phonaesthetica Keeping the beast in the sock drawer since 1974.

I don’t focus on the dark side of my job. Teachers who thrive are the ones who focus on the kids — what they need from us as they become who they’re going to be. They’re like blobs of cookie dough (all the necessary ingredients are there but they haven’t been baked) and because the blobs are all different sizes and flavors, you can’t treat them all alike. If you do, some will burn to a crisp and others will remain doughy. It’s why I never make certain kids read out loud; why I let others perform a rap as their final “Hamlet” project. I let the oatmeal-raisin be oatmeal-raisin, you know? I allow for pink sprinkles.

When discouragement wraps its slimy little arms around my neck and breathes its funk on me, I switch my thoughts to the 142 faces that look back at me every day; 142 faces who’ll go, go, go out into the world in June. I see the kids as they’ll be in 10 or 15 or 35 years, and I drop time-capsuled hints and jokes to those people; hints and jokes these adults-in-disguise will only understand long after I’m dead.

It’s like planting bulbs that lie underground for years before they bloom, in a season I won’t live to see.

The thrill of teaching lies in the fact that I have no idea who I’m talking to. It’s like a long mystery novel with a lot of detail in the first chapter: This could be important later.

I can’t forget my own high school years. They marked me. If I’m any good as a teacher, it’s because I can’t forget — how one kind word dissolved me with gratitude back then; how one shitty interaction with an adult highlighted and underlined my general sense of powerlessness and how powerlessness was the worst feeling in the world; like emotional seasickness. I remember the sound of snickering echoing off the metal bathroom stalls. The taste of Sprite for breakfast; the smell of AquaNet hairspray mingled with cigarette smoke. The back library room; the cold one, where I found our school’s small collection of feminist non-fiction. Many of those books are still there. And you still need a jacket.

High school breaks your heart when you’re a teacher who can’t forget. So, during first period every day, I look out into the rows of faces (six long; six deep) and see artists; doctors, engineers; and one gifted professional athlete. Second period has a psychologist; a math professor; and the woman who develops a cheap, effective immunization against HIV. Third period is full of excellent parents and teachers, plus one Episcopal minister and a Peace Corps volunteer. In fifth period, the Democratic Senator from Arizona keeps her small group on task, and in 6th, the lead guitarist for a band that doesn’t exist yet (but whose first album will go platinum) slumps in his seat because his legs are too long for his chair.

I see ordinary people, too — people who will experience drudgery and setbacks and suffering, because nobody escapes it. I want to add something to their cache of memories to use against that time — maybe a line of poetry they’ll remember during a long day in the hospital, or a weird-ass short story by Flannery O’Connor during a long night in jail. I don’t overestimate my powers — most of these kids, in the rush to forget high school, will forget me — but for those who are being marked as I was marked, this could be important later. Anything could happen.

High schoolers can be low on empathy and they’re famous for poor taste, but sweet fancy Moses on a soda cracker, how did this pep-rally stunt get approved by teachers? By administrators? The mind reels.

Short version, if you can’t stand to read the whole thing: Three white boys, in blackface, performed a pep-rally skit re-enacting Chris Brown’s 2009  assault on Rihanna. And then?  People defended it as “a little bit inappropriate” that was “completely blown out of proportion” because “kids will be kids.” Dang, you high-strung little pussyflowers, it was just a joke; can’t you take a joke?

“I don’t think it was offensive at all,” said Chelsea House, who earned her high school diploma from Waverly last year and moved to Alabama but returned for homecoming last week and saw the skit.

“There’s nothing wrong with blackface. There’s nothing wrong with dressing up as a black person. Black is but a color,” House said.

“Black is but a color?” Who taught this kid her syntax? I thought, Surely the administration will apologize, if only for fear of lawsuits! but aaaahhh no:

Waverly Central School District Superintendent Joseph Yelich said Tuesday that he did not believe the students in the skit intended to offend anyone.

No, Captain Obvious, of course they didn’t intend to. They just didn’t care; didn’t think; didn’t know. Is this not part of your JOB, to help them care and think and know? I know it’s time-intensive and there are days you feel like giving up. People’s Exhibit A: Several kids laughed at photos of the (trigger warning) Nanking Massacre in class today, and it would have been convenient to ignore it but  helping them understand why photos of the Nanking Massacre aren’t funny was the most important part of my job today. Sometimes I’m late on grading and one week I showed a movie three days in a row, but I don’t slack on teaching them why victimization isn’t big yuks. Last week, some boy told his wittiest one-liner — “It’s not rape if you yell ‘Surprise!’ first” — and of course his girlfriend laughed in order to be the Cool Girl. Gillian Flynn wrote all we need to know about the Cool Girl:

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.”

