Losing My Faculties: A Teacher's Story

by Brendan Halpin

  This woman has pissed me off for most of the year, but I really appreciate this. It’s just so rare to have somebody tell you that you’re good at your job, much less that they can tell just by talking to you that you have teaching in your blood. It’s a vote of confidence and a very nice way for the year to end.

  But not as nice as another party at Al’s house, which does happen, and which is fun in a kind of subdued way. Apparently this was a tough year for everybody. While everybody talks about how people were guzzling tequila in the pool until 3 A.M. last year, this year the party’s mood is pretty well established when Chip, the principal, comes in at about five, sits down on the grass, and falls fast asleep until seven. Still, the food and company are great, and there is something very nice about ending the year here, where it began.

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  And the next year begins similarly well. There are more meetings with the new transition department (it’s actually the same, except, with Jessie gone, I’m teaching both sections of transition English this year), but since we did orientation last year, it is less painful to plan everything this year. The same stupid scheduling thing has happened again, where we have faculty orientation and student orientation at the same time, and once again the faculty orientation is a complete waste of time—you know, we have meetings where we sit around and talk about what the mission means to us, and although I am a proud pin wearer, the mission frankly doesn’t mean shit to me; I only want to teach English.

  But then, after the pre-freshmen are gone, the entire faculty gets on a bus to New Hampshire to go to this big retreat-type thingy with a high-ropes course and that kind of thing, so we can build our teamwork skills.

  And while I think that the Nalgene-bottle-carrying crew (which constitutes about two thirds of the Better Than You faculty) tremendously overstates the team-building and self-esteem-building importance of a high-ropes course, and while I don’t really think climbing a rickety structure in a stupid, testicle-crunching harness is a metaphor for anything, I am game to try anyway. I hope to God it’s not a metaphor, because we go off to do our stupid activity, and it’s a partners thing, and nobody picks me for their partner. I feel like I’m back in the second grade and nobody’s picking me for the kickball team at recess just because I can’t kick, run, or catch. So that kind of sucks, but I do eventually get up on the ropes, and it’s fine, and then we break into department groups to try to build a raft to race around the pond, and this is actually a lot of fun, partly because the science department designs such a shitty raft that it falls apart as soon as it hits the water, and they all get soaked. English does respectably, but only because we have the office manager on our team to design a functional raft. During this exercise, I manage to scare the shit out of two new teachers by talking about how much Kathleen pissed me off, and I guess I sound pretty angry, so I come across as this scary, bitter fuck, which I guess is at least partially true, except for the scary part.

  After all the metaphorical bonding experiences are finished, we drink beer and play Frisbee and eat, and it is just a great time. The vibe is really relaxed, and it feels totally different from last year, but in a good way. There is no longer the tension of Kathleen intimidating everybody, of Wilhelmina reproaching everybody, and once again, I am really proud and happy to work with such a cool bunch of people. There follows another big party at Al’s house a few days later, and this is great too.

  I call Jessie up, and she asks how school is going. “Well,” I say, “you know that Spin Doctors song that starts out with ‘Been a whole lot easier since the bitch is gone’? I kind of can’t get that out of my head these days.”

  It gets harder much quicker, because my entire world falls apart on the second day of school when my wife, Kirsten, is diagnosed with breast cancer. I have already written a book about what this does to most of my life, but what it does to my teaching is, I think, to make it better. Or at least to make me appreciate it even more.

  Partially this is because I am now doing my second run-through of the ninth-grade curriculum, so it’s easier, but also it’s just that I have come to really treasure all the time I spend here, because even given the unpredictability of teenagers, what happens here is something I’m used to, something I’m good at, and something I enjoy. Whereas being a cancer spouse is not something that I’m used to or good at, and it damn sure isn’t any fun.

  My advisory is back, minus two, and I find myself delighted to see them. To my amazement, Diana, the girl who was suspended fourteen times last year, is now bugging other people about their grades, organizing stuff, and impressing the hell out of me with her maturity. I don’t know what happened over the summer, but I am psyched.

