Losing My Faculties Read online

  I complain to my department head and principal, and they both tell me to relax, he didn’t really mean anything by it, that’s just the kind of thing he says—but I do notice that the sheet with the “bright and beautiful” comment disappears from the stack.

  They make us give her an interview, though she didn’t make the cut from anybody on the committee. She is sort of generically cute but certainly not what I’d call beautiful; however, she’s a lot closer to beautiful than bright. She gives these Miss America answers to all the interview questions. If you ask her if she prefers A or B, she replies, “Well, on the one hand, I really believe in A, but of course I also firmly believe in B, though they are polar opposites and mutually exclusive.”

  Rrgh. Fortunately they don’t make us hire her.

  The only other kind of weird thing that happens is that some of the older teachers on the committee start getting their insecurities a little ruffled by the process. We don’t consider people with more than a year or two of experience—this is a budget thing—and there are so many résumés from people with really top-notch schools on them that we don’t even really consider people from the local public college that about half the staff here attended. So this just adds pain to what is, under the best of circumstances, a painful process. (After all, we’re trying to get seven people—six of whom are teachers and therefore talkative know-it-alls—to agree on something. Three times.)

  After many long, agonizing days of interviewing and arguing, we end up getting three really great people, and I’m excited, even though one of them is devastatingly handsome, has all these great new ideas, and is a published freelance writer. He is in every way cooler than me, so, like thick-calved Nancy back at Newcastle High, I am about to lose my identity as “the Young, Cool One.” Now I’ll be “kind of like an uglier, crankier version of Mr. Paulsen.” Oh, well.

  I begin my third year at Northton feeling hopeful. Three new English teachers! Three colleagues close to my age!

  Unfortunately, I find out that Kurt and Jesse are on the second floor in adjoining rooms, while I am on the third floor with a history teacher on one side and the boys’ bathroom on the other. This is fine—the history teacher terrorizes the students, but they love him for it; he’s one of those “I bust your ass because I care” guys, and the kids get it and love him. He also has a very dry sense of humor, which it usually takes the kids several months to tune into. The boys’ room is fine—because it’s close, I usually end up using it, and my presence there probably causes, in total, several cartons of cigarettes to be dumped into toilet bowls or thrown out the window. The battle I have about the boys’ room is the soap. Weeks will go by where there’s none, and eventually the empty dispenser is ripped off the wall, and then we get a new soap dispenser, and then it’s ripped off the wall while it’s still full. The whole thing is strangely depressing. Eventually I just bring my own soap. Sometimes I will leave it in the bathroom. And then it gets thrown out.

  I’m feeling jealous of Kurt and Jesse downstairs. I do have Caroline, the third new teacher, on this floor for two periods a day—she is “floating” room to room like I did my first year at Newcastle—but she is way down the hall with the math teachers. Caroline and I do get to be friends, but my dreams of a little new-teacher community evaporate almost immediately. I just don’t have any incidental contact with Kurt and Jesse; somebody has to go make the effort to go see somebody else, and I do end up going down there from time to time, and it’s nice, but it’s always me going down there—they never come up to see me because they have each other—and that gets kind of old.

  Maybe they also don’t come up to see me because the majority of the English teachers are up here, and the new kids are not exactly welcomed with open arms. This is largely a reflection of the fact that the staff here hates the administration, and the English department in particular really hates the English-department head because … well, because she is in charge of English K–12 in this system, and she’s never really been an English teacher. She was some kind of elementary-school gifted-and-talented teacher. So while I am not particularly insulted by being evaluated by this woman—I still feel insecure enough to feel like almost anybody knows more about teaching than I do—the people who have been doing this for twenty-plus years really resent this and, as a result, hate her.

  Also she’s just too nice. She tries to be kind to everybody, and as students will do to a teacher like this, our department just eats her alive because she wants so badly to be liked, and while I do like her most of my colleagues hate her with a venom people usually reserve for people who sleep with their spouse or kill their dog, so she should just give up trying, but she can’t. Some of these old fuckers are just tough as nails, and they chew her up. (She cries in and after department meetings on what seems like a regular basis but is probably really just twice.)

  So the new teachers are automatically suspect because they come from fancy-shmancy schools, they are hired by the new administration, and they seem to embody all the grievances that the old teachers have about having been disrespected by an evil or possibly just very stupid administration for twenty years.

  The department head totally plays into this by having the new teachers make a presentation to the department about Socratic seminars, which is education-speak for students running the discussion instead of teachers, and the old people instantly mock the idea. (I think the idea is cool and try it out; it works great for me except for the part about assigning kids roles—“You are the recorder!” “You are the discussion-mover-alonger!”—which always feels corny and artificial.) But the “veterans” just can’t even be courteous about it, and it becomes a running joke to a few of them in future meetings. So this is our department head screwing up by making it seem like the new kids are here to teach the old people, but the irony is that she probably could have never gotten any of the old folks to talk to the department about teaching, and if she had, nobody would have listened. Teaching is the one thing that we never talk about here. I guess after doing something in isolation for twenty years, you don’t want to think that you might have been doing it wrong. One guy, who is long-winded and cranky but at least intelligent and articulate, even explains how he feels implicitly disrespected by all the fuss being made over new people, because what the hell, he’s been doing this for twenty-five years and wouldn’t mind a little fuss over everything he’s achieved. He is right and I respect him for it even though he develops a pretty pathological hatred of me as the symbol of this whole thing.

