Losing My Faculties: A Teacher's Story

by Brendan Halpin

  One of Henry’s friends comes up to me a couple of days later, giggling, and says, “I heard Henry cut his arm in class to make you think he was a psycho!” All I can think to say is, “Well, it worked,” but I manage not to.

  A week later Henry walks up to me at the end of class, gets right in my face, and says, “Mr. Halpin. You don’t like it when I cut myself, do you?”

  “No, Henry, I don’t.”

  “Well, how do you like this,” he says, sticking his left thumb in my face, grabbing the nail with his right hand, and ripping the nail right off.

  I manage to respond with atypical aplomb.

  “Well, Henry,” I say calmly, “I don’t like that either.”

  I write up the incident and give a copy to the vice principal and the school psychologist. A few days later, Henry stops coming to school.

  That’s the worst thing that happens in this class, and it’s usually not that bad, but it’s usually at least pretty bad. I barely know what I’m doing and the class is out of control for at least part of every day, but strangely enough, we do get some real learning done. Unlike Nancy across the hall who reads everything aloud to her level-three classes (so it’s basically forty-five minutes of story time and the kids never actually read the books), I insist that they read, and some kids do. I insist that they write, and all the kids do. Nobody else in this place does this with level-three classes. I photocopy packets of their writing, which they proudly read aloud to the class, and as much as I’ve screwed up, I am proud of what I’ve done, at least compared with what I know my colleagues are doing with their classes. The kids getting story hour or worksheets might have been a whole lot quieter than mine, they might have sworn a whole lot less, and they probably threw fewer pieces of furniture (they were probably stoned in similar if not greater numbers, though), but they also didn’t do any reading or writing. And this is the trade-off I will continue to make throughout my teaching career. Though I will get better at the discipline stuff, I am fundamentally a marshmallow, and I will trade a little bit of chaos for a little bit of student involvement. It’s pretty easy to run an orderly class, but if you want kids to really write and to really get involved, it gets messy.

  In the springtime I get to assign the kids to their next year’s English classes, and I bump everybody I think has even a hope of surviving academically up to level two.

  The following year, when I am no longer working in Newcastle, Tom will call me and tell me that Rick has been running around the school going, “Where’s Halpin? Bring back Halpin! What did you do with him?”

  The year after that, one of my students will mention that she is dating one of my period-five students from Newcastle. “He says he really liked you, that you were a great teacher.” It’s nice to hear this, but it also makes me sad. I knew nothing. I couldn’t keep order in the class. What does it say about his other teachers that this kid remembers me as a good one?

  14

  I am given a somewhat less than completely warm welcome from most of my colleagues in the English department. I have to “float”—that is to say, I don’t have my own classroom. Instead, I have my five classes in four different classrooms. This leads to a lot of lost papers.

  This also leads to some friction with my coworkers. I have my first-period class in the room usually occupied by Nancy, who writes all her notes for the rest of the day all over all of the blackboard space in the room before first period. “Oh, here,” she says, pointing to a space of about two square feet surrounded by the notes she will give her classes (the level-two and -one classes, of course—level three gets story time), “you can use this.” I am cowed by her experience and her thinly veiled hostility. She was the youngest teacher here before I came, and continues to show off her ever-thickening legs with short skirts; she seems, though she is forty-one, to have staked out the “I’m the young, hip one” territory and does not appreciate my intrusion on her turf. Because she intimidates me, and because, deep down, I know I am a fraud—I have no idea what I’m doing! I leave work every day with a complete blank in my mind about what’s going to happen tomorrow! I can’t stand up for myself or they might find me out!—I never tell her that she doesn’t own the room, that it’s a workspace and right now I’m working in it, that I’ll use however much of the goddamn blackboard I feel like, and she can like it or fucking lump it.

  Margaret comes to me and in no uncertain terms tells me that when the desks are moved out of the neat rows she has them in, it is not enough to simply put them back in rows—they must be back in the exact spot they left, that the corner of the third desk cannot be two inches to the left of the corner of the first desk.

  A couple of times Nancy is teaching next door to me and my class, for whatever reason, gets loud, and she does not have the courtesy to speak to me in the hallway—rather, she opens the connecting door and yells directly at my class. Stunned to be yelled at by “a real teacher,” my kids fall silent.

  So I am not exactly Mr. Popularity with my colleagues, and while Nancy is the only one who has actually come in and yelled at us, I know other people are disturbed by the noise in my classes. Sometimes this concern is justified—my classes are frequently out of control—but other times my students are loud because they’re excited about what we’re doing, and the idea that learning is anything but a quiet, orderly activity is completely foreign to these people, so they think I have a problem.

  And being friendly, helpful colleagues eager to help a young person succeed in the profession, they of course take me under their wing and offer to help me out. Ha! Actually they rat me out to the boss.

  One day after a department meeting Tim comes up to me and says, “Pete and I”—Pete is the principal—“are a little concerned about you. We understand you’ve been having some discipline problems.”

  “We understand”? What the hell does that mean? Well, it means my colleagues in abutting classrooms have been complaining about the noise. Back-stabbing old fuckers.

