Schooled

by Anisha Lakhani

  “Then…how do I assess?” I felt like I was in the Twilight Teaching Zone.

  “With comments,” Harold responded, shaking his head in frustration. “Didn’t you read any of the information about our school on the Web site? Grades are…titles. We avoid titles here at Langdon. We prefer to give valuable comments to our parent body.”

  “So the report cards just have comments about the students?” I asked curiously.

  “Report cards?” Harold sniffed in disgust. “Report cards are for…public schools. We write informative essays on each of our students. With constructive comments.”

  Essays? On all fifty of my students? How long would that take?

  “Don’t worry, though. You can take your laptop home. That’s what we use them for.”

  And just like that, I was a prisoner of my two-thousand-dollar laptop.

  7

  Langdon Hall on the first day of school was as crowded as Morningside Heights on graduation day. Black Lincoln Town Cars were double-, triple-, quadruple-parked with not a traffic cop in sight. A line of bored-looking Latinas (nannies? housekeepers?) held the leashes of what seemed like an endless shih tzu and Yorkie parade. The women chatted to each other in Spanish as they waved good-bye to their young human charges, who greeted each other with the excitement that only the first day of school can provide. Amid all this bustle…the Langdon Hall mothers. These women—average height five-foot-seven, average weight 108—had assembled in loose packs of three and four. Some groups sported soft yoga whites that clung to their itsy-bitsy butt cheeks, others wore low-slung jeans with casual but expensive-looking T-shirts, while still others had slipped on trendy summer dresses with flip-flops. They looked like a casting call for a L’Oreal shampoo commercial. The highlights on these women—each and every one—were breathtaking. Everywhere I looked, hair seemed to be cascading, curling, and shimmering in the early September sunlight. And that’s not all that shimmered. Each woman wore an enormous engagement ring. Four-, five-, and six-carat emerald-cut diamonds gleamed and twinkled as they waved bye-bye to their darlings. I was mesmerized.

  “Wait till you see the dads.”

  I whirled around and there was Sarah smiling kindly at me. She nodded toward the scene and laughed. “I never get used to it either. It’s quite a world, isn’t it? Shall we dive in?”

  “You first,” I offered weakly, and watched Sarah approach a semicircle of women. The mothers closed in on her like paparazzi, surrounding her and giving her air kisses as if a celebrity were in their midst. Sarah looked positively thrilled, and I felt a surge of happiness. These mothers were wonderful! Any worries I had of teachers being treated like second-class citizens at Langdon were immediately eased. The families obviously respected us and knew that we were responsible for their children’s education.

  “Ahh, yes, our mothers do love Ms. Waters,” Damian Oren sniggered behind me.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, more than a little annoyed with his constant pessimism. These mothers seemed to genuinely love Sarah.

  “She tells them all that their children are geniuses,” he responded simply. “Even the dumb asses.” With a shrug, he turned to watch Dr. Blumenfeld shake the hand of an adorable middle-school girl, and his face wrinkled in disgust. “She’s such a phony I can’t take it.”

  I didn’t see anything insincere about the way Dr. Blumenfeld shook the child’s hand. It was sweet, actually, that she took the time to personally greet all the students. I decided to take Damian’s comments with a grain of salt and vowed never to become so jaded.

  “Okay, Anna,” he continued ominously, “let’s do this—welcome to Dante’s first level—the Langdon Hall Inferno!” Clucking at his own cleverness, Damian walked toward the building. I followed him warily and felt a hundred eyes boring into the back of my head as I shook Dr. Blumenfeld’s hand.

  “Welcome to your first official day,” she said kindly. And right then and there I decided to stay clear of Damian. He was a creep. This woman had given me a chance and had really done nothing unkind or phony. I was capable of making my own decisions. I entered the building, my head held high. Wait…did one of the mothers say something about me and Puerto Vallarta?

  I stood near the entrance of my classroom, feeling like a Broadway actress on opening night. The scene I had just witnessed was a mere peep from behind the curtains. The moment had arrived and my performance was finally about to begin.

