read online

  The day comes, and I get my suit on and trot over to the education building. There is a note on the door of the room where the interviews were to take place, saying that the interviews are canceled.

  I go home disappointed, and in an act showing uncharacteristic gumption, I call up the Boston Public Schools and get transferred around for several minutes. Finally I reach someone straddling the line between surly and indifferent. “Hi!” I say. “I was scheduled to talk to one of your recruiters today on campus, but they had to cancel. I’m wondering if I could reschedule an interview for sometime later in the week, or maybe early next week?”

  “Hold on,” the bored voice says. I hold for two minutes. Finally she returns. “No. Just send your application in.”

  So I do. I even, in more shocking displays of gumption (you can tell how much I want this job), follow the advice of people who tell me not to mail anything but to take it down there and watch them put the “received” stamp on it, make follow-up phone calls asking if they have all my stuff and if they are scheduling any interviews. They never call.

  8

  I end graduate school flat broke. I have hit up the financial-aid office for a little supplement in the springtime, which allows me to eat and pay my rent, but now it looks like I am back to the good offices of Kirsten if I want food and shelter for the summer. So I apply for jobs at two Upward Bound programs. These are basically academic summer camps for urban high school students. I have one interview that goes very well and I feel confident that I’ll get the job. I don’t.

  I have another interview that does not go as well—you know the kind, where the interviewer is not giving you the nods and chuckles you’re trying to elicit with your answers, where you just don’t seem to be connecting for some reason. At the end of the interview, the woman says to me, “I know I really shouldn’t be asking you this, this is really a postemployment question, but how old are you?” I really do look like I’m about sixteen. “I’m twenty-three,” I say, and she says thanks, you know, it’s just that I look so very young.

  I’m convinced that there is no way in hell I am getting this job. But I guess the woman liked me, or else she was afraid I was going to sue her for asking illegal questions in the interview (like I have money enough to sue anybody); whatever the case, she hires me.

  I don’t know it at the time, but this turns out to be a dream job. I teach three sections of writing to the kinds of kids who choose to go to school in the summer. I have no discipline problems, and because we are affiliated with a major university, I hold class in a room full of computers that actually work. This will never happen in any other computer lab I take my students to.

  Many of my students are immigrants, so when we do a poetry unit, I have them write poems in English and in their first language, and it is one of the best assignments I ever give. A Salvadoran girl, Elena, writes a really moving poem in which she describes her school in El Salvador in minute detail, then reflects on the fact that she’ll never see it again. Vinh, a Vietnamese boy, writes a poem about being on a rickety boat in the middle of the sea and being afraid. They read them in their native languages and then in English, and the class responds with awestruck silence followed by really vigorous applause. It’s wonderful.

  We also take field trips—I accompany them one day to see Poetic Justice. I am very excited because it is John Singleton’s follow-up to Boyz N the Hood, which was preachy and anti-Korean but still pretty moving, and because it has Maya Angelou’s poetry in it. Well, as you may or may not know, the movie is a complete piece of crap. It is incoherent, the poems suck and are randomly thrown in as voice-overs and are not important to the plot at all, and despite the shootings that begin and end the movie (or perhaps because of them), it is dull. In 2001 students will mythologize this movie, mostly because it has Tupac in it, but in 1993 I go with fifty high school students and the best thing any of them can say is, “Well, I guess it was kind of okay.”

  Despite the cinematic misfire, the work is incredibly rewarding. Except not financially. Because we are affiliated with a major university, somebody somewhere in some office can’t find the grant money or doesn’t want to release the grant money or some goddamn thing, so four weeks into this six-week program I still have not seen a dime. This doesn’t bother most of my colleagues, because they have all just ended a year of teaching and have some money, and they know they’ll get paid eventually. I, on the other hand, have nothing except some rather huge student loans coming due. I have to write a pathetic letter to the director saying how I really need to be paid because I need to eat, and she uses this as ammunition against whatever bureaucrat is not releasing the money, and we finally get paid.

