Losing My Faculties: A Teacher's Story Read online

  Anyway, I end up having a nice relationship with Janice, one of the custodians. Janice is a graduate of Newcastle High, about thirty years old, and loves to talk. I mean loves to talk. Every day after school I find her talking to Mary, the new band director and occasional ride giver, and the closest thing I have to a peer here, and I frequently join in because I am too fried to do any work after a long day of teaching, and even on the best of days, Newcastle Middle School gets out an hour after the high school, so I have to wait for Bridget anyway.

  Janice is very kind and helps Mary out immeasurably—she essentially becomes the number-one band-booster volunteer as a second job. (Well, at least I think it’s a second job. I very rarely see her actually cleaning anything.) And she also helps me out because she knows everybody and everything.

  “Why does my whole department hate each other?” I ask her one day after school.

  “How much time do you have?” she answers. I tell her I’d like an under-thirty-minute version, if she can deliver. She can. What she tells me is that Tim has just become department head this year. Before that, Stephanie was the department head for years and years. During the summer there was some kind of bloodless coup—Tim was appointed department head as a sort of compromise candidate between the Stephanie lovers and Stephanie haters, since he apparently was neither. Unfortunately, nobody told Stephanie until she showed up to check on a book order over the summer and found the locks changed on her office and all her stuff in the hall. Classy.

  She also tells me why Tom hates Dan. Dan currently lives with a woman many years his junior. She was one of Dan’s students and moved in with him only a few weeks after her graduation from Newcastle High. This was five years ago, so she’s twenty-three now and Dan is forty-three. Dan is not reputed to have had affairs with any other students, but Tom still can’t forgive him.

  Wow.

  Well, I guess that’s what I get for asking.

  12

  It’s my second day as an employee of Newcastle High School. I’m still driving my rental car, and it’s still only teachers in here—the kids will arrive tomorrow. I am in the book room, rooting through the stacks looking for stuff to teach. Tim promises to try to dig up the curriculum, but he will never deliver this, and anyway, it becomes obvious pretty quickly that the curriculum is fictional. Everybody pretty much does whatever the hell they want.

  This is both good and bad. My pals from ed school sometimes tell tales of having to turn in next week’s lesson plans to their principal every Friday, of ironclad curriculums filled with crap they hate doing, and I was terrified that I would be subject to the same scrutiny. It looks like I’ll be able to run my classes any way I want, which is great, except it means I have to build curriculum for three grade levels from scratch. What do we expect the kids to know at the end of the year? Nobody can tell me. The only thing I know for sure is that they have to read a Shakespeare play every year, even in sophomore year, which is their American-literature year.

  I have been given some big fat anthologies, but these always suck, and my problem is compounded by having level-three classes. The level-one and -two students have some relatively new-looking anthologies, but the level-three kids get the castoffs—the old editions that are all beaten up from years of use. Well, the school has a limited budget, so why spend lots of money on books for kids who won’t read them? Right?

  Anyway, I am there in the book room, which turns out to be a kind of treasure trove—all the books from back in the seventies when English teachers got to teach cool stuff they liked in “English electives” are still here and basically intact—the electives trend came late to Newcastle and left early. Olivia, another English teacher, is there picking out a selection of Dumbed Down Classics for her level-three kids. These are books with recognizable titles that have been modified to contain about a fifth-grade vocabulary and reading level: Poe for Dummies, and such things. These, I will discover, are all her classes “read.” They also sit silently and do a lot of worksheets and take a few tests. Olivia is a prime proponent of the “you don’t bug me, I won’t bug you” school of teaching.

  But I don’t know this yet. All I know is that she turns to me in the book room and says, “Oh, this particular Dumbed Down Classic works really well with the eleventh-graders.”

  “Oh, well,” I say, “I was actually looking at this book of short stories. I think I’ll try that first.”

  Olivia looks at me like I’m dumb as dogshit. “These are level-three kids,” she says.

  “Yeah. Well, I think I’m going to try this.”

  “Suit yourself,” she says, looking at me the way you’d look at someone who announced he was going to ride a tricycle down the expressway. When she leaves, I just plop down on the little rolling stool and put my head in my hands. I remember all of the great people I was in ed school with—people who cared, people who believed in kids, people I liked talking to. I was happy, excited, and proud to start being a teacher and looked forward to working with the same kind of people I went to school with. Instead I get this lady. Shit. What am I doing here? I have that feeling I haven’t had since my first day of camp the summer after fifth grade—oh, shit, I’m stuck here, I want to go home, I want my mommy.

  My opinion of Olivia, and by extension Newcastle High, is not helped by the end of each school day. After my last-period class with the juniors ends, I stand by the windows and look at the parking lot. It is the rare day when Olivia and Hope don’t beat all the students out of the parking lot at two o’clock. I really don’t know how they do it—they must actually stand by the door waiting for the bell to ring, or else they’ve been doing it for so many years that they just have an instinctive sense of when the bell will ring and they can start walking at the perfect pace to be crossing the threshold of the school at the exact second when it starts. Why the hell, I think, is this lump just taking up space here? She is obviously just going through the motions, she obviously doesn’t care about kids, why doesn’t she pack it in?

