Losing My Faculties: A Teacher's Story

by Brendan Halpin

  “I love you, Mr. Halpin!” she calls after me.

  “Of course you do.” I try say it in a grumble, but of course I’m pleased and have a hard time maintaining my grumpy front.

  “Mr. Halpin!” Chaka calls out. “Remember!” She puts her palm over her mouth and calls out in an unnatural, too high, and hard-to-identify voice, “‘Shut up! This is corny!’ Just keep doing that for two weeks!”

  I laugh, and they laugh, and I tell her I probably should.

  But of course I don’t.

  I stumble to the subway, exhausted, come home, flop on the couch, and am asleep in seconds.

  56

  After having it out with Big Daddy in the meeting, I am pretty much spent. (I have been trying all year to start a movement to call Dr. Watkins simply “the Fat Man,” possibly as an homage to Jake and the Fatman, which is a show I never actually watched, but that’s the way my mind works. Someone else comes up with “Big Daddy,” and for some reason this ends up sticking.) I am very nervous about going to work on Monday. Big Daddy sees me in the hall first thing Monday morning and shakes my hand. I guess this is his way of telling me that we can still be civil. I am such a sucker that I appreciate it.

  We have our two weeks of meetings. We spend a couple days on discipline, which are sort of interesting and possibly helpful, but Erik, the Dean of Yelling at Kids, does a completely typical administrator thing and turns this complicated stuff about how to best relate to kids into a three-copy carbon form that we’re to fill out when sending a kid to him detailing, for example, what strategies we used to try to engage the student. So if a kid tells another kid to fuck off, that he’s going to get his ass beat, I am supposed to spend approximately five minutes filling out a carbon form detailing what strategies I used to engage the student.

  Our other big training comes from the Institute for Good Teaching and is led by a perfectly nice woman, but it’s a rehash of material that anybody who went to ed school has learned already. And nobody is allowed to get out of it, even people who have taken this exact training before. “We paid a lot of money for this,” they are told. So that’s pretty much a waste of time, but at least the presenter is a former teacher and not condescending or insulting like the Buzzword Institute guys, and she bakes for us a couple of times, which puts her program head and shoulders over pretty much any other professional-development program I’ve ever been made to suffer through.

  Once our two weeks of meetings are over, life here at Better Than You just gets worse and worse. I try to just focus on my classes, on teaching every day and getting through it, but it gets harder and harder as stupider and stupider shit happens.

  We have a mediated diversity meeting, which ends up being just as stupid and pointless as the unmediated ones last year except without the screaming, and in which somebody I thought was my friend tells me, in essence, that she doesn’t think white people should teach kids of color. It hurts. Hooray for diversity.

  The deadline comes for us to apply for our jobs back. I do not write in “Bite me.” I just check “No” and have done with it. I am really glad, because when the interviews start, morale, which I thought couldn’t get much lower, dives to previously undiscovered depths. The interviews are conducted by the president’s assistant for parent and community relations, Big Daddy’s right-hand woman, whom I have been afraid of since day one because she is one of those people who hide their desire to eviscerate you with gooey, exaggerated niceness. Creepy. Chip, our principal, sits in on the interviews and says nothing, effectively announcing that his is a purely ceremonial position these days.

  The interviews, or so I’m told, consist of Ms. Barracuda asking three questions: Do you want to work here, are you willing to do the job, and, um, I have some kind of mental block about the third one, though people have told it to me a hundred times. In any case, you’ll have to trust me that it’s just as inane as the rest of them. It is made clear that the teachers’ evaluations do not figure in this process.

  So what, exactly, is happening here? Presumably everybody is going to give the same answers to those three questions. So what are the criteria for being hired? Nobody knows. Some people leave the interviews in tears, some people say they feel like they’re about to go postal, others say they felt like they were in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

  After undergoing this systematic humiliation, candidates are told they will have a decision in three to five business days. When people get their “congratulations” letters a few days later, they laugh bitterly and wave them around the teachers’ room. I’m in there as Pain gets hers, and after Ms. Barracuda leaves, she says, “Hey! Congratulations! Lucky me!” and laughs before throwing the letter in the garbage.

  Others don’t get the chance to trash the letters. Al and Glenn get “fuck you” letters instead. (Okay, they don’t really say “Fuck you.” They essentially say, “Thanks but no thanks” and probably end with “Govern yourself accordingly,” which is Smiley Barracuda’s favorite non sequitur ending to every incomprehensible communication she issues. No explanation is given for why these guys aren’t hired back—in fact, Al explicitly asks if there is something wrong with his job performance, and Big Daddy says no. Smiley Barracuda gives Glenn his letter right before class starts. Classy.

  This has a pretty predictable effect on people. We’re all sad to see what has happened to our school, to our friends, and to our students, but we’re also scarily full of rage. Most of us don’t take it out on the students, but it seems like the ambient level of aggression rises. At one point we have three fights in two days. Well, the students do. We don’t actually fight—we just want to.