  So the old people are, if anything, more hostile than ever, and no wonderful new teacher collaborative has developed.

  But it’s kind of okay, because this year my classes suddenly start to get much better, which makes the new teacher collaborative feel less desperately important than it did before, when I just really needed to know that I wasn’t the only one fucking up all the time.

  Of course, I’m still fucking up all the time, but, as I said, it’s starting to get better. I am on my third round of teaching ninth-graders, so while their behavior continues to vex me, I am no longer tossing textbooks across the room, and now I at least have a pretty good idea of what I do in what order and the confidence to make the class harder than it used to be. But still probably not hard, like the history teacher next door. Though I do aspire to be the guy that everybody hates and then loves because he’s so tough, I pretty much have to accept that it’s never going to happen.

  For the first time, I have an all-writing elective. The school has switched from year-long forty-five-minute classes to semester-long ninety-minute classes, and this has opened some holes in the schedule, so I create this writing-workshop class.

  Initially, it’s not that popular. My first class has three students. While this earns me the wrath of the twisted guidance counselor who hates me (on the couple of occasions when I am forced to have a conversation with him and I mention the class, he says, “Oh, the one that the school committee is so concerned about? The one they want to shut
down? That one?”), and it sometimes gets kind of claustrophobic, we end up doing much more work on writing than I would have believed possible in a school situation.

  Of course, I need more students if the class is going to continue. One of the three initial students is an originator of the “funky rules,” and this trend will continue: every time I teach this class, at least a third of the students will be kids I’ve taught before. I am too insecure at the time to realize what a powerful endorsement this is, but in later years it will strike me as a really nice compliment that I should have appreciated more.

  My number comes up in the scheduling lottery or something, because I also get some of the coveted level-one classes. Well, this also happens to be because the do-nothing veteran who had taught my funky-rules kids as ninth-graders got demoted back to English teacher when the new principal came in, and he requested all level-three classes, because he realized that as long as you keep those kids quiet, nobody really cares if they don’t do any work, and he was, to his credit, very skilled at keeping them quiet, which is something I never mastered.

  Anyway, I have a level-one class, and while I do have some struggles, I don’t have to deal with a lot of behavior problems. Which is good, because I still suck at that. I am now having after-school “meetings” with kids rather than giving them detentions—they fill out a form about what’s been happening, and we talk about it for a few minutes, and it is sort of effective in that most kids would rather be yelled at than be called on to examine and explain their behavior—it just makes them squirm—but I don’t follow through very well, and my classes are still more chaotic than I’d like.

  The kids in this class do their homework, they participate, they are great. Their papers kind of suck, though, mostly because they are long on opinions and short on evidence to back them up, but also because most of them seem to have been taught that you need to say the exact same thing in your introduction and conclusion, presumably to make your reader say uncle and submit to your argument, if only to stop you saying “Macbeth’s tragic flaw is ambition” over and over and over. I give them an opportunity to rewrite them, but most kids don’t do it. So after one quarter I stop giving grades. I am convinced that the department or the parents or somebody will give me hell about this, but strangely, nobody does. I tell the kids that I will grade the entirety of their work at the end of the quarter, and until then, I will just make comments on their papers.

  This has the strange effect of making them do multiple drafts, which is something I’ve always struggled with. While they wouldn’t bother to rewrite a paper with a C on it, they will happily rewrite papers again and again until they get a comment from me that says, “Everything looks great! You’re done!” It ends up being a smashing success, and though the kids kind of hate me for it at the time, they do fantastic work. It remains to be seen whether they will love me for it later, but at least I’ve finally achieved half of my dream of being a hated-then-loved hard-ass.

  I think I’ve finally found it—the educational Holy Grail! The success gives me some confidence I’ve never had before. This class is really hard, and the kids rise to the challenge and do great work, and I guess that must mean I am a good teacher.

  I like to think that this is due to my great idea about the grades, and that this is a vindication of my whole philosophy, but in fact the no-grades approach works well next year with level-one sophomores but fails horribly with level-three freshmen. I can tell you all the reasons why this is the best way to do things, but the fact is that it doesn’t always work. So when it works, am I skilled or just lucky?

