Losing My Faculties

by Brendan Halpin

  And my English-department meetings don’t help. Kathleen runs them, and they generally suck. Frequently there is some item up for discussion, but it’s not really up for discussion. Kathleen pontificates for a while and responds to any disagreement with withering sarcasm. The best you can hope for if you open your mouth is that she will mock you and then come back with your idea next week as if it’s her idea. The worst you can hope for is that she just mocks you.

  I frequently do disagree with Kathleen, mostly for philosophical reasons that I won’t get too deeply into except to say that when I visit her class once, there is some drill-and-kill vocabulary exercise followed by a “discussion” in which Kathleen asks opinion questions of the class in order to get them to say what she’s thinking. It’s this game of “can you read my mind,” a lecture masquerading as a discussion, the kind of thing I always hated as a student.

  So I am always uncomfortable in these meetings, biting my tongue to avoid verbal bullying. This is not helped by the fact that Roberta never disagrees with Kathleen. Or maybe she did once and they worked it out down on the Cape. In any case, she does more vocabulary with her ninth-grade classes than Jessie and I do, and she “covers” more books than Jessie and I do, and so we periodically have these checkins that turn into “Why can’t you two be more like Roberta?”

  Ugh. Another English teacher tells me that things were different when the Old Guy was here because he was another big power center and was not afraid to tell Kathleen that she was full of it, but early in the year he disappeared for a week without notifying anybody or calling in, I mean he was literally a missing person, and then he showed up and wasn’t given his job back, and this new woman was hired and ends up teaching not only the Old Guy’s classes but also half of one of Kathleen’s classes, which is kind of a neat trick.

  We frequently have to go to Kathleen’s house to correct writing exams or whatever, and this is actually kind of nice. She clearly likes to entertain, and she acts genuinely hospitable and pours us all giant goblets of wine when our work is done, and there is a real satisfaction in getting a lot of important work done with other people who give a shit. But there’s this weird tension. On the one hand, it’s nice and homey, but on the other hand it takes so long, and it would be so much easier to do at school. But for some reason we can’t do that.

  I also end up on a personnel committee with Kathleen. We don’t do much except talk about all the great benefits, like family leave and life insurance, that regular schools have that we don’t, and try to figure out what it would cost and why we can’t have them. This is okay except for one day when I say that we are never going to attract more teachers of color unless we improve our salary and benefits. (For some reason teachers of color avoid this place like the plague—possibly because Kathleen is so powerful here and is given to saying things like, “Our students really have impoverished language and they need to listen to an articulate adult like me to find out how to express themselves verbally,” which is a canard that’s been discredited for years, and “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is an affirmative-action pick in our curriculum that really has no business there.” I mean, okay, I’m not that crazy about that book either, because I think it’s boring and sanctimonious, but God knows much of our White Guy curriculum is too, and Kathleen’s choice of words seems calculated to be offensive.) Anyway, thinking of how Sandra was hired on the spot by the Boston Public Schools, I ask Kathleen why somebody like that would give up higher pay, better benefits, and greater job security to work here. Kathleen gets as angry as I’ve ever seen and says something incoherent whose key word is “fuck!”

  So that’s fun. In addition to all this stuff, I have to teach, and it’s not long before I start having all these weird physiological symptoms. My asthma gets really bad, which it hasn’t done in a long time. I frequently feel short of breath; just walking up the steps gets me winded. I go to the doctor and get some kind of steroid inhaler. Then I start having heart palpitations. One day I’m walking down the steps to the subway and I have to slop in my tracks, because my heart is suddenly hammering out of control. It scares the shit out of me—mostly because my own father fell over dead unexpectedly and inexplicably at age thirty-five. It stops after about ten seconds. More often, my heart will just feel weird—like there’s a little hitch in the mechanism followed by one or two big beats that makes me stop and take a deep breath and wait for everything to get back to normal, which it does within about five seconds, but those five seconds really suck because I always think they are my last five seconds on earth.

  I go to the doctor and get a King of Hearts monitor with two electrodes that I’m supposed to wear all the time. (It’s about the size of a deck of cards! Get it?) When I feel something funny happening to my heart, I press a button and the thing records the event. I can then call it in to the techs at the hospital, who read the data. I end up annoying the techs for some reason—I call too frequently or not frequently enough—and eventually the doc tells me I’m just having normal palpitations, probably occasioned by stress.

  Great.

  45

  Despite the palpitations and the glut of meetings. I am deliriously happy at Better Than You. I say aloud in a faculty meeting early in the year that I hope to retire from this place, and I really mean it. For everything that’s wrong with this place, it is the first place I have ever worked where everybody—even the people I don’t like—really cares about what’s happening here. Nobody here is teaching to support a house on the Cape or a golf habit. People are here because they want to work here.

  Amazing.