  During this whole program I am frantically applying for jobs. I want to work in the city, but it seems like that’s not going anywhere. Nobody from Boston will return my calls, and my applications in Cambridge and Somerville also seem to be going nowhere fast. So I go through the same routine I went through last time I was unemployed—at first I concentrate on the jobs I want, and later I apply for any teaching job within fifty miles of Boston. I send out countless résumés, and I hear nothing. It gets to be mid-August, and I’m starting to panic. It gets to be late August, and I get incredibly depressed. I think I could be good at this. I have two top-notch schools on my résumé. Why the hell won’t anybody call me?

  A week before Labor Day, I go on an interview. The job is not my first choice. It’s in a small city that is an hour from Boston on the commuter rail—not the kind of trip I’m eager to make, but it beats the hell out of commuting to the liquor store, which is all I’ll be doing if I don’t get a job.

  The interview goes okay. I meet with the principal and the head of the English department, and I talk fairly coherently about why I want to teach and about some ups and downs I’ve had. They say they’ll call me and let me know.

  That night I’m sitting in my apartment watching Beverly Hills 90210. I mocked this show mercilessly as recently as last September, but Kirsten started watching it when I was at class on Wednesday nights, and now I’m hooked too. We are in reruns, but I didn’t see the first go-round, so I am mesmerized as Donna—Donna, yet!—gets hammered at the prom and then is not going to be allowed to graduate until Brave Brandon leads a student revolt! Everybody walks out of class just as finals are about to begin, and they are chanting—

  Brrring! “Hi, Brendan, this is Tim from Newcastle High. We were really impressed with you today, and we’d like to offer you the job.”

  “Donna Martin Graduates! Donna Martin Graduates! Donna Martin Graduates!”

  “I’ll take it!”

  “Donna Martin Graduates! Donna Martin Graduates! Donna Martin Graduates!”

  “Wonderful. School starts in one week.”

  Part Two

  Newcastle

  9

  Before I can get officially hired, I have to have an interview with the superintendent of schools. The train trip out to Newcastle is a very pleasant, one-hour ride. At one point the train goes right past this scene of really stunning natural beauty that actually seems to be enhanced by the gigantic, beautiful, peaceful homes right next to it. I walk about fifteen minutes from the train station up to the main office of the Newcastle Public Schools and have an interview with Frank, the superintendent, which he announces at the beginning is completely a formality. “You’ve got the job, by the way,” Frank says to put me at ease, and while I appreciate it, I wonder, well, why the hell did I just drag my ass all the way out here, then? He asks me some questions I don’t remember, and I give standard kiss-ass answers.

  I fill out some papers and go home clutching the piece of paper that has my salary written on it: twenty-two thousand dollars. This is shit money even in 1993, especially considering the five and a half years of student loans I have to pay back. The train ride home is a very long one, and the rich people’s mansions that seemed so pleasant and peaceful on the ride up seem like giant evil monuments of injustice, and it’s all I can do no
t to flip them off as I try to calculate how much I’m going to owe for student loans, how much I’m going to be bringing home, and how much I think I’ll need for rent and food. I do the calculations. It looks like I may have enough money to buy some clothes, but a car is out of the question.

  What the hell have I done? I’ve just taken a job fifty miles from my house, and they’re not going to pay me enough to get a car? I could probably afford a commuter rail pass, but the commuter rail doesn’t run out of Boston in order to get people to the far suburbs by seven-thirty in the morning. The first train stops in Newcastle an hour after school starts.

  Shit. I’m fucked.

  What really depresses me is that I was so broke during grad school, and I was really looking forward to working so that I could sort of have enough money, and now it looks like I’m going to be broke all the time again.

  I get home, and Kirsten has that excited smile on her face like you do when someone you love just got a new job, and she says, “What’s wrong?” as soon as I walk in the door, and I say, “I’m going to make twenty-two fucking thousand dollars and it’s in East Jesus and they’re not going to pay me enough to get a car and I’m going to be broke all the fucking time and what the hell am I going to do?”