  I am concerned that one of my advisees is going to push someone’s button the wrong way and end up on the wrong side of a confrontation with a faculty member. I close the door to the room, as usual, and get all of their attention at once, which is a lot less usual—most often it’s just random conversation time in here—and I tell them, “You know when one of your friends is having a bad day, and they might tell you something that pisses you off, but you just leave it alone and give them some space? You should assume that every adult in this building is like that right now.”

  Nobody gets suspended that week, so I guess it works.

  The center (or, I suppose, the centre, if you wanna be persnickety about the Yeats allusion) cannot hold, and things start falling apart all over. We take a bunch of new students in February, which we’ve never done before but which we’re doing now, I assume, because the state does a head count on February 15 and gives us nine thousand bucks for every warm body we have enrolled. Two of them disrupt their classes every day, one of them gets into several fights and then leaves school altogether, and another is a really sweet kid who can’t do math because she literally doesn’t know how to count.

  So classes that used to work well kind of stop working when we throw these kids into them (including my beloved first period, which remains beloved but stops being the easiest class to teach and becomes a huge challenge). We don’t have enough resources to provide a self-contained class for a kid who can’t count or a kid with serious behavioral issues, so things just get chaotic.

  We used to send kids home for saying the word “nigger.” It was a rule that was held over from the five o’clock faculty-meeting guy, who, let’s remember, is African-American. Erik, who has failed for three years to convince black kids to respect him because he’s black and who talks about empowerment a lot (I have a very vivid memory of sitting with Diana after a suspension meeting and having her say, “I hate it when he starts talking all that black shit! He’s corny!”), starts telling kids that they can’t say the word because it makes white people uncomfortable and sending them right back to class. It’s not long before kids are yelling it in the hall.

  Martine, one of my advisees with great grades and potential, tells me one morning that three of her six college applications are basically toilet paper because our “dean/college counselor/‘Mommy’” coun
seled her not to take the SAT IIs, and the schools require them. Oops.

  Diana comes to me in tears one day because one college is telling her she has to have a letter explaining that she has an incomplete for gym on her transcript because of a medical excuse. We got the principal to write a letter explaining the situation, and he gave it to the “college counselor,” who is refusing to fax it to the college. Diana is beside herself; her deadline is approaching.

  I go to the college counselor’s office. “Hey,” I say. “I’m just faxing some stuff over to Nice Little College in the Shadow of the Famous University. Can I have a copy of the letter Chip wrote about the gym thing?”

  “No,” she says. “They don’t need that. And in the future, refer all these requests to me.”

  I feel like referring her ass to my foot, but I refrain from saying anything because she’s mean and I’m terrified of her. I feel bad about being a wuss and not going toe-to-toe with this woman, but I figure that butting heads with her will get me a sore head and Nice Little College still won’t know why Diana didn’t finish gym class.

  I have a brainstorm. I go to Chip and say, “Hey, thanks for writing that letter for Diana.”

  “Oh, sure, no problem,” he says.

  “Hey, can I have a copy for my advisory files?” I ask.

  “Yeah, sure, I’ll print you up another one right now.” I know that his brain must really be addled from his transformation into a powerless figurehead, because anybody who knows me knows that my filing system consists of piles of crap on my desk that I move wholesale into empty file drawers at irregular intervals, or maybe he goes for it because he is super organized and his desire for everybody to have advisory files overrides the evidence of his senses, but whatever the case, he gives it to me, and I run up to the teachers’ room, where the fax machine is.

  “Watch the door!” I stage-whisper to Alison, who’s in there making copies. “I’m trying to get one of my advisees into college, and I don’t want our college counselor to find out!”

  Two days later the college counselor gives Diana the letter she wouldn’t release when Diana was asking for it in tears. What the hell is that about?

  I have an almost identical experience with our college counselor and one of my advisees’ special-ed records; she told Karin that if she were a college admissions counselor, she wouldn’t take a second look at her application if she included that stuff because she’d just be announcing that she was a problem student. The admissions offices at the colleges felt quite differently, and I participate in another mad scramble to get information into an admissions office without alerting our college counselor.

  Every day I think it’s gotten as bad as it can get, and every day it gets worse. One of my senior students is manipulated into withdrawing at the beginning of the third trimester because he’s in his fifth year and he’s not going to graduate. They say it’s his decision, but when he breaks the news to me in the middle of my senior class, tears in his eyes, he says, “They say it’s time for me to go.”

  One of the original five teachers of the school, who now mostly does administrative stuff, is forced out after losing some kind of power struggle that I can’t even pretend to understand but that has something to do with control of all that teacher-training money. But he’s team-teaching the senior math class, and Michelle, the other teacher, is practically in tears after he announces that the administration will no longer allow him to do this. “I don’t know what to do,” she says. “I was counting on him.”