  “So I talked to Pete”—great, pal, when were you going to talk to me?—“and we agreed that I would get a sub for my classes tomorrow and follow you around to yours.”

  I somehow manage to respond, though I am so angry and humiliated I can’t believe I can actually speak.

  I go home and cry and cry as Kirsten—still my future wife, but it’s now less than a year in the future—tries to comfort me. “I fucking hate that place!” I sputter out between sobs. “I never want to go back there again!”

  At five forty-five the next morning I leave the house and go to do it again. Now, I like Tim, Tim has always been nice to me, but I’m really nervous. Before school starts I go to seek out Tom to ask him what he thinks this means politically. I pick Tom because I have two classes in his room and he has always been supportive, he is never a bite in the ass about what’s on the board or where the desks are, and the fact that he hates the student-fucker guy kind of makes me respect him.

  “Well,” he says, “Tim and Pete both really like you and want you to succeed. I don’t think they’re looking for documentation. I think they’re really trying to help. They’re just being incredibly clumsy about it.” Tom turns out to be right, and this conversation marks the beginning of what will become a really nice friendship. Tom and his wife, who is also a teacher, will frequently take me out for coffee after school while I’m waiting for my ride, and he proves to be someone I can really talk to and someone who continually encourages me. His reassurances—“You’re doing a great job, I can tell by what the students are saying,” “We really need more people like you who are serious about this job”—will sustain me through a very tough year.

  But right now I have to go through an entire day being observed. I don’t know if the students have some sort of extrasensory perception that makes them want to protect me, but all my classes go really well. The students do the activities, nobody misbehaves seriously, even period five goes smoothly, and at the end of the day I feel good. “I had a great time,” Tim says, “and
it looks like you’re doing a great job.”

  A few days later I get a follow-up visit from Pete, the principal. He comes only to my seventh-period class, level-three juniors. I really like this group, and they can be thoughtful and genuine and do really good work. They can also be gigantic pains in the ass. At the end of the third quarter I will have to cook the grades a little bit to make sure that the whole class doesn’t fail—once springtime hits, they will just stop turning in papers. But today Pete is here, and we are in the middle of a poetry unit, and I have prepared a little response sheet for them to do. I thought of this sheet at the last minute, and I am really nervous because I don’t have a clear plan of attack with the poem we are doing today.

  The poem is Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven,” in which the speaker goes and meets a little girl who insists over and over that there are seven children in her family, though it quickly becomes clear that five are dead.

  Pete loves to read aloud; unlike most principals, he covers detention himself, and spends the time reading aloud to the detainees—short stories, poems, or whatever he happens to be reading for pleasure at the time. He is good at it. I ask him to read “We Are Seven.” He does a fantastic job, reading the poem in a quiet, serious way and really bringing out the pathos.

  I give the kids their response questions and ask them to write. They tear into the paper like they are possessed. They cannot wait to get their thoughts down.

  After a few minutes I ask them to speak, and what happens next is probably the best class I will ever have. At least, eight years later, I will be unable to think of any single class I’ve had that even comes close.

  As they talk about their reactions to the poem, the students start bringing up family members they’ve lost—siblings, cousins, parents. They speak honestly and movingly, and, best of all from the perspective of an English teacher, they keep coming back to the poem—“It’s like it says here in line ten” or “When the little girl says …” By the end of the class, they have done as thorough a job analyzing the poem as I could have hoped for, and better yet, they’ve done it while talking about how the poem relates to their lives. Today my class was both rigorous and real, and I love my students. It is the class period that makes my year, that makes me think, well, maybe I’m not so bad at this job after all. And the principal was here to see it!

  Several weeks later, one of the vice principals will come into the same class for one of my official evaluation visits. He sits there for about ten minutes, which is the point at which I stop the class because it has become clear that not a single student in the room has read the five-page short story I assigned them for homework. I stop class and announce that since they have come prepared to do nothing, nothing is what we will do, and that means they cannot sleep, they cannot do homework, they cannot talk, they cannot do anything but sit there. I will try this trick a few more times in the coming years. It is really effective—it’s torture.

  At the end of the class, after the vice principal leaves, I say, “You know, I work really hard every day for you guys, and I get shit back from you.”

  This is not fair, because of course they have already given me what might be the best class of my career, but I am really angry and scared about the evaluation, and they are suitably shocked by my scatological language. It does improve their homework-completion rate slightly for a week or two.

  I end up getting a glowing evaluation. The vice principal basically has no choice in the matter. He is required by the contract to make three visits to my class, and he will never make another one. If he says so much as one negative thing, I would get to grieve the evaluation as unfair, and I would win automatically because he hasn’t made the visits. So I, a first-year teacher with a lot of potential, okay, but with a hell of a lot to learn, become perfect on this piece of paper.

  Tim’s shadowing me for a day, Pete’s “We Are Seven” class, and the vice principal’s ten-minute visit constitute the entirety of my supervision in my first year of teaching.