  Congratulating myself for having come in during the long weekend to make photocopies of all my handouts, I felt ready to teach my first lesson. I refused to follow in Harold’s footsteps. I had a full lesson prepared that required me to teach the class from beginning to end. My inexperience at teaching aside, I was adamant that seventh graders did not need to work on projects in the library so that they could become independent. They needed to be taught. In the classroom. By their teacher.

  Before I could even extend my hand to shake each student’s hand as I had planned, the seventh graders were upon me.

  “THERE SHE IS!!!”

  “Omigod, she’s the new teacher!”

  “She’s, like, so young!”

  “She’s, like, our age!”

  A deluge of students burst through the door, forming a circle around me. They backed me up against the chalkboard. I felt old and frumpy as twelve-year-old girls wearing neon Juicy skirts and Chanel ballet slippers raised their perfectly arched eyebrows at me. Did they wax? The boys—equally stunning—were in head-to-toe Abercrombie with white iPod strings dangling from their necks. It was as if an enormous circle of Ralph Lauren mini models were just breaking for lunch—and I was lunch.

  Hi!” I announced loudly, stepping out of the circle with a feigned confidence. With trembling knees, I walked to the board to write my name.

  “WE ALREADY KNOW WHO YOU ARE!” Three girls shouted in unison, and if they had said they were all called Heather I swear to God I wouldn’t have blinked.

  “What are your names?” I asked sweetly, irritated with myself as I tried to step back from the ever-growing circle around me. This wasn’t part of my lesson! Oh, God. I didn’t even remember my lesson.

  “Charlotte.”

  “Blair.”

  “Madeline.”

  I have to admit I gave Charlotte a closer look. She stared at me with wide, innocent blue eyes and the very idea that she even knew what the words blow job meant seemed ludicrous.

  “Okay, girls,” I ventured cautiously, “so you know all about me, huh?”

  “YEAH! You’re the new young teacher. You’re pretty like Ms. Abrahams. You’re going to teach English!” In spite of myself, I felt a foolish grin spread across my face. They thought I was pretty!

  “Um, Ms. Taggert?”

  A scrawny, red-haired girl with big braces and even bigger glasses peered intently at me. Poor thing. I would do my best to make this awkward little girl feel at home in my class.

  “My name is Jessica Landau,” she said confidently. “I just wanted you to know that Langdon Hall does not allow teachers to assign homework on Yom Kippur.” Jessica made this announcement in a tone that would have humbled even the most stuck-up woman in my mother’s bridge circle. So much for awkwardness. Jessica Landau…I did a furious search in my mental catalog of student files: Mother. Lesbian. And Yom Kippur?! That was, like, weeks away! Who was this kid?

  “Excuse me?” I asked, trying to keep the sarcasm from my voice.

  “Well,” Jessica continued, pulling out a pink homework notebook with little glitter star stickers all over the front, “I just wanted to give you advance warning.” She smiled frostily and held up her notebook to indicate the auspicious day on which I was not, under any circumstances, to give homework.

  “Thank you, Jessica. I’ll do my best to remember.” I forced myself to smile.

  A boy with sandy-brown hair and enormous brown eyes stepped in front of Jessica. “Um, my mother wanted you to know that my bar mitzvah is coming up and you should give me my work in advance so I can
do it,” he blurted. Before I could respond to his request, the group of seventh-graders all turned their attention to him.

  “Omigod, Harry, when is your service?!”

  “Next Saturday!”

  “Shut up!”

  “Seriously!”

  “Where?”

  “Temple Emanu-El.”

  “Sweet! Mine, too!” The voices came from every direction. I turned my head back and forth, trying to keep up. It was like watching the U.S. Open. My neck hurt.

  “Are there so many bar mitzvahs coming up?” I blurted, a bit shocked. Nobody had warned me about this seventh-grade phenomenon.

  “Bat,” Blair spat out.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Bat. Boys have Bar. Girls have Bat.”

  Cover-of-Teen Vogue Blair. No wonder. She looked like she was already eighteen. Only the first day and already I felt as if I might hate one of my students just a little bit. That couldn’t be good.

