by Ilana Garon
Another teacher once described Callum, one of my eleventh-grade students, as “the most brilliant dumbass I’ve ever met.” I think he meant it the other way around: Callum was one of those kids who had a sort of white-hot intelligence—he’d remember everything you said, no matter how long ago, and offer the most pithy, insightful analysis of any topic—but then would be several days late turning in the essay at the end of term. As a result, when I met Callum, he was a solid B-student, despite his capability of explaining topics of theoretical physics to me during his study hall period. His classmates called him “The Professor.”
A tall, very lean, handsome young man with cornrows and just a hint of a moustache, Callum appealed to a certain type of girl—usually the smart, quirky, “alternative” types who shared his interests in anime (really, anything involving “Japanimation”) and drawing, which he was decently good at. He was quiet, but not shy, and did not suffer fools gladly: Once, when the school’s top football player spontaneously jumped up on a desk and started flexing his muscles, for which the principal (who happened to be passing by) immediately gave him lunch detention, Callum rolled his eyes and looked my way. “Infantile,” he muttered, just loud enough for me to hear. The trace of a Jamaican accent was evident only from the precise way he emphasized some of his consonants.
“Have you ever noticed,” he said once in class, during a discussion of politics which was, naturally, dominated by the extreme liberal bent of the northeast, “that people who are very liberal are at one end of the spectrum, and people who are very conservative are at the other—but really they’re not so dissimilar in their thinking, even if their principles are different? So basically, extremes are the same, and a continuum is really . . . more of a circle.” Then he chuckled to himself, as if someone had made a joke earlier that he had just gotten.
Days later, in typical fashion, he failed to turn in a paper. In response, I threatened—in the most professional way possible—to beat him up.
He burst out laughing and turned in the paper the next day.
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Callum was sixteen when I was his teacher, and I was twenty-four. From the beginning, our affinity for each other—not just as student and teacher, but simply as people—was evident. We had identical taste in nerdy media; I lent him my copy of Freakonomics, and he introduced me to “anti-folk” singer-songwriter Regina Spektor. During his study hall period, he would position his student-sized desk near my teacher-sized desk, so as to sidetrack me from my vain attempts to update my grade book with conversations about the movie Donnie Darko or proposed resolutions to the political tensions in the Middle East.
“If you weren’t my teacher, we’d hang out on the weekends,” he told me once. I couldn’t help but agree.
Once, we were so immersed in a discussion about the TV show House and its connection to Sherlock Holmes that his classmate Adam came up to us, listened for a moment, and then said, “Yeah, I’ll just let you guys be.”
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It was strange for me to be so “in sync” with a student. Though I was certainly closer in age to the kids than I was to many of the faculty members, in most cases there still would have been an unbridge able divide between us, and rightfully so—I was the teacher, and they were the students. I was (with minimal success) the disciplinarian in the room, and they were the somewhat unwilling beneficiaries of my attempts at classroom management.
Part of the reason for Callum’s and my friendly rapport was that I never needed to discipline him. In spite of his propensity for turning in assignments late, if at all, Callum was one of the best students I ever had. He was always interested in the material, always engaged, always performing well on tests (despite never studying), always contributing brilliantly to class discussions; I never once had to correct his behavior in any way, and if I had, I suspect he’d have been more shocked and disappointed than I. Though discipline was undeniably part of my job (an aspect that I have never been quite able to get behind; at that time I stubbornly insisted that I’d become a high school teacher, as opposed to elementary school, to avoid having to punish kids), Callum saw no reason it should have had to be.
“In Jamaica, education isn’t free,” he told me once. “Secondary schooling costs a lot, and you’re damned lucky if your family’s able to afford it. No one screws around there because it’s such a privilege to get your education. Not true of American kids. They take it for granted.” In spite of my abiding belief in the importance of free education, there was no denying Callum had a point. Though his power to do anything about it was limited, his tolerance for his classmates’ antics was even lower than mine.
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I taught Callum for eleventh- and twelfth-grade AP English. I wanted him to try applying to a top-notch school, maybe in the Ivy League, or at the very least, to get out of the city. No such luck; Callum’s father—who had sired eighteen or nineteen children, by Callum’s count—lived in Jamaica, so Callum’s mom and sisters relied on him as the “man of the house.” He was staying put. He enrolled at one of the CUNY schools and began studying a combination of Japanese and psychology.
At first, college seemed to be working out pretty well for him. While he was quick in any conversation to point out self-deprecatingly, “it’s not like I’m attending the world’s best college,” the truth was that Callum was making friends, enjoying his classes, and joining student groups. He was even learning to play pool. (This made me laugh, because he was the least likely pool-shark I could imagine.)
He and I kept in touch mostly by Google-chat. We were both night owls, and it was a rare week wherein we didn’t end up talking online at least two or three times, if only to send each other YouTube videos we liked. During academic holidays, we’d meet up, usually on the Upper West Side. We’d go eat lunch somewhere, maybe a diner—or, alternately, I’d make Callum his favorite “Jewish” sandwich of lox with a bit of lemon-juice and butter on pumpernickel bread with a salad on the side. Then we’d amble leisurely through the park, sometimes stopping so I could run an errand, and usually end up at the giant Barnes & Noble on East Eighty-Sixth Street, where we’d read comics together for the rest of the afternoon. Other times he’d come over, we’d eat, and then he’d help me move furniture in my apartment, or fix my computers, or do any number of other quasi-chores for me that were really more of an excuse for us to hang out together than anything that actually needed doing.
