Losing My Faculties: A Teacher's Story Read online

  I know that this is the job for me because I keep forgetting to get paid. This happens all the time. I simply forget to go to the office to pick up my check. I have no idea when payday is. This particular feeling will evaporate once I have a child and a mortgage, but right now I’m still sort of pleasantly surprised whenever I get a paycheck. Oh, you mean I get paid for this too? Now, part of this is the training I received paying thousands of dollars to teach as a student teacher, but it’s also that I can’t stop thinking of work as something you suffer through until you can do what you want, and of a paycheck as the thing that justifies your wasting so much of your miserable life under fluorescent tubes instead of doing what you want all day. But now I am doing what I want all day. And they pay me for it!

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  On April 15 I get a pink slip. It regrets to inform me that I will not be hired back, blah blah blah. I don’t panic because every teacher in the building with less than three years’ experience gets one of these, and they all look the same, and everybody—principal, vice principal, department head—tells us not to worry about it, it’s just a formality.

  The contract requires teachers to be notified by April 15 whether they are being hired back next year, but the town never has its budget passed by that time, so because the school system has no idea what their money will look like, they fire all the first-, second-, and third-year teachers just to give them some wiggle room in their budget.

  “Don’t worry about it,” they say, “everybody gets hired back.”

  What they don’t know, or aren’t telling, or don’t believe will have any effect, is that the newly elected mayor of Newcastle has just eviscerated the school budget. Of course, he’s done this in a really sneaky way—not by taking money out but by adding line items. So while, for example, snow removal (no small expense in Massachusetts, especially this year when we do not have a full week of school between February vacation and April vacation due to weekly snowstorms) has always been done by the town snowplows and has been considered a town expense, the mayor is now billing the schools for the use of the town snowplows, effectively cutting thousands of dollars from the school budget. He’s shifted a number of items over from the town general fund this way, thus squeezing the school budget considerably. Sneaky bastard. I don’t live in Newcastle, but I’ll bet “screwing the schools” was not his campaign slogan.

  Well, a few days before school ends, one of the vice principals tells me not to worry, he’s pretty sure that I’ll be getting hired back. But, he adds, he is sort of out of the loop right now because he’s resigned his position as vice principal to return to teaching science. I don’t know if this is a good decision or not, but I do know that it means somebody in the science department is getting screwed. The department has two new teachers this year, and one of them is getting fired because this guy decided he didn’t like his promotion.

  On the last day of school, the other vice principal goes around the final faculty meeting handing out the “Just kidding! Actually you are getting rehired!” letters, and smiling and joking with the recipients. I watch as he hands them all out, and I am waiting for him to come over, and by the time he gets to me, his hands are empty. “I’m sorry, Brendan,” he says, and keeps walking.

  What?

  Wait a minute.

  What?!

  Later I will find out what went on behind the scenes. The word came down from Mr. No Dungarees that there were going to be some budget cuts, and could department heads please present some enrollment figures justifying all their positions. Well, apparently the vocational department, which enrolled all of about twenty kids, cooked its numbers pretty severely so as to have it appear that its moribund program was actually growing next year—nobody knows exactly where these kids were coming from, they would have had to raise the dead to achieve these numbers, but there you go. Apparently, as a new department head, Tim did not know how to play the game at this level or something, but anyway, the bottom line is that my position was new this year, I hadn’t replaced anybody but had been added due to growing enrollment, and somehow all the masses of undead voke students were not going to take English, but anyway, I got canned.

  There were some other budget cuts in the school that Pete, the principal, didn’t agree with, and he and Frank went back and forth until Pete finally wrote a letter of resignation and said I can’t continue to work for you if you don’t listen to what I say about what’s best for the school, and Frank, slavering, grabbed the letter out of Pete’s hand and said, “Yoink! Thank you very much!”

  At the end of the day I am frantically asking everybody for recommendations in between kicking myself: “Dumbass! Why’d you believe them? Dumbass! Why didn’t you start applying for other jobs? Dumbass! Don’t you know these motherfuckers are always lying to you?”

  Pete says he’ll be happy to write me one (and who better—he witnessed probably my greatest class ever), and then he asks me what I’m doing in the summer, and I tell him I’m planning on job hunting and hanging out at home, and he gets this kind of faraway look in his eyes and says, “Yeah, the city is great, especially in the summer. You get your girl, and a picnic, and a ninety-nine-cent bottle of Spanish red and head down to the river … you feel like a king.”

  But I feel pretty much like a chump today. Mary takes me out to lunch at this gargantuan Chinese restaurant that is several times larger than the whole of Newcastle High School, with louder décor and, ultimately, I decide, more class, and this makes me feel a little better. But only a little. It’s June 24, and I have no job.

  Part Three

  Northton

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  After getting laid off, I go into a frenzy of sending out résumés and cover letters and recommendations, except that Tim, the department head at Newcastle, seems to be too feeble to both write and send me a recommendation. I call him periodically, and he blathers at me about how he can’t get it typed, he’s trying to get his wife to type it. This goes on for weeks. I end up calling Tom practically crying in frustration. Every school on earth asks for three letters of recommendation, and I have only two and it certainly looks funny that my department head won’t write me one. Tom promises to call Tim and yell at him for me.