But I couldn’t say all that to a pair of 17-year-olds, make them understand, and get them to Trig on time, so I saved it in the mental file that contains all the conversations about Chris Brown and Rhianna I’ve ever overheard between teenage girls:

“She hit him first.”

“She cheated on him.”

“It takes two to tango.”

“She wasn’t hurt that bad.”

“We don’t know his side of the story.”

“Chris Brown can beat me anytime.”

And yeah, Waverly High peeps, you might think, They won’t learn; they don’t want to see and so they never will, but you shove down the words rising like an itch in your throat and walk them through it. Break it up into pieces and hand-feed them if you must, but if you give up because reasons, you might as well leave the classroom because you’ve already abandoned the kids.

Teaching, like abortion, is a hot political issue which, if you’ve never faced firsthand, you can only discuss in the abstract. That doesn’t stop all and sundry from having passionate theories. At best, these theories are naive and twee (“Teachers should shake hands with every student as s/he enters the classroom!”); at worst, they have the power to kick the shit out of public education (property taxes = school funding; vouchers; charter schools in the strip mall where kids dick around online at their own pace; more standardized testing testing testing). The only people with credible opinions re: what teaching involves and what students need to be successful in school, are teachers. And we disagree. A lot. But our disagreements are fired up by concrete experience, not theory. If you’ve never stood in front of a room full of kids and tried to get them to engage with– to WANT to engage with — a complex concept* that their still-developing prefrontal cortexes** struggle to grasp…well, go ahead, have an opinion, but know that you see through a glass, darkly.

All schools — public, private, charter — struggle to teach students what they need to know to survive, and it’s because we have no idea, really, what the jobs of the future will be. I’m a nascent example: I started a career in print journalism in 1996, eight seconds before the world went online. The Internet, in 1996, was like a cute little newsroom pet with its adorable modem trills and burps; its real-time weather reports and dancing cats. And then? It rose up and ate us in our sleep. I raced ahead of every job I ever had like Wiley E. Coyote as the cliff crumbles behind him, trying to get to a paper that wouldn’t fold or become a pamphlet. By the end, none of my old jobs existed anymore — it was all wire services and freelancers. Print journalism had its heart cut right out of its chest.

We live in exponential times. As fast as the world changed between 1996 and, say, 2001? That’s nothing compared to what’s going happen to the 18-year-olds who walk in and out of my door every day. I prepare them as well as I can, but we all know they’re about to climb onto a rickety socioeconomic trapeze. This affects different kids in different ways: Some get motivated and work harder than ever; others give up entirely. They feel helpless, and they’re marking time.

So, yeah. We’re all wondering what comes next in education. If we had more blue-collar jobs that paid a living wage, education would be less fraught: Kids could drop out at 16 with solid options — electrician, plumber, auto mechanic, etc. There would be no shame in leaving school early if academics just weren’t your thing, or if you didn’t want to rack up $100,000 in undergrad student loans.

And whatever happened to apprenticeships? Apprenticeships would be 37 kinds of awesome right about now.  I would totally go for ironworking, because that way I wouldn’t electrocute myself, have a car jack fall on my head, or have to investigate the depths of strangers’ bathroom pipes. My dream job, however, remains “Kitten Shepherd.”

*Or, hell, even a simple concept that they’re just not interested in. I dare you to make a teenager care about punctuation the week before Christmas or the prom, or if he hasn’t had enough sleep the night before, or if he had a fight with his girlfriend on the way to school, or if he subsists solely on Hot Cheetos and Coke, or or or…

**The “executive function” part of the brain responsible for long-range planning, risk assessment, empathy, and understanding that it is wiser, if not better, to attend Senior English than to lick a psychoactive toad.

COMING NEXT: Part 2 — Teaching: What It’s Like When It Is Like A Movie, But Not the Movie You’re Thinking Of

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”

- Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

Every day, I try to (forgive the expression) “find a balance” between fostering free thought and an anti-authoritarian spirit of inquiry in students and keeping my job. I’ve been haunted by this story – a lengthy account of the writer’s stint at at Amazon-type warehouse-picker job — for months now, and  it’s mostly because of the link between jobs like that and our educational system. I have a creeping horror that the American corporate zeitgeist doesn’t want kids educated — or wants them educated just enough for a bubble-filling job like this. Or worse, educated just enough to accept a job like this because they can’t really imagine anything else.