  She invites me to her sweet-sixteen party, and because I got to know her better than anyone else last year due to all the meetings and conversations we had, and because I feel kind of parental toward all of my advisees, but especially her because of all the suspensions, I decide to go. It’s kind of awkward at first, hanging out with my advisory in a social situation with no other adults I know around, but it’s basically okay. The event is at some Polish social club in the hall on the second floor. On the first floor they have a bar. Early in the evening, while we’re standing on the street, a guy staggers out of the bar, completely shitfaced. Ralph, one of my advisees, makes somebody take a picture with me, Ralph, and the drunk guy, who doesn’t even seem to know what happens. The drunk guy staggers a few steps down the street, then falls. I run into the bar and say to the bartender, “Hey, that guy who just left is lying on the sidewalk out there, he’s, like, so drunk he can’t walk, do you think you could call him a taxi or something?”

  The guy looks at me like I’m both annoying and stupid and offers the really spectacular non sequitur, “That guy’s not Polish,” before walking down to the end of the bar. When I go back outside, the non-Polish guy (who, by the way, spoke no English and was babbling in an obviously Slavic tongue, but, okay, whatever, isn’t Polish) has managed to get about three blocks down the road under his own power.

  Inside, I sit at a table between Will and Ralph, and we start making jokes about how Diana and her attendants are really, really late, and when a bunch of Diana’s relatives bring in trays of food that are meant for after the birthday girl arrives, Ralph and Will start to goad each other into stealing a plate and bringing it back to the table, and I alternate between wanting to encourage them and feeling a responsibility to be an authority figure, so I smile and say nothing.

  When the birthday party finally arrives, I find myself moved by an almost parental pride as boys and girls that I’ve only ever seen in the school uniform of a white shirt and dark pants proceed in slowly wearing poofy dresses and tuxedos. But it’s getting late, and after wishing Diana a happy birthday, I sneak off as Will, Ralph, and everybody else heads for the food. It has been fun to see my advisees in this non-school situation, and as much as I have liked students at other schools, I just never would have gone to something like this even if I’d been invited. It would have seemed weird, but now it just feels like the right thing to do.

  So that’s fun, and the advisory, though two members still hate each other because of somebody’s boyfriend two years ago, gets a lot mellower, and I really enjoy hanging out with them. We are even able to have conversations sometimes, which is remarkable. When it’s our turn to present a town-meeting topic, we present the idea that town meeting should be renamed “assembly,” because town meeting is a decision-making body, and this is just, well, an assembly. I think it gets voted down, but nobody cares about anything that happens in town meeting anyway. Last year I used to get really annoyed because some of the boys in my advisory would sit there and act like total jackasses throughout the whole thing, but I am slowly coming around to their point of view about the importance of this time.

  They throw me a little birthday party in November, and I am really touched, especially remembering the way they hardly acknowledged my existence (in Denise’s case literally) at the beginning of last ye
ar.

  So it is a constant comfort to see these kids first thing in the morning, and to think about their problems in math or science or whatever as opposed to my problems. At the end of the year, somebody has screwed up the calendar and not built in any snow days (a really dumb mistake to make in Massachusetts), so we have to have two days of school after grades are in and exams are done. School must be open for four hours to satisfy the state, even though we have no classes. Instead we hang out in advisory groups. I bring my PlayStation, and we sit in the basement room playing video games, which certainly takes the sting out of having to have these two ridiculous days. In fact, it’s really fun.

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  With Kirsten in and out of the hospital for cancer treatment, I go through most of my days in a fear- and sleep-deprivation-induced fog, but I manage to do a pretty good job with my classes. It quickly becomes clear that one of my two English classes is “the loud class” and the other is “the quiet class,” and this is how we refer to them in transition meetings for the rest of the year. I can’t believe how much work we can get done in the quiet class—how awesomely cooperative they are, what great work they do. It’s fantastic.