  15

  I get up at five. I’m usually home by about four-thirty, though when Bridget becomes track coach, this is more like five. I fall on the couch for a few minutes, make dinner, do an hour’s worth of reading papers or planning classes (I find that I can’t neglect this hour or I will wake up at four-thirty worrying about the papers I haven’t corrected or the class I haven’t planned), watch an hour of TV (by this point I am planning my week around Wednesday’s 90210, and I will continue to do so through Kelly’s illicit romance with Dylan, Kelly getting burned in a fire, Kelly joining a cult and trying to become Homo lucens, and will finally give up when either Kelly or her artist boyfriend or both are drug addicts), and fall into bed by nine-thirty.

  I never go out on Friday nights. When I get home on Friday, I sleep for an hour, and then I’m in bed by ten. I’m just starting to get interested in The X-Files, which comes on at nine during these years, then I quickly lose interest because I always fall asleep halfway through. Kirsten gets us tickets for a Friday-night performance of Handel’s Messiah. I fight to stay awake, battling to keep my chin off my chest even when the trumpet sounds and the dead shall be raised incorruptible.

  I feel kind of like a monk. A Beverly Hills 90210–watching monk, but a monk nonetheless. There are days when I can’t believe how much I suck at this job. Yet I never even consider throwing in the towel. I don’t really know why.

  I guess part of it is that usually, most of my day doesn’t really suck that bad. While the ninth-grade class will be a puzzle I can’t solve all year long, and the junior class, apart from the “We Are Seven” day, continues to give me fits with their refusal to do work, I do have three tenth-grade classes that actually go okay. These are the classes where I don’t have to spend the bulk of my time on discipline, so I learn, however slowly and painfully, what works and what doesn’t, what kind of questions will get interesting answers, and how to manage a group of kids every day.

  My first-period class is fine, but it never really gets exciting—it is never terrible but also never really soars. Whereas my last-period juniors are just about jumping out of their skin. I wonder what seeing these groups of kids at different times would do, and I even join the volunteer committee that is looking at new scheduling options. It forms after we get a presentation on block scheduling and its many advantages, and I am intrigued, so I join the committee only to find it packed with people who joined with the express purpose of making sure the schedule stays exactly as it is now until the end of time. I go to only two meetings, but the vice principal is the chair of the committee, so my participation gets me a nice couple of sentences in my end-of-year evaluation.

  My second period develops a very nice atmosphere. With a few exceptions, the kids in this class are the misfits, and I am always drawn to the misfits. They dress in black every day (they are friends with Henry but don’t share his penchant for either confrontation or self-mutilation), they smoke in the woods at lunch, they wear shockingly disgusting T-shirts for their favorite death-metal bands (one that stands out in my mind featured a skinless male corpse performing oral sex on a skinless female corpse—eccch), and they are smart and interesting. One day I find a bunch of them under the bleachers at a pep rally, and I say to them, “Look, I’d rather hang out under here too, but we all have to go join the crowd out there.” We emerge to find the student body screaming its approval as one of the football players stomps on a stuffed bulldog, which is the mascot of hated rival Northton High.

  My seventh-period class is my biggest—twenty-seven kids—but also the best. The kids do their work, mostly, and we always have lively discussions. In the beginning of the year, we are reading some horrible Puritan shit because I am plowing through the American-literature textbook, and they ask me why we have to read this, and I launch into this long thing about how literature helps you to understand a country, blah blah blah, and I don’t think they really buy it, but they are impressed enough by my sincerity to stay with me for the rest of the year. The ki
ds in this class are so good that, well, two of them skip school one day in order to get Pearl Jam tickets, and when they come back the following day with no documentation, no phone call from home, nothing, everybody just assumes they were sick and they get excused absences.

  My fondest memory of this class is watching Roman Polanski’s Macbeth with them. We had read the play, and I got this version without watching it first, so I didn’t really know about how the witches are naked and elderly. There are certainly communities in which showing this movie would have been enough to terminate my teaching career right there.

  Fortunately, Newcastle isn’t one of them, and so I don’t get in trouble for the geriatric breasts, though I do lose some sleep worrying whether I will. Anyway, at the end of the movie, Macbeth is decapitated on-screen and his head rolls across the courtyard, and when this happens, the entire class bellows its satisfaction, and when that happens, Pete the principal comes in and explains how they are having some kind of school-committee luncheon with the superintendent right over there in the library and how they can hear us bellowing and how he’s really delighted that they’re enjoying school, but he needs to ask them to be quiet. I think he means it. His face reminds me of nothing more than my own face when I had to chase the death-metal fans out from under the bleachers. He’d much rather be in here bellowing at Macbeth’s death, and he’d love for us to scream about it, but he has to take care of this political bullshit.

  Apparently he doesn’t do a good enough job taking care of political bullshit, but I’ll get to that shortly.

  So, yes, my ninth-graders are out of control, and yes, all my classes are way too easy, and yes, there are some days where I don’t feel like I’ve done anything worthwhile in any of my classes, but those days are rare. Most days, I feel like I get something done, and every single day I have at least some fun. Even when the juniors are driving me nuts, I get a kick out of them. Yes, I see teenagers at their worst, but I also see them at their best, and I get to laugh every day and I get a buzz off of work that I damn sure never had at the insurance company or the computer company.