Losing My Faculties: A Teacher's Story Read online

  I also have a level-one sophomore class here in my first year. These are the kids who are expected by the school to excel and then attend prestigious private colleges, whereas the level-two kids are expected to go to less prestigious state colleges, and the level-three kids—well, if they can just graduate, the school will feel that it’s done its job. Which is an indicator that the Northton community is a little more upscale than Newcastle.

  Level-one classes are typically the province of the veteran teachers who have paid their dues teaching the low-level kids when they were younger, so it’s kind of unusual for me to get a level-one class, and it’s almost unheard-of, a bizarre quirk of this year’s schedule, that this section has only ten students. I hope I don’t screw it up.

  Of course I do screw it up. I do this in two ways. First, I make the class way too easy. I think they have three papers per quarter or something. They write each one the night before in about half an hour. I just don’t challenge them at all.

  Second, I just let it get too chummy—there are so few of them, and they are easy kids to like—they are smart, they are funny, they like to write, and they talk in class. But it gets to the point where I have a hard time getting them to do anything because I’ve made them so comfortable in class that they don’t feel like they have to really do the work. I give them a big lecture one day about how I’m not their friend. They look hurt and confused.

  Strangely enough, we manage to overcome that crisis, and throughout most of the year the class goes smoothly. On parents’ night I’m kind of embarrassed; all their parents come and tell me how grateful they are that their kid has my class, that they were really worried that their kid didn’t do anything last year, all they did was watch movies.

  Their teacher last year was a twenty-five-year veteran. Of course I am not above loving being told that I’m a better teacher than him, but it’s also kind of embarrassing. I really shouldn’t be better than him—he’s got twenty-four years on me. And, to tell the truth, I’m not really that good yet. I mean, my heart’s in the right place, and I work hard, and I believe that they should read and write in English class (most of the English faculty here share my point of view, but not all), but I am not half the teacher I am going to be and I am certainly not giving these kids enough work to prepare them for high-level college work. I make mistakes all the time.

  One time I make a mistake by underreacting when a student writes a story about her committing suicide. I read it at home and fret all night, hoping she’ll be alive the next morning when I get to work. She is, and I say to her, “Listen, Jeanie, I was really concerned by your story. Do you, um, you know, have somebody to talk to about this stuff?”

  “Yes,” she says curtly, and walks away. She later writes me a note about how terribly I overreacted, about how Stephen King writes lots of gory stories and nobody ever says that he has a problem (though given what he will later reveal about his alcohol and drug problems, all those stories of writers losing it maybe should have given us a clue that he did in fact have a problem, and I think The Shining is especially chilling when viewed in this light). I write her back that Stephen King doesn’t write stories in which he is a character who kills himself, and that I was concerned because I care about her, blah blah blah, but I am intimidated by her anger and foolishly let it go at this, figuring, okay, somebody is on the case here. She lives to and beyond graduation, so my failure to follow up with parents, with the school psychologist, with anybody does not have fatal consequences. But the nice relationship we had been building—she is a good writer, I praise her good writing—evaporates, and she will barely speak to me for the next three years. Like Henry who cut himself, she can’t forgive me for heeding her cry for help, though I never so much as mentioned it to another adult.

  Despite alienating Jeanie and telling the kids I’m not their friend, I continue to have success in this class—I think it would be difficult not to with such a small group of motivated kids. So they write wonderful stuff, they say good things in discussions, and I don’t succeed at all in creating any of the distance I was trying for in the “We’re not friends” speech. This is okay, I guess, because one day I fart really loudly at a dead silent moment in class, and they don’t mock me about it forever, at least not to my face, so I guess the excess chumminess does work in my favor at least this once.

  Sometime after my attempted nonchummy crackdown, two of the students make a little cartoon poster of “Halpin’s Funky Rules.” It has a little cartoon of me saying things like, “Respect each other and listen while people talk.” (Not really sure what’s funky about that, but there you go.) I love it and post it in the room and refer to it frequently to remind them when one of the funky rules is being broken.

  Then somebody draws a dick on the cartoon of me and I have to take it down.

  In October, last year’s twenty-five-year veteran who, according to my students and their parents, did nothing all year, is promoted to vice principal.

  20

  I will have five different homerooms in my five years at Northton, thus guaranteeing that I will be unable to build any kind of relationship with any of the kids in my homeroom. It would take no effort at all for them to give me the same kids in homeroom every year. It must actually be more work to replace my name on their schedule with someone else’s. Well, administrators work in strange ways.

  One kid in my first-year homeroom, Chester, always refers to his math teacher, scornfully, as “Captain Jack.”

  I finally make the mistake of asking why he calls this guy, whose name is Eric, Captain Jack.

  “’Cause he loves his Jack Daniel’s! You know he’s got a big old bottle in his closet that he hits between classes!”

  I am appalled and I tell Chester that he has to stop slandering his math teacher with this name, that I don’t like to hear him referring to him this way, that he has no kind of good information about this guy’s drinking habits, that this is just kids starting malicious rumors.

  He refuses to stop, or, more accurately, he seems unable to stop. We eventually reach a compromise whereby he refers to his math teacher as “the Captain.”