  Probably the unkindest cut comes when Roberta, who has been a very vocal critic of the administration, at least behind closed doors, and who I trusted so much I put her on my e-mail list (I send occasional snide e-mails to a variety of my colleagues under the pseudonym “Lou Garou,” which is a homonym for the French word for “werewolf” and the best use I’ve made of my high school French in years), is going to become a dean, joining the bloated administration she’s hated all year. I talk to her about it, and it seems pretty clear that it’s a mixture of ambition and arrogance—she wants the administrative experience so she can be better qualified to start her own school, and she believes (wrongly, I think) that she is pure and bigger than the corrupt power structure, that she will be able to keep it at bay rather than be tainted by it.

  The rumor mill says the administration is reading our e-mails. It would make sense, since there are freaking eight of them and they are never around and don’t really seem to do anything. Roberta is not officially part of the administration yet, but of course she is unofficially, and she is one of the few people who have the technological capability to do this, so I ask her about it in front of everybody in a department meeting. She is either shocked or feigns shock very well. I hope it’s the latter—she’ll need that kind of duplicity if she’s going to be an effective school administrator. She says she hasn’t heard any such thing and would be very surprised if it were true.

  At the end of the meeting, Nina, a student teacher, comes over to me and whispers, “They are absolutely reading our e-mail. Don’t you believe that bullshit for a second.”

  I write a fake e-mail to the Globe’s education reporter and leave it in my in box. When opened, it says, “Gotcha! Just wanted to see if you weasels are really reading my e-mail.” Later in the day I get terrified imagining that I’ll have to have a meeting where Big Daddy yells at me if they actually do read it, so I delete it. (Big Daddy is a fantastically effective bully. I remain terrified of him yelling at me, even though it’s already happened once and it wasn’t so bad.)

  I go home and eat too much and drink too much and don’t sleep enough, which is pretty much what I do when I’m under stress. It’s funny—I have enough money from the book I wrote while Kirsten was in treatment that I can afford to be unemployed for a while if I have to. I know I am leaving, so there is really nothing they can do to me, and yet every morning I am filled with dread as I head into school. It’s only nine more weeks, but how the hell am I going to get through it if some new shitty thing happens every day, if I have to watch my friends crying, if I spend my time talking to people I like about how miserable we all are?

  When Brad came into my senior class crying after having “decided” to leave school, the rest of the kids were a mess. I gave them a nice little speech about how I know how hard it is to focus when your friends are crying, and that I was not talking out of any nether orifices when I said that because I saw friends of mine on the staff crying all the time, but that we all had to focus on getting our stuff done and getting out of here intact.

  It was a good speech, especially for being completely off the cuff when I was also upset, but it was kind of bullshit. I can hold it together pretty well most of the time, but then I’m wide awake at 3 A.M. wondering how the hell I’m going to walk into this place the next morning.

  One Thursday I have an absurd epiphany: perhaps God himself speaks to me, because I hear in my head a voice, not still or small but more like the kind that advertises monster truck rallies on TV, saying, “Rock.” Well, actually, it sounds more like “RRRROCCKK!”

  I pick up the Guns N’ Roses CD Appetite for Destruction and listen to “Paradise City” and “Sweet Child o’ Mine” (which are really the only listenable tracks on the whole thing, which is tragic, because if every song was as good as those two, that record would be like the bible of rock) over and over on my forty-five-minute walk to work, and when I get there, I have a fully formed philosophy: Less Talk, More Rock.

  I announce it to my pals in the windowless basement room and cue up the two good GNR songs again. I’m afraid they’re going to be appalled, but surprisingly, they are all really into the music. Michelle does a strange movement that I think is an attempted Axl Rose; serpentine mike-hump, and I call out, “Michelle, did you just attempt a double Axl?” She confesses she was only trying to crack her back.

  I can’t really articulate my epiphany enough to make it comprehensible (and this, after all, would violate an essential part of the philoso
phy), but I think what it means is that I have to just teach my classes and not really hang out talking about the school anymore. I just have to keep my head down. And also bang it whenever possible. For some reason, Axl groaning out of my tinny computer speakers just sets a strangely upbeat tone. “This is going to make my whole day,” Carol says, smiling.

  It sounds absurd and adolescent, but what the hell, I work in a high school, and at least for a day, I talk less and rock more, and I feel a whole hell of a lot better.

  This lasts about three days, and then I am back to feeling a misery so strong that no amount of rock can lift me out.

  57

  Should I keep teaching? I think a lot about this question. I talk to some guy who runs a struggling nonprofit that does college counseling (I sent many of my advisees there to get some real college counseling, and I’m really glad I did, since they were the ones who really caught the mistake with Karin’s special-ed records) about adding a writing component to his program. We have two meetings in which he is incredibly enthusiastic, and then he calls me up and tells me that it’s pretty much all he can do to run the program he’s already running and he’s not ready to add something new.

  One Sunday I see an ad for a writer for video-game manuals, and I seriously consider applying, despite the fact that writing videogame manuals is lower even than being a poet in terms of the number of people who are likely to ever read a word you write. But what the hell, I think, I’d probably get paid to play a lot of video games, and I wouldn’t have to deal with this heartbreaking bullshit.