Losing My Faculties: A Teacher's Story Page 8

  When I get a little older I will understand that there is a lot of class in what happens here—not in the awful food or the atmosphere or anything, but the man was a principal here for decades, and sending him off with a tacky catered affair is the right thing to do, and, to their credit, these people do it no matter how they feel about him.

  This is hard for me to understand at age twenty-four, though. I feel like a dork for not fitting in at my table, I hate the insincerity of the whole thing, and I am depressed that I work at a place where I feel so alone.

  I get in my car, pop in the punk mix that my friend Karl made for me in the eleventh grade, turn up Stiff Little Fingers, and go home.

  23

  In my second year at Northton High I am assigned a new classroom. It is in what turns out to be a really sweet location—a dead end of the hallway with three classrooms on only one side. Next to my classroom is one occupied by a science teacher, the kind of teacher that people call Coach. He sometimes teases male students he likes by calling them “faggot,” and he unironically displays a sign in his classroom that says, ATTITUDES ARE CONTAGIOUS! IS YOURS WORTH CATCHING?

  Through the connecting door from me is Andrew, the old guy I hated eating lunch with last year. The two younger guys I liked are gone—one transferred to the middle school, while the other went to a school fifty miles away—but there is precedent for me eating in Andrew’s room, and so sort of by default, he and I end up having lunch together every day. I have stopped going to the teachers’ room even to microwave my lunch, because the walk up to the third floor and the three minutes of heating time take precious time out of my allotted twenty-three minutes.

  Andrew and I don’t have a lot in common apart from the fact that we both hate the teachers’ room. Basically he likes to hold forth on stuff, and I listen. It starts to kind of suck, as I knew it would after my experience last year, but I don’t know how to stop. He will stick his head through the connecting door and say, “Lunch?” I can’t very well say, “No, actually I prefer to sit in here and eat by myself.”

  He’s really not a bad guy, it’s just that we are from different worlds, we think different things are important. For example, he seems to really value propriety, whereas I rarely give a shit about it. Sometimes this concern with propriety has made him do good things—he frequently tells the story of dropping a dime on the school to the local papers when there was some kind of stunt involving watermelons at a pep rally before Northton played a predominately black high school. But he talks very nastily about a certain segment of his students—the gum-chewing, blue-collar girls who seem to offend him because they speak their minds at somewhat inappropriate times. (I tend to love kids like this.) He does this terrible impression of this one girl, who, okay, once disrupted his class by washing her feet in the sink in the back of the room, and he occasionally refers to these girls as “bitches,” and by the end of the year, when he’s really coming apart at the seams, his epithets grow much more colorful.

  And I still can’t get out of it. I disagree with him twice, and it pisses him off mightily. One time he has this really cute student teacher, and the three of us are having lunch, and some educational thing comes up, and I make the mistake of getting into it (he doesn’t have his students do any writing, so there’s just not a whole lot of common ground here). I disagree with him in front of her, and the student teacher kind of agrees with me, and he gives me the cold shoulder for a couple of days.

  Later, at a meeting, our boss goes off on how she just wants to go home, can we please come to an agreement here, and he says to me the next day, “That was a real example of female high dudgeon last night.” Tired of his misogyny, I say, “Well, you’ve kinda got a thing about that female thing, huh?”

  He gets mad and tells me to grow up. This somehow infuriates me, and I yell back at him, “Don’t you tell me to grow up!” Later we both apologize and continue to have lunch together.

  It’s a complicated relationship. He drives me nuts, he tells the same stories over and over again, and yet sometimes he is very funny, and I feel sorry for him in a way—he seems to be deeply sad. He is also a heavy smoker, and since Northton, like all schools in Massachusetts, is required by state law to have a smoke-free campus, he can’t go to the lounge and smoke anymore, so he sneaks into the men’s room to smoke, and when you’re sixteen, I guess smokin’ in the boys room is cool enough to write a song about, but when you’re fifty, it’s just kind of sad. (It also makes it kind of horrible to go pee because the bathroom is usually fogged with cigarette smoke.)

  At the end of the year the administration decides they want to break up the gang of burnouts who all have lunch together and hang out in the teachers’ room, turning it into a black hole of negativity, and so they move several people’s rooms. They invent this cool cover story about how this will “allow for interdisciplinary work,” and they try to move history teachers next to English teachers and math teachers next to science teachers. Griping and golf are about the only interdisciplinary activities that ever go on here, but what the hell—I guess they feel like the truth is too ugly.

  Anyway, though I am not a burnout they’re trying to keep out of the teachers’ room, I do get my room moved—all the way up to the third floor. Everybody else is running around all pissed off, but I am relieved. It’s the only way I could ever get out of these lunches.

  24

  I have a class of juniors this year that proves to be the biggest failure of my entire career. I also lose this class on the first day, but at least this time I don’t think it’s my fault. There is a girl in the class named Jaime, but a misprint on my little class sheet lists her sex as M, so I assume that this is one of our five Hispanic students and that his name is pronounced “Hi-may.”