  I let it go, but I marvel at kids’ ability to be malicious.

  Then, at the end of the year, the Captain approaches me at about 10 A.M. because he is collecting money for the faculty end-of-the-year get-together, and he reeks of booze. The smell is pouring off of him like it does from the guys passed out on park benches, but he is not passed out on a park bench, he is gainfully employed as a high school math teacher.

  Of course my first impulse is to go find Chester and apologize for doubting him. I don’t, but I file this information away: kids always know.

  21

  Somehow I get conned into being the newspaper advisor. Like getting all the level-three classes, this is another initiation rite for new teachers—having all the crappy activities nobody else wants passed on to you. In this case, the newspaper is a hot potato because kids always want to write what they think and administrators always want to confiscate and/or burn such material.

  I know absolutely nothing about putting a newspaper together, but they tell me that the kids know what to do, that I don’t have to really do anything, and by the way, it’s a twelve-hundred-dollar stipend. I am making more here than I did at Newcastle, but not so much that I can turn my nose up at twelve hundred bucks.

  So I call an initial meeting, and probably fifty kids show up. By the time our second issue comes out, it’s down to three. Two seniors run the thing, and they are ambitious, involved-in-everything-’cause-it-looks-good-on-my-college-application kind of kids, which is good because they are competent but bad because their energy is split fifty ways and they often have to neglect the newspaper in favor of one of their three sports teams or five other clubs.

  One problem I can see immediately is that this paper is still laid out by hand. I seek out the district’s computer guru, and, as such people always are, he is gruff and annoyed by mortals who don’t understand his
beloved technology or the terrible price he pays for loving it. He blows off my question about desktop publishing, and though the software exists in the building, he won’t teach the kids how to use it or even take the ten minutes it would take to get us access to it so we can figure it out ourselves.

  So this is my first big failing as a newspaper advisor. I give up at the first rejection. Later another new English teacher will come in and do the newspaper, and he will get computers with laser printers and desktop-publishing software installed in his room, which is pretty close to a loaves-and-fishes kind of miracle in a public school.

  The kids put the paper together at a desultory pace. Around November we still have no product to show for my twelve-hundred-dollar stipend, and the Northton Times actually sends a reporter to interview me about what’s taking so goddamned long to get the paper out. I have refused to take over or to really kick anybody’s ass on this issue, figuring that my job is to advise a student activity, not actually perform the student activity. Apparently that was not the case. I’m glad I don’t live in Northton, because I guess it would be embarrassing to make the paper for being a feeb, but I never so much as see the issue.

  Eventually I get a call from a graduate of the school. She is a former editor who contracted a serious illness that took away her ability to walk, and she wants to help the kids put the paper together. Welcoming the help, I meet with her. She is a little bizarre, but she’s in a wheelchair and she wants to help, and she does know her stuff.

  Well, if I have been excessively hands-off, she is excessively hands-on. She comes to layout meetings and barks at the kids about how they are doing it all wrong, then attacks the page herself while the kids shoot me these looks like, “Who the hell is this and what the hell is wrong with her?”

  Well, it quickly becomes clear that she wants this paper to be her project, and while I would probably welcome this because God knows the kids aren’t really doing it, and I have to get something out to justify my stipend, the kids hate her. She just has no idea how to talk to them. Her tone ranges from gentle condescension to overt annoyance and abuse. Admittedly, this is also true of many teachers here at Northton High, but the kids have to put up with them, and they don’t have to put up with her.

  Finally the two coeditors come to me and beg me to fire her. I’m reluctant to do it because I am a coward, and because she is kind of pathetic, and I know that sounds awful but it’s not because she’s in a wheelchair but because she is thirty years old and seems to want nothing more than to put out a high school newspaper. Eventually they say that they’ll quit the paper if I don’t tell this woman to buzz off, and if these two quit, well, that’s two thirds of the staff, and any illusions anybody has about this being a student product will be gone, and I’ll probably make the front page of the Northton Times and give back the stipend, which I’ve already spent on plane tickets for my honeymoon.

  So I make the call with my two editors standing there. I am way too cowardly to tell this woman that I don’t like the way she treats the staff, so I just tell her that we have reached a decision that we really need to keep this thing in-house with only current students and faculty involved.

  There is a terrible silence. I feel awful—clearly this was something this woman wanted to do to get back on her feet, figuratively speaking, following her illness, maybe test the waters for teaching or journalism or something, give something back to her alma mater, and I have taken it away from her. I feel like I’ve kicked a cripple, and I guess I kind of have.

  She quickly assuages my guilt by getting abusive. She tells me that I don’t know what I’m doing, that my staff doesn’t know what they’re doing. I don’t argue. I know that taking the abuse is my part of the bargain.

  She ends with “Your paper is going to be a piece of shit!”

  Her vulgarity is completely unexpected because she’s always been super prim around me and the kids, and it has the weird side effect of turning me into Cary Grant.

  “Quite possibly true,” I answer. “Good-bye.”

  Cassie and Jim, my staff, smile and give me the thumbs-up. We get one more issue out that year. As predicted, it is a piece of shit.