It’s my job to help them imagine something else.

A kid in 2nd period (I call him Tiresias because he is blind but intuitive, not to mention girly) laid it out for me in one sentence today:

“Ms. S., if they don’t get you for something technical, I think you’ll be a teacher for a long, long time.”

Tiresias is dead-on-balls accurate. I got into education by default — ask me about my LSAT score and why I fucked it up! – but I could be a lifer if they don’t get me for something ridiculous on standardized test day. People’s Exhibit A: The Great Bubble-Sheet Ben-Gay Clusterfuck of SADIM Testing Week, 2010, when I was long-term-subbing at Our Lady of Maximum Discomfort Middle School.

SADIM is not the test’s real acronym, but it should be.* Like all standardized tests, it’s riddled with inaccuracies and biases; not particularly related to effective teaching; and limited in terms of measuring learning or ability — but it determines whether students in our state graduate from high school, so we prioritize it and do the best we can.

SADIM was the be-all and end-all of human existence at Our Lady, where I worked with a quartet of women I called Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft. They lived in terror that some 12-year-old might use an answer sheet to bubble in a skull with a snake slithering out of the eyehole, and they weren’t wrong. Adult jobs were on the line. We had a minor mixup  – two kids’ booklets were switched by mistake –and every adult in the room (including me) was required to give a “statement,” which mostly involved ass-covering and blame-shifting. None of these women ever smiled. It’s the most hostile place I’ve ever worked, and I once had a temp job counting bags of money for a televangelist with a camera trained on my hands.

I didn’t think I was going to make it ’til May. Every time I got paid — $775 every two weeks because I’d chosen to spread my checks** out over 12 months instead of 9 –my eyes cried all by themselves.

Anyway. Cheney was a reading specialist who rendered children physically rigid with fear. Half-dead from heart surgery and diabetes (she was about to lose her right foot), Cheney used her dwindling chi to huff and puff down the halls on her walking stick (clump clump WHAP, clump clump WHAP) demanding that teachers count and re-count their allotted SADIM testing restroom passes.

“If you run out of passes,” she wheezed at me, “that’s IT for the restroom. Understand? THAT’S IT. When the kids bring the passes back, sign them, note the exact time, AND LOCK THEM UP. FAILURE TO LOCK UP THE PASSES MAKES US VULNERABLE TO A STATE AUDIT.”

I had to administer SADIM with Rumsfeld, the school psychologist. Rumsfeld was beautiful, which made her constant “fuck-you” expression even more jarring. She hated me. I can only assume virulent homophobia. Being in the same room with Rumsfeld was the icing on the train-wreck cake of this panicky, Pinter-esque scene, so my neck seized up. I went to work anyway, since being absent on SADIM day was grounds for immediate dismissal. But, because I’m not a masochist except in my romantic relationships, I took some self-care measures such as Ben-Gay, hot tea, and a little stretching. At the break, I received the following e-mail from Assistant Principal Cheney:

Ms. S,

I had some students come share some concerns with me today. They expressed that they found the room to be very distracting for testing. Please make sure to do your best to keep their environment free from such things. Some of the concerns were:

·         The tea kettle in your room was steeping and was very loud. Please make sure your water is heated before testing begins.

·         You were stretching and students were laughing because of it. I understand that you had a recent injury, but you need to be discreet about stretching and taking medication.

·         You were using an ointment or something minty. Students found this odor to be overwhelming. Please do your best to avoid using anything with a strong odor during testing.

SADIM is an extremely important time for everyone, especially for 8^th graders. We want to make sure we keep the testing environment distraction free. Please see me if you have any questions.

Thank you.

Later on, Ashcroft stopped me in the hall — no easy feat because she was partial to wobbly hooker shoes with egregious cutouts and bows — and we had the only human interaction I ever experienced at Our Lady.

“I’m so glad I’m retiring,” she said. “I feel sorry for new teachers, because this stuff is getting worse. You might be OK, though. You deserve to be OK.”

Ashcroft wobbled off, swatting at a fly that wasn’t there. I felt perversely encouraged. I hadn’t realized how much I needed another shot of perverse encouragement (encouraged perversity?) until today. That Tiresias, he’s pretty all right. I gave him 10 extra credit points and a granola bar. It was all I had on me.

*Soulcrushing Anxiety Demonstrably, Inherently Masochistic or Sad And Desperate Idiots Mutiny.

**I originally mistyped this as “cheeks.” Which would be more accurate.