  I also have my schedule. It turns out that Newcastle High sorts its kids into three tracks, and three out of my five classes will be the lowest level. These are the kids who once would have dropped out of school to work in Newcastle’s once-thriving, now-dying industrial base. Now there are no jobs for unskilled sixteen-year-olds, so they have to stay and get a diploma. I am undaunted because, though I am an hour away from the city, I am the Great Urban Education Warrior! I will make them love English and me! I will show this school that kids they have labeled as stupid can excel!

  I still don’t know how I’m going to get up there every day when new-teacher orientation starts. I rent a Festiva, Ford’s bottom-of-the-line shitbox at the time, and drive up for it. The system has hired a bunch of new teachers this year, and they put us all on a school bus and give us a tour of town, they feed us shitty lunches, they take our picture for the local paper, and we have meetings. Five years later I will forget everything but the bus tour. I meet the other new teachers, but I don’t really connect with them. They are mostly female, which would normally be a point in their favor as far as I’m concerned, but they are … well, they are the kind of people who can have a conversation about which funny-named drinks they like. A long conversation.

  A few days after orientation we have a whole-faculty orientation. Every teacher from the Newcastle school system files into the auditorium at the middle school to hear speeches. The big highlight is the speech from Frank, the new superintendent. Frank is an old, thin, bald man who tries to affect a folksy manner that can’t quite cover his obvious desire to cut the heart out of anyone who crosses him. His speech makes it clear that he has no earthly idea what year it is.

  He opens with a joke about the newspaper. “I’m new in town. I almost fired my secretary because every morning she comes into the office waving the paper and says, ‘F.U.L.’ It took me three days to figure out she was talking about the Federated Union Leader!” Polite chuckles.

  “I’m just kidding, Ethel, as long as I’m here you’ll always have a job. As I’m sure many of you know, Ethel is fantastic.” Burst of applause.

  “And then there’s the assistant superintendent, Vito—those of you at Dockside Elementary remember your old principal …” Applause. “I call Vito the Godfather.”

  ’Cause he’s Italian! Get it?

  (Later I will find out that about half of the student body is Italian too. Does Frank know this? Does he care?) The speech goes on in this vein for another fifteen minutes or so as we hear of all the hard work that the Godfather has been doing, but seriously, the Godfather’s great, I couldn’t do this job without him, I have to say that or I’ll end up at the bottom of the river, ha ha.

  Then Frank gets to his big inspirational moment for the teachers. This is what he says: “No dungarees! Dress professionally, and that means no dungarees!”

  Well, I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m sure as hell fired up to teach after that stirring call to arms. Also, who the hell says “dungarees” anymore? My eighty-one-year-old grandmother says “blue jeans.” Dungarees. Honestly.

  Luckily, this will be the last I will see of Frank and his archaic ethnic and sartorial vocabulary until the end of the school year. Also luckily, I meet a woman who works at the middle school who also commutes from the Boston area, and she is looking for someone to carpool with. Great! I wasn’t planning to wear my dungarees to work anyway, and now I have a way to get there! Looks like I’m set.

  10

  Bridget and her husband live in Cambridge, where he works. I now live in Boston. In order to get to Newcastle High School by seven-thirty, I have to leave my house at quarter to six. I ride the subway, and it is a very different experience from when I worked at the computer company. When you ride the subway at seven-thirty or eight, you are riding mostly with office workers in suits. Before six it is all construction workers and custodians. Even though I am so tired I want to curl up on the nasty floor of the subway car, I also kind of like it. We’re the men who work hard for a living every day—not like those office-working wusses sauntering into work at eight o’clock! No sir! This is the hour when men who work hard ride the train! Men like me!

  I change trains, then emerge in Cambridge’s Central Square, where I hop into Bridget’s car and hold on tight as she drives like a bat out of hell and gets us to Newcastle in forty-five minutes.