  I never get the recommendation.

  What I do get through the good offices of Tim is a job. So I guess I can’t really complain about the recommendation too much. His wife, Terri, teaches at Northton High, so she got my résumé sort of bumped to the top of the pile, and I go in for an interview and knock them dead.

  Once again I get the job one week before school begins. Once again the school has no real curriculum in place, so I will have the wonderful freedom to do whatever I want along with the horror of having no assistance in creating a curriculum from scratch. Well, what the hell, I’ve done it once already, I can probably do it again. This also pays better than Newcastle—enough that I can actually afford a tiny car in which to commute and not listen to classic-rock radio. Of course, I’m still not quite living my dream of being a Great Urban Educator. In fact, Northton High is actually a much less urban school than Newcastle High. Northton is not a wealthy town, but it is an all-white, all-Catholic suburb, and while it has none of Newcastle’s mammoth summer homes for the wealthy, it also has none of Newcastle’s unemployed heroin addicts. So it’s a much more homogenous, typically suburban place than the weird mix that was Newcastle and is therefore farther from my urban education dream. On the other hand, Northton is twenty miles closer to my home, so at least I’m moving closer to the city geographically, if not demographically.

  I am replacing some guy named Dan Rather, no relation, ha ha, who was legendary for doing almost no teaching at all. One guy in the department tells this story of how he walked through Dan’s room at the beginning of class to get a book or something and heard him droning out the attendance, and when he went back into the room fifteen minutes later, he was still droning out the attendance.

  I have one senior class, and though I am undoubtedly the kind of guy th
ey would beat senseless for fun if I were their age, the boys in the class decide that I’m cool. One of them even writes a poem at the end of the year called “The Halpin Blues,” which is this awesome paean to me that features the inspired couplet “He’s got a badass goatee/Hell no, he ain’t no wannabe!” How many jobs offer you a chance to get something like that?

  Anyway, I am required to stand in the hallway before class and impose order with my fearsome five-foot-four, 140-pound frame. What actually ends up happening is I hear a lot of stuff teachers are never meant to hear because so many of the kids don’t have males as short as me programmed into their teacher radar yet. Frequently Kevin, future author of “The Halpin Blues,” and Kent stand in the hallway with me.

  One day a girl who dresses in all black and has some kind of attention-grabbing dye job walks by and Kent looks over at Kevin and says something along the lines of “What the hell’s wrong with that freak chick?”

  It’s the kind of horrible shit that this girl, who is actually a really nice, sensitive kid, gets all the time, and I let Kent have it. “Hey. Don’t stand next to me if you’re going to be cruel to people. I don’t want any part of that—it’s disgusting to me.” He looks at me with a complete lack of understanding—I thought you were cool, why are you sticking up for the freak chick? After that he stops standing next to me in the hallway.

  A few days later Northton High gets its first Hispanic student. He is dressed in what at the time is typical urban fashion—cartoonishly baggy pants and some kind of sports jersey. He has the misfortune of walking down the hall to his first class in front of Kent. Using his unerring instinct to punish the different, Kent calls out, “Hey, Snoop Dogg! Hey! What up, Snoop Dogg? Hey!” and like that. The Hispanic kid whips around and throws a punch. It’s the only one he will land. Kent is all over him and beats him bloody, breaking a pane of glass next to the fire door with the kid’s head. Later I have to step over the blood to get to class.

  The Hispanic kid, it turns out, is not from Northton, he’s on some kind of school-choice deal, and we, it turns out, don’t want his kind around here, these criminals come in here and get in a fight the first day, no sir, he can go right back to where he came from and go to school with his own kind, thank you very much.

  Kent is back in school in two days.

  He wins the battle, but this war will not go well for his side—in five years about a third of the all-white student body will be dressing like the kid Kent beat up, coming to class with DMX CD’s in their Walkmen and Fubu shirts on their back. Future Kents will call the boys “wiggers” and the girls “hoochies,” but it won’t have any teeth. There are just too many of them.

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  So I really like my seniors, mostly. I mean, one of them does write a poem in my honor, but, like last year’s juniors at Newcastle, they just don’t really have it in them to do any work. Well, no—two girls do everything I ask them to do and do it well, but the rest of the class just barely scrapes by, and it’s very difficult to run a class when nobody is doing the work. Frankenstein is the most spectacular failure I have with them—it sounds interesting and everybody’s excited to start it, and then we all find out how much it sucks. It doesn’t work as a horror story, the plot mechanics are embarrassingly bad, and the heavy-handed philosophical allegory just doesn’t interest any of us very much. After this they are kind of wary of anything I give them, and we limp through to the end of the year.

  I also have three ninth-grade classes, which range from very good to okay depending on their size. The class of seventeen goes very well. The class of twenty-seven is okay, respectable, but there is frequently just too much chaos in there. I actually see the same phenomenon when the teachers sit in faculty meetings: when one person is talking to a large group, no individual in the group feels a responsibility to hold up the other end of the conversation. So it somehow doesn’t feel rude to turn and talk to somebody while the person up front is talking. I do it myself all the time. Which is fine, but it just means that in a class of twenty-seven, if you have ten people doing that, there’s too much chaos for anything to get done.