  “I’m not having a bar mitzvah, but I have a chess tournament in a week so I may not be able to do my work then,” said a small girl wearing tight black pants with the words SO LOW stretched out across her butt. I had never seen these before. So many of the girls were wearing the same pants in different colors that I wondered if this was a brand beyond Juicy. Did the name not strike any of their parents as inappropriate?

  “And next weekend I have a riding tournament so I’ll be out of town and—”

  “EXCUUUSSE ME!” I suddenly shouted. I had to remind them who was boss. Oh no! Had I yelled? Yes, I really had. I had yelled. I really had not wanted to yell. I had not wanted to be a yeller! I took a step boldly into the circle and started speaking as quickly as I could.

  “Okay, here are a few things you need to know about me. One, you’ll be learning a lot. Two, we’re going to have fun. Three, I give a lot of homework. And finally, if you ever have an individual problem about why you can or cannot do your work, then please speak to me individually after class. Right now, I would like you to all take your seats. I would like to begin class.”

  After a moment of silence, my students began moving reluctantly toward the conference table. I noticed a few of them give each other little glances with raised eyebrows.

  “Please just find a seat, okay?” I begged, absolutely detesting myself for being so nervous.

  “Where?” Jessica asked.

  “At the table,” I responded stupidly.

  “Um, yeah, we figured that one out. I meant, like, do we have assigned seats?” Jessica asked, giving Charlotte a little wink. I did not like that wink one little bit. If I didn’t come up with a clever response, I was going to lose control.

  Inspiration.

  “This is a progressive school, Jessica,” I replied slowly, giving her a knowing look. “I believe in giving my students the freedom to sit where they want with the assumption that they will sit in a place which will not cause them to be distracted. So I hope you, and everyone else, will think carefully about where you choose to sit each day.”

  They bought it. They had been hearing that word progressive since kindergarten, and I had a feeling that they understood it about as much as I did. But it was impressive enough to shut them all up. I made a mental note to store the word and use it for future ammunition. I watched with increasing wonder as they claimed their seats, marking their territories with BlackBerrys, cell phones, and iPods. The table looked like the scene of an illicit smuggling den, but these little muggers obviously saw nothing out of the ordinary.

  “I’d like to start my class with a reading of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken,’” I announced brightly after they were all sitting down.

  “That’s a poem about this dude in front of two roads. My brother told me every teacher is, like, obsessed with it.” I looked in the direction of the latest disruption. It was peanut-allergies Benjamin.

  “Benjamin, I need you to raise your hand when you want to make a comment,” I responded sternly.

  Benjamin raised his hand in a halfhearted effort to appease me, but he continued talking, “And poetry is something we did all the time last year and I hated it.”

  “Well, you will not hate this poem. It was life-altering when I read it for the first time, and it sets the tone for my class,” I declared. “And now, I would like no more comments until I have read Frost’s work completely.” There, finally, was the moment I had been dreaming about. I was going to recite my favorite poem to my first class. Some demented part of me expected them to clap when it was finished.

  I never realized how long that darn poem was.

  Reading it alone in my apartment, I had been filled with the grandiose desire to take the more difficult path in life. I imagined myself as Frost’s wanderer, caught in the crossroads. Yes, I could have taken the investment banking road, but I, why, I took the road less traveled and decided to become a teacher. And that, I had imagined at 3:00 A.M., while pacing back and forth in my apartment, would make all the difference. I had envisioned reading it to my class and having all my students become immediately inspired to always take “the road less traveled.” I would be Robin Williams from Dead Poets Society! Instead of yelling “Carpe diem,” my students would follow me down the halls of Langdon shouting, “Take the road less traveled!” Everyone would nod understandingly because they were “Ms. Taggert’s kids,” those unruly, unconventional geniuses who weren’t afraid to pave the way. But as I read the poem to the class I was painfully aware of the shuffling and dramatic sighs being emitted from around the table. After what felt like an eternity, I reached the final line and read it with a burst of passion.

  “‘And that,’” I looked around the room with conviction, “‘has made all the difference.’”

  Silence.