Callum was eighteen or nineteen by the time we were able to be friends this way; I was about twenty-six. Even if we had been romantically involved, it would’ve been legal. We weren’t—yet, I still sometimes felt freaked out that someone might perceive things that way. By Callum’s nature, he was something of a flirt: He would tell me I had pretty eyes or remind me of the fact that a group of boys in his class had apparently shared some sort of fantasies about me. I found this information, which I had not known at the time, simultaneously flattering and horrifying in the ways it could possibly be misconstrued by anyone who might overhear our conversation. I would beg, “Shhh! Enough out of you!” when he’d say these things (to which he would burst out laughing); I worried someone would see my intentions as predatory in some way.
Our friendship was pure. In my years of teaching, Callum is the only student with whom I felt, eventually, that a certain type of equality and understanding existed between us, such that we could be true peers. I still advised him on all manner of things, from which courses to take, to how to deal with awkward situations with his various girlfriends. However, I felt my ability to do this was merely the consequence of a few more years spent on earth—a sort of “been there, done that” type of expertise. In turn, I shared my interests and dreams with him. I let him read things I’d written. We never ceased to crack each other up. As I get further in age from the students that I teach (who, despite my increasing years, are always the same age when I get them), I realize the opportunities to become true friends with any students are dwindling, such that I’m not sure I’ll ever for
m a friendship like this again with any one of them.
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In the beginning of his sophomore year of college, Callum’s progress came to a sudden halt. Until then, he’d been getting straight A’s and enjoying college life. Suddenly, he was getting D’s and F’s. His professors, he recounted to me, were supportive, but concerned; several of them had asked if he wanted to retake tests or had assured him without his prompting, “Just so you know, I’ll drop your lowest grade. . . .” He talked about changing schools to somewhere with a fencing team; I was confused, as he’d never before expressed an iota of interest in fencing. Our late night Google-chat conversations were morose. “I guess I should do my statistics homework, but I’m tired,” he’d say. And then he wouldn’t do it. Not even late. That semester, he failed three courses and barely passed the fourth, which was Japanese.
He was always straightforward with me about what was going on. He told me when he failed tests he should’ve been acing, skipped out on labs that he knew would determine his final grades. His GPA was crashing and burning, and he never tried to hide it from me. He’d seem alternately anxious (“This is really bad, right?”) and apathetic (“I just can’t bring myself to care”) when I would speak to him about it.
I was alarmed. I knew his mother had been very sick, and though she had improved by the end of that year, it became apparent that the very fact of her illness had taken a blow on Callum’s psyche. Somehow, I found this unexpected, though I don’t know why I did: She was the only parent he had in the country, a rock upon which he’d built his life in ways I hadn’t realized. It occurred to me, during that season, that I had never truly considered her role in helping form the incredible young man Callum had turned out to be. Confronting her failing health had left him shaken and deeply depressed.
“You can never have a semester like this again,” I told him over Christmas vacation, with a look that I hoped conveyed both seriousness and concern. I scrutinized him from across plates of eggs, toast, and turkey bacon. (We were at a diner again.) “I’m worried for you, kiddo.”
“I know.” He looked dejectedly down at his food. He had dark circles under his eyes and appeared gaunt. He had lost weight off his already skinny frame. “Believe me, I know.”
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He turned it around. Reconciled to the inevitability that he would have to graduate at least a semester later than the rest of his peers due to the fact that he now had to retake several critical courses for his major, Callum plunged himself into the spring semester determined to take on the world. I never knew what reserves of strength he pulled from (other than school-provided counseling) or if anything specific had caused his depression to lift. I can only report my observation that, after the break, Callum was ready to go. His apathy gone (and, I suspect, his pride somewhat wounded), he became a more determined student than before. Very soon, he was again pulling straight A’s.
It was during the first semester of his junior year that I had the idea of Callum writing for Dissent Magazine, a leftist rag begun by some Brandeis professors in the 1950s that focused on cultural, social, and political issues with a liberal bent. I’d been writing for Dissent, as well, and now they were doing a series called “30 Under Thirty.” I suspected Callum, now twenty, might be a good fit.
Callum was assigned to write an article about how family had, in some way, pushed him towards education. He pondered it for a while and then sent me a first draft (I was assigned to edit for him) that was part memoir, part polemic. “Imagine running a marathon in which most of the other runners actively try to hold you back if you are going too fast. They congratulate you when you are running as slowly as they are; not winning is the thing to do,” it read. “Going to public school in the Bronx is just like that.”
I cringed. His anger at his peers, while justified, was never going to work for the magazine; I knew they were looking for a more upbeat story of triumph over obstacles. But moreover, seeing his frustration expressed so starkly filled me with retroactive guilt for my role in his experience. Had I been a better disciplinarian, could I have stopped his sense of being held back? Was the feeling of being congratulated for running slowly one that I had inadvertently fostered through my own weaknesses as a young teacher?