  Then one day Janice tells me the story of the Suicide. Last year at Newcastle High, a fourteen-year-old ninth-grader blew his head off in the lunchroom. Many of my sophomores watched it happen. Janice tells me how Tom stood there ineffectually passing out tissues all afternoon, how for a whole week afterward all the kids just drifted in and out, mostly talking to crisis counselors and rarely going to class, how the kid’s friends couldn’t decide between grief and anger, how they walked around saying, “Why did he want me to see that?” and how, the minute it happened, the minute the shot went off, while the rest of the lunchroom was paralyzed or screaming, Olivia, whose husband had died only a few months earlier, had run to the table and cradled the dying boy in her arms, saying softly, “It’s okay, honey, it’s okay, it’s going to be okay,” and stroking his bloody hair until he died.

  13

  So maybe Olivia doesn’t fit too neatly into the box I made for her in my mind. Neither does Bob, a science teacher, recently divorced, who eats lunch every day surrounded by a gaggle of teenaged girls to whom he talks about his love life. He’s not hitting on them or anything, so it’s not like it’s illegal or even immoral—it’s just creepy and kind of sad. I hear him in the hall one day calling out to a fifteen-year-old female student: “Will you marry me when I grow up?” Then one day he brings his son to school. His son has autism, and this guy is just so affectionate and patient, and the very idea of having any kid at all, much less an autistic one, fills me with terror at age twenty-four, and I am really impressed with Bob. But I still think it’s creepy that he talks to teenaged girls about his love life.

  Whatever my opinions about my colleagues, I am able to put all those concerns on the back burner once classes actually begin. Having three level-three classes is pretty standard practice for new teachers—everybody foists all the classes they don’t want onto the new kid. One of my level-three classes is a group of sophomores I see first period. This class ends up going pretty well, overall. They are a good-natured group of kids
, and class starts at seven-thirty when they’re still half asleep. Actually, one girl is frequently more than half asleep. She has a newborn son and comes to school two or maybe three days a week, says something like, “My son is sick … he was up all night …” and promptly falls asleep on the desk. I don’t have the heart to wake her up. I’m kind of in awe of her—a seventeen-year-old single parent. After a while she just stops coming at all.

  My second level-three class is fifth period, right before lunch. It’s a group of ninth-graders, fourteen boys and two girls. The first day, one of the students looks around at all the kids in the class and says, “So. I guess this is the retard class, huh?”

  One of the kids in this class, Rick, is actually a sixteen-year-old sophomore. He failed ninth-grade English, so he takes that with me and tenth-grade English with somebody else. He seems to have some legal difficulties—he comes in from time to time after having been absent with a note saying he has had a court date. One day he comes in, practically hugs me, and says, “I got my chins dropped!” I am too new to teaching to know he’s talking about a “Child in Need of Services” order.

  Rick is also really, really smart. He is in level-three English, though, because of his behavior and legal troubles. One day he does something unacceptable—I think punching a classmate or something—and I kick him out of class. He literally throws a desk—mindful of the basketball story, I don’t want to say he throws it at me, because he just does it out of frustration and I don’t think he means it as an attack on me, but I do have to do a quick sidestep to avoid being hit.

  Rick’s placement, I will find, is pretty typical of level-three classes; there are always kids in them because they have behavior problems, and putting them in a class where the pace is too slow for them doesn’t usually help their behavior problems, and their behavior doesn’t help the kids who are in these classes because they have a tough time learning.

  Thirteen of my sixteen students have IEP’s, or “individualized education plans,” which means special education. Students on IEP’s are required to be mainstreamed—that is to say, they must be integrated into the regular education program and not segregated in “pullout” special-education classes. So my students have all been “mainstreamed” into the same English class, effectively making me a special-ed teacher.

  I have no special-ed training.

  So the deck is stacked against me, but I also do my share of fucking up. I have the students write for a few minutes at the beginning of the class, and I tell them it is their time to write whatever they want. What I mean is that I’m not setting a topic, so they can write what’s on their mind. So a kid decides to test it on day three or something, and says something like, “I feel like shit.” I object, and he says, “But you said we could say anything we want.”