  Once I do something that could certainly get me fired—a stupid stunt that I won’t repeat. The class is talking and talking, they won’t listen, I’m standing there like an idiot trying to get their attention, and nothing is working. Finally I pick up one of those gigantic English anthologies and fling it down on the linoleum. As predicted, it hits the floor with a very loud and satisfying crack that certainly gets the attention of the class. As not predicted, it hits the floor with a great deal of force at kind of an angle and goes sliding across the floor and hits Christine in the foot.

  Sure, it’s an accident, and no, it doesn’t hurt her at all, but it’s totally indefensible, and, should Christine choose to make an issue of it, it could certainly end my teaching career. There is really nothing I could possibly say to justify this. So the intended spectacle of me creating a loud noise to get the attention of the class becomes a spectacle of me begging a fourteen-year-old girl for forgiveness. She seems kind of embarrassed by my contrition and insists that it’s no big deal.

  I don’t get fired for this.

  This same class has one of the two students in nine years that I just won’t be able to reach any accommodation with. Now, it’s become kind of a point of pride with me that I can find something to like in even the most difficult kids. I am somewhat puzzled by this, because while an adult just has to say one mean or offensive thing for me to write him off forever as an asshole, I can always see the good in a kid, even one who says cruel and offensive things on a daily basis.

  Except for Jimmy. Basically the kid just lives to get on everybody’s nerves. To be fair, he certainly doesn’t focus on me—he will happily annoy the shit out of one of his classmates too. I have his sister Jamie in another class, and she says to me one day, “I just can’t stand him. Everybody says, ‘Oh, yeah, when you guys get older, you’re gonna love each other,’ but it’s not true. I hate him!” I can see why. He just pushes buttons until the pushee loses it. And with most kids like this, you can, at some point, have a normal conversation, particularly if it’s one-on-one with no audience. So I try a few one-on-ones with no audience with Jimmy, but even with nobody else there to impress, he smirks at me, he mocks me to my face, he says, “Oh, yeah, sure, Mr. Halpin, whatever you say, Mr. Halpin,” in a smarmy, sarcastic way.

  So I lose it with him on a semiregular basis. I always count it as a win for him if he gets me to kick him out of class or if I yell at him, and he usually wins. The only time he doesn’t is once when I’m wearing a tie with some kind of floral pattern on it. “Oh, Mr. Halpin,” he says in this stereotypical lisping gay voice, “I just love the flowers on your tie. Don’t you just love flowers?”

  I am annoyed, not because I give a shit if this kid thinks I’m gay, but because, you know, I’m trying to talk about To Kill a Freaking Mockingbird here, and we have only forty minutes, and I’d rather not spend it talking about whether my tie is butch enough for him. “Jimmy,” I say, “are you trying to imply that I’m homosexual?”

  The class falls dead silent in an instant, that loaded, anticipatory, something-we’ll-discuss-at-every-reunion-is-about-to-happen kind of silence, and Jimmy looks stunned. “Um … well …” He is uncharacteristically speechless.

  “Are you trying to say that I’m homosexual?” I repeat. Jimmy still can’t bring himself to speak. If I were, his peer, he’d doubtless say yes so we could fight about it, but he doesn’t have a script for this, so he continues to sputter. I continue calmly, “Because I’m not. Now, when Scout and Jem find this stuff in the tree …” Everybody is stunned by my refusal to get mad about this. It doesn’t make any cultural sense. This is a marked contrast to one of my colleagues, who still happily tells the story of how some kid said, “You’re a faggot!” on his way out of class one day and he chased the kid into the playing fields, tackled him, and brought him back to the principal’s office, which, if true, should t
otally put my mind at ease about clipping Christine’s foot with a textbook.

  My ninth-grade classes end with what begins as a spectacular failure in Romeo and Juliet. I drag them through it line by line as we read it in class, I explain that yes, you’re supposed to giggle when he says, “My naked weapon is out,” I explain every single sex joke in the play, of which there are many, and yet it is dead, it is boring, it sucks.

  So at the end of the unit, I split them into groups and have them “translate” a scene and perform it. The results are spectacular. One group in particular does a great job of turning Romeo and Juliet into something like Beavis and Juliet. So, “Turn, villain, and draw!” becomes, “Shut up, butt-munch! Get your sword out!” I take them out into the courtyard to perform on the first day, and it goes really well, and the kids are tremendously excited about the chance to go into the forbidden courtyard (Northton High’s very nice courtyard will be closed to students for as long as I work here). The next day I get the word that the math teachers were complaining about the noise in the courtyard, so the rest of the performances take place indoors. It’s significantly less fun, but this assignment is still a big win for me, and it’s a nice way to end the year. Years later kids will still talk to me about it, and I am amazed—I mean, yeah, I thought it was fun, but nothing extraordinary, yet for many of these kids, it’s the single wackiest thing they have ever done in an English class. Which is kind of sad.

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