I ran it by our editor at the magazine. He was not pleased. “I see that you have got Callum writing wonderfully on a sentence-by-sentence basis. But I worry that he’s playing the ‘victimized youth,’ which isn’t interesting. This was to be a piece for a section on how his family relationships influenced his education—and it is really a gripe about schools,” he said.
“Should I have him add some things about his family?” I asked.
“Have him start over.”
I went back to Callum. I wanted to say, “Hey, are you mad at me? Did I contribute to your feeling of being held back in high school? Should I have been harder on your peers?” and then hear him tell me, no, I’d always supported him, I was the reason he’d succeeded, etc. Then I reasoned that, even if I hadn’t been the perfect model of pedagogy, maybe our friendship—as it had become—had moved past whatever slight he might believe I’d allowed to happen to him back in the day.
“Callum,” I told him as gently as I could over Google-chat, “Your essay has to be changed a little bit.”
“How much is a little bit?”
“Rewritten entirely.”
I expected him to get mad. Instead, after a moment he wrote, “Oh no! LOL!”
Bolstered by his good spirits, I explained again what he needed to do: incorporate more family, fewer jibes at former classmates.
“Oh, no problem!” he said. He sounded completely unperturbed. “That’s actually easier anyway; I know exactly what I’ll write. I’ll have it for you in a few days.”
His second try was resoundingly better. From the sobering opener—“I’m the seventeenth, eighteenth, possibly nineteenth child of my father. But who’s counting? Certainly, he’s not.”; to the usual self-deprecation—“I haven’t ended up at the world’s best college . . .”; to the tribute to his mother—“My mother continued to push me, doing whatever it took to make me do well . . . It motivates me that she still cares about my education”; it was pure Callum: occasionally cynical, sometimes brilliant, always real.
One line in particular struck me, near the end: “I have met enough of the positive expectations to avoid being viewed as yet another casualty of the Jamaican or American education systems. In the inner-city middle schools and high school I attended, I often got the sense that my classmates and I were expected to drop out and become failures—join gangs, become teenage parents, etc.”3 I don’t know what my expectations of Callum as a student consisted of, back when I was his teacher, beyond his graduating high school and making something of himself—but whatever they were, he has surpassed them and more. He has given me every reason to be proud of him, as his former teacher, as his sometimes editor, and as his friend.
3 From the article “Mom, Dad, College, and Me,” Dissent Magazine, December 2011.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ilana
In my second or third year of teaching, when I was around twenty-three, I went on a blind date. It was a disaster from the outset—the guy and I had nothing in common other than both being Jewish, and he kept trying to impress me by saying things like “What were your SAT scores? I bet mine were higher.”
I had asked him about his job, and now he returned the volley. “I teach high school English,” I told him.
“Where?” He guessed the name of a local Jewish private school.
“No, it’s public school—in the Bronx.”
He looked surprised. “Wow, I bet the bullets just whiz over your head every minute!” he quipped.
It was a remark I could have seen myself making jokingly in the company of friends, especially other Bronx teachers; indeed, at that very moment I had on my wall a cartoon clipped from the New York Post, in which some soldiers are pictured sitting in a trench, explosions all around, with
the caption: “Hey, things could be worse . . . we could be students in a New York City public school. . . .”
But when he said it, something in me recoiled.
You don’t understand at all, I wanted to tell him. How dare you say that about my students.
Instead I said meekly, “No, it isn’t really very unsafe.” I never called him again.
I think it was around that time that the affinity I had developed for the students dawned on me. It wasn’t merely the kids themselves, though they were generally delightful; I could have seen myself falling in love with a group of kids in a magnet school or a private school just as easily. Rather, it was the sense of doing work that was concrete, interactive, of knowing that it would matter to someone if I didn’t show up one morning. I felt infinitely protective of the kids. It seemed to me that they had been slighted in more ways than I could enumerate, while my peers and I had been given ever more incalculable advantages over them. To say I felt guilty isn’t quite accurate; it was more that I had become sort of single-mindedly focused on trying to make up to them the things I felt they had unjustly missed.
That, and I liked teaching. “It’s addictive,” one of my mentors told me, “because it’s so f—ing hard. And when you do it successfully, it’s a high . . . It feels amazing.”
Boy, was she right.
______
I think I took it as a given that I would leave at some point—mostly because I wanted desperately to go back to school. I loved reading and learning. Post high school, I even loved being in class. I wasn’t sure what discipline I wanted to undertake, exactly. I felt a pull towards a PhD program in English literature, as I had considered doing in college, but after nearly four years of teaching in the Bronx, the idea had begun to lose its luster. What could I say about Chaucer that no one had already said before? What could I do that would really be productive?
It was the students who helped me to figure it out. I was teaching a creative writing class titled Creative Nonfiction and the Personal Narrative—one I had invented on the spot during my interview over a year prior, when asked what elective I would teach if given the choice. The course requirements involved writing weekly one- to two-page assignments from a variety of prompts. I believe the first one was a memoir prompt—something vaguely along the lines of “an important incident in your life.”