  22

  Because of where my classroom is in my first year, I don’t get much contact with my colleagues. On one side of me is a hallway, and on the other is a rather grumpy old history teacher whose big welcome-to-the-neighborhood gesture to me is to open the connecting door and yell at my class when a kid from my room is passing notes under the door to a kid in his room. Across the hall are only science teachers. Everybody around me is at least twenty years older than I am. This makes for a kind of strange dynamic and probably explains why I let my sophomore class get too chummy—they are only eight years younger than I am and therefore are the closest thing I have to peers in this place.

  Well, not quite. There is Lilly, a math teacher who is hired at the same time I am and who appears to be my age, yet for some reason we don’t quite hit it off.

  I go into the teachers’ room once or twice to look over the local paper, but I quickly find that it’s a horrible place where people do nothing but complain or talk about golf. Or sometimes complain about golf. They do get the paper delivered, so I go in to check the headlines once in a while, but I pretty much stop after the news breaks that a former Northton High student has been arrested for his role in a drive-by shooting in a neighboring town. The former student is black, one of the few black students this school has ever had, and some longtime teacher had gotten fired for saying to this kid, “I just can’t stand some niggers.” One history teacher, a guy who is sartorially stuck in the eighties—he wears a polo shirt under an oxford every single day—says, “Can you believe we had to lose a guy like Jim over this kid?”

  A science teacher adds, “Well, with his coloration, at least he’ll look good in prison orange.” These are the worst two comments I hear, but the tone of everybody’s conversation is pretty much the same: Jim was right, and some niggers just can’t be stood.

  Of course I have fantasies about standing up and denouncing the whole crew as a bunch of racists, but (also of course) I don’t do it. Would I change their mind? Would they listen to someone as young as most of their children on this issue? What would I accomplish? I mean, you know, other than standing up for what’s right. I wimp out, slink out, and thereafter visit the teachers’ room only rarely, usually to microwave some leftovers.

  But Lilly is in there every day. She hangs out and jokes with these guys and apparently even plays golf with them sometimes. Does she know that they talk about her (admittedly traffic-stopping) body in a less-than-completely-respectful-of-her-as-a-person way as soon as she leaves the room? I have to imagine she does—the woman works with sixteen-year-old boys and comes in wearing tight tops and short skirts every single day. I have no idea how boys in her class learn math. So either she knows that she’s driving sixteen-year-old boys and fifty-five-year-old men nuts and kind of likes it, or she is completely clueless. In either case, she is able to fit into this world in a way that I just can’t—that I don’t want to.

  One day in November I see her in the hall, and I say, “Are you happy here?” expecting to commiserate about how hard it is to work with a bunch of old people who don’t really seem to like their jobs much, but she comes back with, “Yeah!” And I don’t really know what to say.

  Two young men are hired late, one because the twenty-five-year veteran is promoted to vice principal in October, and another because a science teacher—one of these midcareer professionals who changed from engineering to teaching, the kind of guy that everybody says the teaching profession needs to attract more of—proves so incompetent that he and the school mutually agree to part ways. This is a pretty spectacular achievement in a school where one science teacher is a notorious alcoholic (even more so than Captain Jack) who is apparently at least half in the bag all the time and one Spanish teacher suffers from some kind of mental illness that prompts him to spend entire class periods with h
is shoes propped up on his chest, sniffing them.

  Anyway, I like these two new guys, but I never see them—none of us go to the teachers’ room, so the only time I see them is at lunch. They spend every lunch period in the room of Andrew, an old, leathery English teacher who doesn’t go to the teachers’ room either. I join them a few times, but I quickly find Andrew tiresome—he pontificates a lot and tells the same stories over and over. He’s only fifty, but he’s kind of prematurely seventy. So I stop going down there and miss out on building much of a relationship with the new guys.

  My feelings of isolation are alleviated somewhat by Terri, Tim’s wife, who got me the interview here. I really like her, and one day I mention to her very casually that I really want my students to start doing some kind of writing portfolio, but I just can’t figure out the logistics and grading, and she says to me, “You’ll never try anything new if you wait until you have it totally figured out. Just jump in and see what happens!” This is probably the single best piece of teaching advice I ever get, and it really sets me on the road to being a better teacher. But Terri and I are on different floors and have different lunch periods, so I very rarely see her.

  At the end of the year the principal retires—two of his last acts are to finally gather the necessary documentation to get rid of the drunk and the shoe sniffer. I feel like I have to go to the retirement dinner, and it is horrible. Terri is talking to people she’s known for thirty years, and I end up sitting at a table with some young people who are nice, but for some reason I just don’t feel like I fit in. I’m always most comfortable when I’m the most normal person in the group, and here—I am a vegetarian, I live in the city, I like punk rock, I was not in a fraternity in college—I am by far the weirdest. The event is kind of psychotic too. Due to events at least ten years in the past, approximately half the faculty hates this guy’s guts. But everybody shows up at the retirement dinner, and people say insincere things about how great he is. (I haven’t really known him long enough to form much of an opinion. He fired two incompetent teachers in a year, which is a pretty significant achievement, but he waited years to do it—some of my students’ parents talk about the science teacher having vodka bottles in his desk back when they were students.)