  Well, this just about paralyzes this group, they think I am the stupidest dork ever to walk the earth, and it will be nearly impossible to get any work out of them for the rest of the year. Partially this is just bad chemistry. Among the students is William, who is actually a senior and who spends a lot of time just being bizarre, including one day very early on when I look over and he has the window shade tied around his ear and is coloring his tongue with a green Magic Marker.

  I also have Shawna, who is prone to adding non sequiturs to class discussion, who never does any work, who is inexplicably a junior in high school despite the fact that she has passed a total of one class in her first two years here. My efforts to get her removed from the class simply because she doesn’t have the credits to be a junior get nowhere, either because her guidance counselor is a twisted fuck who hates me or because to demote her would create difficulties schoolwide regarding kids who are inappropriately placed. Probably both are true.

  I talk to Shawna in the hall privately after she disrupts class almost every day. Most kids, with the notable exception of Jimmy last year, can have decent conversations in the hall away from an audience, but not Shawna. She shuffles her feet and mumbles, “Aw, iss all good, G” (I should point out that Shawna is white) and other things she seems to have heard in movies or songs. Having a conversation with her is a strange, frustrating experience—only very rarely do her contributions seem to match up in any way with anything I am asking her or telling her.

  Finally I go to the school psychologist. “Oh, yeah,” he says, “Shawna has got some serious problems. I really think she’ll probably be institutionalized by the time she’s twenty.” Which of course implies that we really can’t educate her here, which one might have concluded from the fact that she’s failed everything she’s ever taken except for one semester of gym, and which means that the school psychologist should really make strong recommendations to get this kid into a residential program or something, but of course he won’t do that, because if the district admits that it can’t serve a kid like this, then they have to kick in for her education in some kind of therapeutic setting. Which they can’t afford to do. So Shawna stays, and fails my class and every other class. The next year she will make a stab a
t being a senior, though she is still technically a freshman, but she will drop out about halfway through the year. Problem solved.

  And there is King, who appears to really be named King because that is the name on all official school documents referring to him and who engages in jolly pranks like coloring a tampon with a red marker and tossing it into the middle of the room while my back is turned.

  I have various meetings with King and his parents, but not much ever changes. The tampon thing is the most egregious example, but he will torture me like this all year. Still, I have it easy compared to the sub who comes in when the district makes me go to some mandatory training thing for the phoney-baloney “initiative” they are doing. I spend three days with a couple of other young teachers and a bunch of burnouts (this is the mandatory indoctrination for people who have missed the voluntary sessions) listening to this improbably tight-panted guy from North Carolina tell us stupid jargony names for stuff we already do. Now they can say their entire staff has been trained in the Tight-Panted Southerner Education System! And the only impact it has or will ever have in anybody’s classroom is that a bunch of kids got an even more half-assed education than usual around here because they were going nuts with substitutes.

  When I get back to my classes after three days, it takes a while to reestablish any kind of momentum, especially in period four, where apparently it has been a free-for-all. Kids tell me in whispers about the sub screaming obscenities at them, about King making a blowtorch out of a can of graffiti-remover spray he found in the closet. Nobody tells me how my coffee mug got broken or who covered the entire rear wall of the classroom with liquid soap.

  This is in November, and while it never gets as bad as this again, it also never gets to the point where I feel like I’m getting anything done with this class. A few days later, one of my students bails and switches classes. They are not supposed to be allowed to do this, but it happens all the time. She comes to me to break the news. “I’m going to Mr. Black’s class,” she says. “No offense, but your class is a joke.”

  Well. None taken.

  One of my colleagues tells me he thinks I’m being too experimental with them (because I give them photocopies of Walt Whitman poems that are not in the anthology) and I should just do what he does, which is go through every story, essay, and poem in the anthology and have the kids answer the questions at the end, and give them a multiple-choice test every two weeks. In other words, bore them into submission.

  Of course I scorn this advice, but it couldn’t really have been much worse than what I did. At the end of the year, one of the parents of a kid who goes along with the crowd, which means he would have done well in a class with some order but acted like a jackass in this class, comes to talk to me about the class.

  “Why do you think this happened?” she asks me, and not in a hostile way. It’s not like she’s blaming me (though she could)—more like she’s trying to help me, which in some way makes me feel worse.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe it’s just the mix of kids, or maybe I failed to do something in September that would have made things different. Whatever it is, I feel horrible, because this is their only chance at junior English, and now it’s over and it was less than it could have been, and I can teach this class next year and try to get it right, but this is the only junior English they’ll ever have.”

  True. If you believe your job is important, then fucking up is especially painful.

  Then again, maybe I overestimate my importance. Six years later I will run into King. We have a nice conversation—he seems happy to see me, and I enjoy talking to him. I always liked him in spite of the fact that he tortured me—he’s smart and very funny. He is in college, and he is succeeding despite learning little else but tampon coloring in his junior English class. He says he runs an “entertainment management business” on the side.