  And here is where thinking too much kind of screws me up. I think, well, this exercise is about having them overcome their fear of writing, about empowering them to feel that writing is a form of communication that is real for them, and how can I do that if I stifle their authentic voices? How can I gain their respect if I go back on my word? I am tortured by this for the whole year, and in the meantime, they are swearing when they read their freewrites, and I am doing nothing about it. I’m sure this doesn’t make it any easier for me when I try to get some order in the class, and I am so befuddled by this “dilemma” that the solution—write anything you want, but you can only say things that are appropriate for class—doesn’t present itself, and indeed the very idea that I have the authority to insist on appropriate language and even to define what appropriate language is doesn’t occur to me, because I am all about student empowerment, man, because these kids have been beaten down by the educational establishment (true enough) and they need me to do things a new way and help them to own their education. I make the terrible mistake of reading Jonathan Kozol’s The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home, which is all about how the people who perpetrated the My Lai massacre were mostly trained in public schools, and how we shouldn’t be training kids to be unthinking war criminals (I’m paraphrasing), which is okay, and which I guess I agree with, I mean, I’m as anti-war-crime as the next guy, but when you are trying to teach something to fifteen kids who think they’re stupid, you really do need to be somewhat in charge or all hell breaks loose.

  But philosophically, I want to empower them, I want them to be free citizens rather than obedient automatons, and so I am just terribly uncomfortable with the reality of my authority. So basically my authority has no reality in this class.

  I demonstrate this vividly to the class in the first week, when I make the mistake of mentioning to the vice principal, who’s new on the job, that I’m kind of struggling, that a couple of the kids keep trying to provoke Rick to make him go off for their amusement. “I’ll give you some theater,” he says, and the next day he comes up and literally screams in these kids’ faces—his voice echoes down the entire school, I mean people who teach on other floors ask me what happened later on because they heard the commotion, and one of the kids, who was just being goofy, almost starts to cry, and the other kid just looks really, really hard.

  Tom comes up to me the next day and says, “Jesus, what the hell was Bruce doing? That was embarrassing.” Yep, and ineffective too. Strangely enough, yelling in a kid’s face and publicly humiliating him doesn’t always turn him into a model citizen. And it’s all very fine for Bruce to come in and scream at kids, but I’m the one who has to spend forty-five minutes with them every day, and now they know I called this shit storm down on them, and so I look weak and don’t even have the advantage of appearing to be on their side. So nothing changes.

  I try all kinds of different seating arrangements, assignments, and structures, and nothing really works. Until the end of the year, this will be the class I will dread, the class that makes me cry at the end of the day, the class that makes me feel like the biggest failure. It is not at all unusual for me to lose half of my class time to disruptions. People swear, people punch each other, people don’t listen. I have to send two kids out for sexually harassing the one remaining girl in the class—they can’t stop talking about her “beaver.” I write “sexually harassing classmate” on the little slip they take to Bruce, and later Bruce confronts me and says how if I use the words “sexual harassment,” there is this whole legal procedure that he is obligated to go through, and I say, Okay, well, this is a pretty clear-cut case of sexual harassment, so go to town with your procedure, and whatever the big, scary legal process is, it never seems to result in any consequences accruing to the offenders apart from the standard two detentions they get for getting kicked out of class. By this point in October, they have already gotten enough detentions from all their classes to take them through Christmas.

  By the springtime, they will be untouchable—they are already assigned detention through the end of the school year. At this point, though, they will have started frequently coming to class high, and though I will be ashamed of this later, I don’t really do or say anything about it. They are heavy-lidded and unusually cooperative, and unlike when they are not high, they are not stopping anybody else from learning. And it is the worst-kept secret at Newcastle High, where the school grounds extend to the woods, that kids get high out there. My two sexual harassers are a pretty small percentage of the total number of stoned kids.

  Still, these kids are fourteen. And they are getting high in school. And I look the other way and do nothing to try to help them because it’s much easier for me. So much for my heroic-teacher movie.

  One day it’s almost the end of fifth period, and we are sitting in a circle, and at exactly the same moment two things happen. First, Dennis, a short, ten-year-old-looking kid prone to making up stories about his ninja training, shouts out to his classmates, “Hey, is anybody else here in the KKK?” His classmates, all white and no beacons of racial tolerance themselves, react with immediate and sort of surprising anger.

  “KKK?”

  “Shut up!”<
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  “What the hell?”

  “Let’s beat him up!”

  “Yeah!”

  And, on the opposite side of the circle, Henry, a kid who dresses in all black and wears his hair in a black-dyed Mohawk, pulls out a box cutter and slices down the length of his arm. His arm begins to bleed, and Henry makes a great show of licking the blood off. His classmates respond with predictable shock and disgust.

  “What the hell is he doing?”

  “Oh, that’s sick!”

  “Let’s beat him up!”

  “Yeah!”

  At that moment the bell rings, and everybody runs out of the room for lunch. I go straight to the vice principal and tell him about the box cutter, and he goes into the lunchroom, where Henry is calmly eating with his friends as if nothing has happened. The vice principal demands the box cutter and hauls Henry up to the school psychologist’s office.

  This is before the days of “zero tolerance.” If Henry tries this stunt again after 1995, he will be summarily expelled from school rather than taken for counseling.

  So Henry now has mandatory counseling, and he is furious. He glares at me through every class; he is a black cloud sitting in the corner, sending off waves of hatred. This, I will discover, is a pretty typical pattern for the troubled teen: “Here is my cry for help!” quickly followed by “How dare you heed my cry for help! I hate you!”