  But of course, it’s not just the grown-ups that make it fun to work here—it’s the kids. Not that they’re much different from any of the other kids I’ve worked with. I mean, they are different from the kids at Famous Athlete Youth Programs in that the majority of them come from stable homes and don’t need anybody to come and roust them off the couch to get to school, and they’re different from the kids at Northton and Newcastle in that they are generally darker-complexioned and they talk much less about drinking and getting high. (I don’t know if these kids actually drink and smoke less than their suburban counterparts, but they talk about it a hell of a lot less.) But basically, teenagers are teenagers.

  My biggest thrill is that I get to be an advisor. What this means, well, nobody can exactly tell me. I am sort of a homeroom teacher. I give out report cards to the kids’ parents when they come out. But I’m also sort of an unofficial counselor/advocate/mother hen. At least, this is the way I define the job. I just sort of make it up as I go along.

  I don’t have an auspicious start. We have a twenty-five-minute “advisory period” at the beginning of each day, and if nobody has ever really defined the job for me, they damn sure haven’t told me what I’m supposed to do with fifteen half-awake teenagers during this time. I’ve always had a great time getting kids to open up using writing, so I decide that we are going to start the beginning of each day with a little bit of writing. A couple of game souls try it, but most of them just refuse. They’re not hostile about it or anything—they just won’t do it. So I quickly give that up.

  Somebody asks me on the first or second day, “Are you going to leave too?” These kids are sophomores, and their advisor was part of last year’s great faculty exodus. I tell them I don’t have any plans to, that this is exactly the kind of place I have always wanted to teach, and I expect to be here until they carry me out. I have no idea if this scores points with them or not—most of them seem to adopt a “show me” attitude, which I guess is fair enough.

  Many of my colleagues talk about the great conversations they have in advisory period about the issues of the day. I try to start some conversations, but I am hindered by the Great Schism: it seems that last year one of the girls in here talked to another one’s boyfriend, or liked another one’s boyfriend, or some damn thing, and now the girls in the advisory are split into two hostile camps over this issue. (This will, unbelievably, last for two full
years.) So nobody wants to talk about anything while their hated enemies are in the room, which is pretty much always. (There are only four boys in the advisory. Mostly they play chess and talk trash to each other—“Awww, that’s mate in two! You better give up now!”)

  One girl, Denise, refuses to speak to me or even acknowledge my existence. If I ask her a question, she will stare blankly. If I greet her, she will also stare blankly. One day I get right up in her face and end up following her out of her room to her locker making jokey banter the whole way. She stares blankly and refuses to acknowledge me. What did I do? I’m not sure.

  So the advisory period itself is kind of a bust, although at least it gives these kids some time during this extended school day in which there are very few demands on them. As much as I feel like I’m working too hard, I at least have a free period every day—most of my students go from 8:25 to 3:30 with only a half hour for lunch (this is actually seven more minutes than the students and teachers at Northton got). If you have ever been to a conference or seminar or something where you sat in lectures and workshops for eight hours at a stretch, imagine doing that five days a week with two hours of homework to do when you got finished.

  Outside the advisory period, though, is where my real work as an advisor takes place, and this ends up going very well. The way it typically works is that a teacher will come to me and say something like, “Hey, what’s up with Will this week—he’s had his head down in class.” Or “I’m having a problem with Denise—she just seems to be giving me an attitude,” or “Anna refused to take a test.” Mostly they are little things, the kind of stuff that in a bigger school would go undetected, but here I will find Will at some point during the day and say, “Hey, what’s going on in English? I hear you’ve had your head down all week.” Many of my female advisees who can’t stand each other hold similar feelings for certain of their teachers (actually for many of them it’s the same one), so I am called upon to hear their side of the dispute. Mostly what I do is just listen to them and take them seriously. When we have a meeting with the teachers or whoever, I will usually try to present my advisees’ concerns in a more diplomatic way than they likely would. I feel kind of wimpy and uncomfortable about the whole thing—I don’t want to completely stick up for the teachers, because then I’ll alienate the kids, but at the same time I don’t want to completely stick up for the kids, because then I’ll alienate the teachers. It’s a weird balancing act, but I guess I do okay at it, because the kids end up talking to me and, usually, listening to me, and all my colleagues are still speaking to me too.

  A lot of times when the students are talking to me alone, they’ll tell me what an asshole a certain teacher is (more often than not, this is a person who bugs the hell out of me too), and what I usually end up saying—and this may not be the most liberating thing I could be telling them, but oh well—is that they are going to come across all kinds of assholes in their lives, and the unfortunate truth is that some of those assholes are going to have power over them, and so they need to start practicing sucking it back. I also do a lot of work on the fact that, no matter what the teacher says to you, if you tell him to shut the fuck up, you immediately make yourself the issue, and whatever he has or hasn’t done stops being an issue.