  27

  I’m beginning to find my place at Northton High. By my fourth year, there are no students here who remember the school without me in it, so I am sort of an institution. One of my students makes a sign for my room that says WELCOME TO ROOM 206: HOME OF THE HALPINATOR. My writing-workshop class gets more popular, and I end up teaching two sections per semester. My teaching is getting less memorable. I mean this in an entirely good way—I still have some fantastic classes now and again, and I meet some really interesting and definitely memorable kids who write some wonderful things for me, we have good discussions, but now I’ve gotten good enough at this that I can continue to do a decent job even in the sleep-deprived fog of new parenthood, and it’s no longer a big event when a class goes well. (Though it’s still an event when it goes spectacularly well.) And I’ve had enough bad classes that a bad day no longer seems like the end of the world. There are still times at the end of the day when I sit at my desk and I would put my head down on it in despair if it weren’t for the fact that it’s covered in crap and there’s no room for my head, but for the most part I am in the groove here.

  While my work with the kids is getting better and better, my colleagues remain a pretty constant irritant. I tend to leave faculty meetings grinding my teeth, both because they are so deadly boring and because most of the staff seems to live just for the bitter joy of scorning anything new or any kind of meaningful talk about education at all. Many, many meetings degenerate into someone holding forth on the importance of the hat rule. Students at Northton are not allowed to wear hats in school, and so we periodically revisit this issue, with one of the vice principals reminding us of the importance of uniform enforcement of the rule and some old teacher complaining about kids today, no respect, can’t even see their eyes with those damn things on. Once I make the mistake of saying that the kids really don’t understand this rule, that they generally obey rules that they understand (audible snorts from the cranky old people at that assertion), and that they continually break this rule because it seems arbitrary to them, and if we could just explain it, we might have better compliance. I am shouted down by a history teacher who yells, “It’s about RESPECT!” thereby ending the discussion without actually saying anything.

  So we can talk all day about the hat rule, or the new detention slips, or any of the logistics of controlling the student population, but we can’t possibly talk about teaching, except in ones and twos behind closed doors. It just depresses the hell out of me that so much of our collective energy is focused on stupid bullshit that has very little to do with what we’re doing here, and there is just no energy or passion for talking about working with kids.

  This becomes especially painful when the New England Association of Schools and Colleges is scheduled to come for our evaluation visit, and the English department has to assemble some kind of curriculum to show them. After one contentious meeting in which I say that I hate The Old Man and the Sea because I do hate it, but also because I know that an old English teacher who hates me is a Hemingway cultist and that statement is sure to infuriate him, we all break into groups and spend hours and hours crafting documents that are worded so vaguely as to allow us all to continue doing exactly what we’ve always done.

  Still, we have only one faculty meeting a month and one department meeting a month, and, thanks to the good offices of our union, we get to get right up and walk out at the contractual ending time even if (and, for some people I think it’s especially if) the principal is in the middle of a sentence, so I have only two afternoons a month and the occasional all-day training in which to think about this. Most of the time I spend with kids, and that time is very good.

  I do, however, have a couple of unpleasant encounters with parents. Up to now, I haven’t had much parental contact—I’ve talked to them at parents’ night, I think an attractive single mom hit on me once, though I’m not really sure, and some of them have given me nice letters or cards of thanks for the work I’ve done with their kids. These are hugely valuable because they are about the only real and informed praise I’ve ever gotten from grown-ups. I appreciate it when the three colleagues I can stand to talk to tell me I’m doing a good job, but they never actually see me teach. My supervisor has never seen me teach more than three class periods in an entire year, which doesn’t seem to me to be enough to make any kind of judgment. But the parents at least have heard what their kids sa
y when they say what they really think, and maybe they’ve even got some basis for comparison, so praise from them means a lot.

  But this year I have Jeff. Jeff’s older brother, Elvis, is a star student and headed to Harvard next fall. Jeff, though, is a less than stellar student who is happy to play football well and really has no desire to go to Harvard.

  Unfortunately for both of us, Jeff’s mom is not having this. So we end up having just endless meetings in which she asks me pointedly how it could be that Jeff has a C in my class, and I answer that, well, he never does his homework, and then she says how she has a really hard time with him on that issue but then again implies that I am doing something really wrong, and this is reflected in the fact that Jeff isn’t doing his homework. We have this conversation at least four times, but it feels like forty, and Jeff’s mom’s point veers wildly between “Why is Jeff fucking up, why can’t he get his act together?” and “If only you were a competent teacher, Jeff would be getting good grades like his brother.” It’s exhausting, irritating, and, by the fourth iteration, boring.

  My writing workshop this year includes, along with former students of mine who love to write, a number of kids who did not request it but were placed in it to fill a hole in their schedule. This makes for an odd mix. One schedule-filler is a senior who comes into the class every day and places his head on the desk and goes to sleep. He literally does nothing. At the end of the year I fail him, and he apparently needed the credits from this class to graduate, and so his parents make an issue. The twisted-asshole guidance counselor who hates everybody but seems particularly dedicated to being my personal nemesis is practically licking his lips as he tells me that I have to prove I warned the kid’s parents that he was going to fail. I am incredulous. I ask if the student will have to prove he did any work. The guidance counselor walks away rubbing his hands together in delight like a villain in a silent movie. At least that’s how I remember it. Then again, I also remember him in full Snidely Whiplash regalia during this conversation, so my memory may be playing tricks here.