  The loud class, on the other hand, is frequently derailed by the ever-shifting social politics of five girls—sometimes it’s four against one, sometimes it’s three against two, but there’s always some sort of problem, and none of these girls are shy about stopping class right in the middle to yell across the room, “I hear what you’re saying over there, and you better shut up, ’cause you run your mouth too much, you’re gonna get slapped!” This leads, predictably, to “No, you better shut up, why don’t you mind your business?” And so on. While it is kind of interesting to see how two girls who were allies yesterday could be yelling this at each other today (and then be allies again the day after that), it does kind of suck. In fact, there are many days when I feel like it’s the quiet class that keeps me from feeling like I’m not cut out for this work. I mean, we do get stuff done in the loud class, but we are three days to a week behind the other class for the whole year because I just can’t get them to stop yelling at each other.

  In early October the transition department takes both classes to a high-ropes course for a beautiful team-bonding, metaphor-for-life experience. It ends up sucking horribly—it is poorly planned, and they have us doing these really hard activities: one is this thing where you have to climb up a phone pole and then jump off, trusting the people on the ground to pull hard enough on the rope attached to your harness that you won’t splat on the ground. Several kids cry. On top of this, one of the counselors is terribly inappropriate—he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s the authority here, so he acts like one of the kids, wrestling with the boys, flirting with the girls, teasing Talia about her mustache, and, when Shakila refuses to climb the phone pole, he gets in her face and screams, “That’s bullshit! Everybody climbs!” To her credit, Shakila does what I am too chickenshit to do—she yells back at the guy before running off to cry.

  I just stand there dumbfounded and never speak up when this guy behaves so inappropriately. I have all kinds of justifications for this—we’re in this weird situation off in the woods where we are depending on this guy, so I’m intimidated; he makes some speech at the beginning about how the fact that he is black means that he is uniquely qualified to work with these students, so then challenging him would set up an uncomfortable racial dynamic in addition to the uncomfortable “challenging the authority” dynamic, but this is a complete failure on my part to stand up and do what’s right. I pride myself on having all this affection for the kids, but when it comes to having to do something really awkward and difficult in order to protect them, I drop the ball.

  Anyway, the kids bounce back from this experience very quickly, and the people who run the place eventually give us a free return trip (but not, unfortunately, our money back) after Lisa, the study-skills teacher and organizer of the trip, complains in writing and via phone calls about how inappropriate and horrible the whole thing was.

  Soon after this, we do our big October parent thing, and this time I decide that we should do scenes from Romeo and Juliet, so we perform them at night in the auditorium. Many people forget their lines, but it ends up being a pretty big success, for much the same reason that last year’s trial of George was a success. One immediate effect is that a girl who had previously been very quiet and shy suddenly comes out of her shell the very day after the performances. This is great, except that it’s not long before she joins in on the screaming across the room in the loud class. D’oh.

  Overall, though, I follow the same curriculum as last year, so that’s easier, and the quiet class continues to have a rare and perfect balance of personalities, so that, for example, Jack, who is a very young ninth-grader who seems to be popping out of his seat every ten seconds to do something goofy, never really gets out of hand here because he looks up to Kadeem, who is not only very cool but also very smart and serious and who can do more for Jack’s behavior with one disapproving look than I can by talking to him for an hour.

  Every year every English student at Better Than You has to pass a writing exam in order to be promoted to the next grade, and my quiet class becomes the only English class in the history of the school in which every student passes the writing exam on the first try. I would love to say that this is due to my incredible teaching skills—I mean, I would really love to be able to say that—but I have the loud class and their much lower initial passing rate to keep me humble. The fact is that a lot of what happens in the classroom just depends on the chemistry of the group that gets thrown together, and with this group, we got very lucky.