  We are both adults now, so I say, “What’s that, King—porno?”

  He smiles and laughs. “Naw, naw, we coordinate deejays for parties, a few bands … well, okay, and a couple of strippers too.”

  25

  My ninth-grade class this year is much like last year’s classes—some good stuff happens and some bad stuff happens. It is notable for two things. One is that after the first quarter, the class gets a Hispanic kid from a neighboring town. He is the second Hispanic kid to enter the school since Kent beat the shit out of that kid last year. I take to him immediately, because he’s funny and smart, even if he doesn’t really do any work.

  But the other kids ostracize him immediately. Given what happened last year with Kent and Snoop Dogg, I immediately decide that these kids, though I like them, are just ignorant and prejudiced and can’t get along with someone different. I am annoyed with them for their bigotry.

  Two years later I will have some of these same kids in my writing class, and when I bring this up, they protest: “That kid was a jerk! He offered to sell me coke in the bathroom on the first day he was in school!” So maybe I misjudged them.

  This class gives me my first big revelation about discipline. I have a bit of trouble with Mark and Peter throwing stuff at each other. Actually, they do it every day. Mostly it’s erasers that they break off of their pencils, which is at least preferable to spitballs, which make a terrible mess. So one day I turn around quickly from the board and find both Mark and Peter right in the act of cocking their arms with erasers aimed at each other, and I say, “Okay guys, you have detention,” because this is my big punishment and the schoolwide discipline policy. I start filling out the slips and Peter gives a completely nonchalant “Okay” and throws the eraser anyway.

  And I realize from his tone of voice and the expression on his face that this is not a fuck-you gesture aimed at me; it’s a “here comes the eraser” gesture aimed at his buddy. Peter, in fact, doesn’t care if he has detention. Peter pretty much has detention every day, and so it’s not really a punishment to him. In fact, Peter’s no dummy—he’s figured out that if he just budgets an extra hour into every day (and why not? What else does he have to do?), he can, within reason, do pretty much anything he wants during the school day including, but not limited to, pegging his buddy with an eraser.

  It’s the last time I give detention.

  I also have a sophomore class this year that proves to be one of the best I ever have. About two thirds of the students in this class were my students last year as ninth-graders, so we totally hit the ground running—it is amazing to me how much more work this class gets done than any of my others just because we don’t have to spend the first quarter getting to know each other.

  One day, after reading Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” which is about, among other things, tradition and sibling rivalry, we have a fantastic conversation not unlike the “We Are Seven” class. In this discussion, the class uses the smart, ugly narrator’s decision to give the quilts to the dumb, ugly daughter instead of the smart, beautiful one as a springboard to talking about their own problems with their siblings and their insecurity about which sibling their parents prefer. As my juniors at Newcastle did, these kids keep looping back and forth between the story and their lives. Once again I have stumbled into forty-five minutes of greatness. I am less satisfied this time, though, because while with the Newcastle juniors just getting them to talk about a poem passionately seemed like a real accomplishment, now I feel like I want to be able to take this somewhere, to build on this discussion and make it mean something beyond just that we had a good class today. I don’t, but I do think everybody realizes that something special happened, and even if it doesn’t lead anywhere concrete, it does lend a positive tone to the class that is sustained throughout the year. I don’t really remember many other specifics: I take them to see The Glass Menagerie at a local theater, and they are amazingly good; I turn around one day and see Chester, the kid from my homeroom, doing some kind of doggie-style pantomime and spanking his own ass, and I have to pretend I had no idea what he was doing; and I mistakenly give Denise a
detention one day because she tells Chester loudly that he’s an asshole because he is, in fact, being an asshole to her. (After class she tells me the whole story, teary-eyed, and I tell her to forget about the detention, that I screwed up. When I stop giving detentions, I won’t have these kind of problems.) Mike periodically torments Max, who is such a Star Trek fan that he’s taught himself to speak Klingon, by saying, “Max is a Trekkie!” and Max takes the bait every time, replying indignantly, “Trekker! Trekker!”

  At the end of the year I write this class a good-bye letter and tell them that they are the best class I have ever had. It’s true, despite the fact that we had one day out of 180 that was fantastic. Most days are not fantastic, but almost every day is functional and productive, and at the end of it, I feel proud of what’s happened during that forty-five minutes.

  I am in my third year as a teacher, and for the first time, I feel like I’m getting good at it.

  26

  At the end of this year, I get on the committee that’s going to hire three new English teachers—because our enrollment is going way up, not because anyone is leaving. This is so cool! I’m really excited about it, and Terri kind of takes charge and says all seven of us want to see all the résumés instead of having the clowns in the central office sort through them for us, so we all do this, and it takes forever (if you whisper the words “job opening” and “English teacher” to yourself in a locked room, you will probably find five or six résumés being slipped under the door), but it’s kind of fun.