  We have a personable enough relationship, though there are a few strains. One is that she listens exclusively to classic-rock radio. This is fine for the first week or two, but after that, hearing the same seventeen songs over and over again starts to drive me insane, so that I want to tear my hair out when I hear the opening chords of “Maggie May” for the tenth time this week. (We seem to get that one both going in and coming home.)

  Also, it’s just difficult for me to not have control, not just of the radio but also, and most important, of when I get home. Some days—actually most days—I am dog tired and can’t bring myself to do any work after school, and I have to wait for hours because Bridget has track practice or is involved in some marathon meeting, which they seem to have daily at the middle-school level.

  A couple of times I get calls from her at quarter of six in the morning saying she can’t make it to work that day. I should just call in sick myself, but although I was a total slacker in my corporate jobs, I am John Freaking Calvin when it comes to teaching, so on those days I call up my friend Mary, the Newcastle High band director, who lives a twenty-minute bus ride from the end of the subway line, and she gamely agrees to take me with her.

  This gets frustrating, but what can I say? It’s Bridget’s car, it’s her schedule, and it’s not like I have any other options—I’m not bringing anything to the table here except forty dollars a month in gas money.

  Still, we talk a lot about school and other things—she is much more conservative than I am despite living in Cambridge, so I try to steer away from topics like “It should be harder to get divorced,” and “I don’t really have a problem with gay people as long as they don’t flaunt it.”

  By the end of the year we are pretty sick of each other, mostly just because I cramp her style, she makes me wait forever, and we are not the kind of people who would ever become friends or have even one forty-five-minute conversation, let alone 180 of them, under different circumstances.

  A year later I will see her in the mall, and by this point my annoyance has disappeared. I’m not going to invite her over for dinner, but I really have no bad feelings toward her whatsoever.

  Apparently the feeling isn’t mutual. “Hey, I know you!” I say in that tone of pleasant surprise as I see her walking toward me. I stop for the exchange of pleasantries, but she just looks at me out of the corner of her eye, gives a deadpan �
��Oh. Hey,” and keeps walking.

  11

  It is pretty clear from the word go that Newcastle High is not a healthy place. There is, of course, the fact that it is technically under the stewardship of Mr. No Dungarees, who is about as popular with the staff as you might expect; on the first day of school I see a teacher dressed in jeans. “He can’t tell me not to wear jeans,” I overhear him saying. “That’s not in the goddamn contract.”

  The atmosphere here is poison. I can tell at my first department meeting. I sit quietly as Tim, the department chair, speaks, and Nancy, Stephanie, and Margaret all send him these hate waves. Dan says something and Tom, sending similar waves, visibly shifts in his seat. Only Olivia and Hope sit there looking just bored and not hateful.

  What the hell is going on here? I have no idea, and I don’t know who to ask. Stephanie takes me aside to welcome me to Newcastle High and throws some completely gratuitous shots at Tim into the conversation. Obviously I can’t come to Tim’s defense, because Stephanie, whatever her political status, seems formidable, and I don’t want to make an enemy. The fact that Tim hired me makes me clearly suspect anyway. I try something noncommittal like, “Oh, well, heh, I don’t really know anybody yet, I guess I’ll find out …” and run out of the room.

  One thing that I learned from the menial office jobs I did before teaching was to always be kind to the people on the bottom of the ladder. This strikes me as basic human decency, yet it seems to be beyond most people’s abilities. But I remember being the piss boy and feeling like I deserved the same amount of kindness and respect that everybody else got, so I always try to return the favor. I have to admit that I’m not exactly Saint Francis here—another thing I learned from my experience in corporate America is that the people on the bottom of the ladder, especially the secretaries, run things. So being nice to them is not only the right thing to do, it can also be very helpful when you need a favor or a rule or deadline bent. And it’s not a tough thing to do either—it mostly just involves talking to people like they’re human beings.