  Maybe they were letting the impact of Frost’s words sink in?

  Maybe they were too moved to speak?

  Overwhelmed by its brilliance?

  Forcing myself not to panic, I took a deep breath and waited for their reaction. I didn’t have to wait too long.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Are we going to be tested on this?”

  “Is this guy, like, a loner? Why does he do all this walking by himself?”

  “Yeah. He’s like a total sketch ball.”

  “Like a stalker or something.”

  Terrific. Robert Frost was reduced to a sketchy stalker.

  “This is a poem about taking the more difficult road!” I cried defensively. “It’s about standing apart from the crowd, taking your own path. That is what I hope you will all do in my class!” I had envisioned discussing the poem for at least fifteen minutes and hopefully drawing this conclusion out of them. What was wrong with me?

  Blair raised her hand. I called on her warily.

  “Maybe,” she paused for effect, “maybe if you drew the poem out on the board we would all have a better sense of its…intrinsic meaning.”

  “Blair, you want me to draw out the poem?” I was nonplussed.

  “Yes. I’m a visual learner. If I can see the overarching themes drawn out, I can get a better handle on them. My learning specialist told me all about it,” she finished smugly.

  All eyes were upon me. The words learning specialist had been hurled at me like a seventh-grade grenade. I had to react. This time, however, my mind drew a blank.

  I was defeated.

  I approached the board and began drawing a stick figure facing two roads. I felt like an ass. Were they all watching me? I was dying to turn around to see, but instead I began to draw twigs and broken branches on one road.

  “That’s, like, the harder road, right?” Blair asked. A few girls in the corner began to giggle. I stopped drawing and nodded dumbly.

  “Make a sun with a smiley face on the other road,” Blair instructed. “So people can see that it doesn’t have any obstacles. The sun is symbolic.”

  Hating myself, I obediently began to draw a sun with large, exaggerated rays. Blair seemed to have quite a firm grasp on the poem�
��s meaning for someone who had just loudly claimed that she didn’t “get it.”

  “With a smiley face,” Charlotte reminded, and shot a quick look at Blair. Both girls stared back at me with wide, innocent eyes. I had no choice but to fill in the sun’s face, uncomfortably aware of the increasing giggles throughout the room.

  “Is that better?” I asked, putting the chalk down. I had never felt like a bigger fool.

  “That sun looks cracked out,” Benjamin observed, and the entire room exploded in laugher.

  At me.

  I wanted to run. I wanted to cry. How was I ever going to win their respect after this? Even the stupid smiley-faced sun I had just drawn seemed to be laughing at me in all his demonic chalkboard glory. But if I ran out now I would become that teacher. The one who fled her classroom on the first day. I could just see Dr. Blumenfeld shaking her head sadly and telling me that she had made a mistake. I couldn’t let that happen! Smiling weakly, I turned to the stack of Romeo and Juliet books I had stacked neatly on the ledge.

  “This is the first book we will be reading this year,” I announced as I began to pass them out. “Please write your name in pen on the title page in case you lose it.”

  “Can we use a pencil?”

  “I only use gel pens. Are gel pens okay?”

  “Do you have a black Sharpie? Sharpies are more permanent.”

  These kids were not seventh-graders. They were monsters with a predilection for bizarre writing implements.

  “Use your judgment,” I responded vaguely, not really caring at that moment if they threw the books out of the window.

  “Isn’t Romeo and Juliet a play?” Charlotte asked sweetly.

  “Why, yes, Charlotte,” I responded gratefully.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said smugly. “You said book.”

  The rest of class was like an out-of-body experience. I heard myself give a monotonal description of Elizabethan England and then watched as I wrote a few key dates in Shakespeare’s life on the board, pretending not to notice that nobody bothered to take a single note. We were all painfully aware of the clock—sixty seconds seemed like such an unreasonable amount of time to constitute a mere minute! Queen-Bee Blair yawned loudly and I didn’t blame her. Even I was bored. I wanted them to leave so I could be alone and miserable. Maybe buy a pint of Betty Crocker vanilla frosting and lick the whole thing clean.