  I know that they listen to me, but I don’t really see any immediate results from this lecture—indeed, one of my advisees racks up an astonishing fourteen suspensions. She also manages to have the highest GPA in the entire school for this year. Each one of her suspensions means at least an hour of meetings, as I have to talk to the student, the teacher, the vice principal, her parents, then everybody together. It’s a lot of work, but it feels really important, and it’s one of the things I am proudest of. I think about kids I have known at Northton especially, and how much they would have benefited from just knowing that there was at least one adult in the building who was looking out for them. I think it’s one of the best things we do here, and so the fact that my advisees do homework or play chess during the twenty-five minutes in the morning when we are meeting starts seeming less important. I am also just really enjoying the chance to get to know these kids. When you have a hundred students broken into five classes of twenty, you get to know some of them, but a lot of them just go under the radar, and you rarely get the kind of contact with them that being an advisor provides. In some way I have proven myself to them, and we are then able to have good conversations (individually, of course) in advisory, and even the times when I am talking to them about how they just got kicked out of Spanish class again (these conversations always seem to come up right during the free period when I was going to get a bunch of correcting done) allow me to get to know these kids more than I’ve probably ever known any students. By the end of the year, seeing these kids is really the highlight of my day, and even Denise is speaking to me and occasionally smiling, which I happen to know from talking to her teachers is something really special.

  I know I’m doing a good job about halfway through the year when one teacher who has had conflicts with at least three of my advisees (all of whom are female—are we sensing a trend here? No, unfortunately, we’re not) and who believes that the student is wrong in any conflict with a teacher and pretty much refuses to examine what part in this he might have takes me aside and tries to tell me that I am doing my advisor job all wrong. “You know,” he says, “the advisor is not supposed to be an advocate for the students. The advisor is supposed to help hold the kids accountable.” “Holding kids accountable” is one of the great catchphrases of the school. Philosophically, it seems kind of icky to me. Couldn’t we say something about supporting them or helping them take responsibility for their actions? No. We have to “hold them accountable.”

  My work with the personnel committee comes in handy here, because we have actually been reviewing the job description for advisor, which is in the massive draft edition of the faculty handbook that I was never given as a new hire and that the faculty has been waiting for, like, two years for the board to approve, and so I say, “Actually, the advisor is supposed to be an advocate. That very word is in the job description.”

  At the end of the year this teacher asks if we can have lunch so we can talk about how I don’t have a problem with all these kids that he has a problem with. I don’t know what to say—I mean, I try to take them seriously and treat them with respect, so that’s not exactly a secret, but I also have a special advantage in that I see them every day but don’t give them grades or homework. The fact that this guy even approached me about this makes me feel good—both for the ego strokes of feeling like I am doing something right (I’ve come far enough in this business that other people are asking me for advice!) and because it shows that, as much as this guy torments my advisees and appears to have a terrible rapport with them, he is at least open-minded enough to think about doing something different.

  46

  In addition to my advisory, I am teaching two English classes. Each one meets for eighty minutes a day. These end up going pretty well despite the facts that I have no time to plan or correct and that in one of them I am supposed to be bringing kids up by four-plus grade levels in the same time the other kids have, while force-feeding them The Odyssey and Julius Caesar, along with other easy-to-read classics.

  Having Jessie here helps immensely. We both have our desks in this enormous room in the basement (along with two other teachers) that is also our classroom, so it’s really easy to just turn around and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about doing this with my class tomorrow—what do you think?” It’s also very nice to have somebody here to commiserate with after department meetings. “She’s tweaked” is Jessie’s usual response to whatever heinous thing Kathleen has said this week.

  What also happens because of the unusual desk arrangement is that we get to see each other’s classes all the time. Space is at a premium for everyone in Boston, and perhaps especially for a nonprofit school with no money, so basically there is no place to work other than in this room, so
I am always in here working when Jessie is teaching, and she is frequently in here when I’m teaching.

  This arrangement turns out to be one of the greatest things to happen to me as a teacher, and it’s accidental. It’s funny, because the department is trying to get us to visit other English teachers, and I do a couple of times (and of course I get supervisory visits from Kathleen, who is shockingly kind about what’s happening, which is incomprehensible. She is cutting about our philosophical differences in meetings, but when she comes into my class, she is very gracious and gives me good feedback), but that is just too big a pain in the ass and stops happening after the first month or so. But I am in Jessie’s class almost every day, and I end up seeing a great deal of the history classes that take place in here too. And what’s really great about being in a class frequently, not just as a visitor, is that I get a lot more confident about my abilities. I see days when the kids are amazing, and I see days when the teachers are really struggling and the kids are out of control. So, you know, it’s not just me. This is just so liberating, because I have spent most of my career behind my little door feeling like everybody but me knew exactly what they were doing, and nobody was struggling like I was. Now I see that everybody is. It reminds me of nothing so much as being a teenager—you sit in your room feeling like you are hideous because you have zits or whatever, and you think about how uncool you are really and how everybody else is so cool and if they only knew the real you, they would hate you. And then you start comparing notes when you get older and realize that every single person was having the same thoughts behind the closed door of their bedroom. So teaching adolescents turns out to be remarkably like being an adolescent. Which is a scary thought that probably has psychological implications I don’t think I want to get into.