  Even the loud class, though, ends up doing two more weeks of work (enough time to, grudgingly, do a half-assed job of Julius Caesar, so now I can say I did it and I’m a team player, though it still sucks and bores the hell out of both classes) than last year’s class, which I really can’t figure. I guess that it’s partially due to me not floundering as much and just moving confidently from one thing to the next, skipping stuff that doesn’t work, and knowing where to focus my energy. Or maybe it’s just luck. Who knows.

  At the end of every day, Lisa runs a knitting elective in my classroom, and while Kirsten is in the hospital, I always end up coming back from my daily visit during this class. It’s mostly kids I’ve taught before, and everybody is just really nice to me when I walk in, and Lisa and a few of her students are among the very few people (Alison and Sydney from the transition department are others) who get the joke and agree to take the CHEMOTHERAPY stickers from the roll I steal from Kirsten’s hospital room. There is a great feeling here, and partially it’s because Lisa is running a very relaxed class teaching something she loves, but I also just really appreciate the low-key kindness I get from the students every day. I’m not always in the best mental shape when I come back from the hospital, and coming in here with these kids always reminds me why I like working here, how much I like the kids, and how being a teacher is as beneficial to me as it is to my students. If not, you know, more.

  Apart from my classes and my advisory going well, random kids and adults throughout the school have been really nice to me. I expect it from the adults, but I’m surprised at how much I get it from the kids. One kid I know only from having proctored his study hall in the first trimester of last year will periodically stop and ask, “How’s your wife?” I always appreciate this even if I don’t have anything new to say.

  So at the end of the year, as we’re wrapping it all up and having our final town meeting, I ask Chip if I can speak. I get up (to wild cheers led by my advisory, which I am not above loving for shameful, egotistical reasons) and say, “Back in October, I was supposed to lead an inspirational moment at town meeting, but I, well, I blew it off, because I wasn’t feeling very inspirational at the time. Actually, it was about all I could do to get out of bed. As many of you know, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer this year. She had a really punishing treatment that re
quired her to be in the hospital for six weeks in December and January, including Christmas. So it’s been a really tough year for me and my family, but one of the things that has really helped me has been all of the love and support I have gotten from my coworkers, my students, my advisory, and the whole Better Than You Community. So I just wanted to thank you for all of your support this year. I also want to let you know that my wife recently had a scan, and there is currently no trace of cancer in her body. Thank you.”

  Everybody applauds, and I feel incredibly grateful to be a part of a place like this. Yes, there are a lot of things that are fucked up, but, fucked up or not, this place is a community in a way that no other workplace I’ve ever been in can touch.

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  Unfortunately, there are storm clouds on the horizon. Back in January of this same year, I take a day off when Kirsten comes out of the hospital, and I miss all kinds of drama when Rachael, our invisible cofounder, comes in and tells everybody how the board has decided that we need a superintendent. As a charter school, we are legally a school district as well as just a school, and so Chip, our principal, has to do all the reporting-this-and-that-and-the-other-thing-to-the-state paperwork that a superintendent of schools does for a school district as well as all the running-the-school stuff that a principal does for a school. According to Rachael and Chip, Chip can’t really do both jobs, so we need a superintendent to take over those duties. Only, you know, we are an innovative charter school, so we’re going to call him a president.

  It’s adding a layer of bureaucracy, but more than that, it’s changing the supposed focus of the school, because no superintendent is going to be content with just doing paperwork for the state and raising money; a superintendent will want to run things. Superintendents want to issue pointless orders and start bogus “initiatives,” like the Tight-Panted Southerner Education System training I did at Northton. This is how they justify their salaries and prove they are in charge. Only we are supposed to be in charge. Right? I mean, isn’t that the whole point of this school? I can’t tell if this is a terrible failure of imagination and heart or a carefully planned evil plot cooked up by Rachael to wreck the vision of the school. I try to believe it’s the former, but our next meeting on this topic gives me a strange sense that the evil-plot theory is closer to the truth.