Losing My Faculties

by Brendan Halpin

  My “regular” freshman class goes very well almost from the beginning. I have a couple of girls who like to talk to each other a lot more than they like doing anything else, but that is pretty standard in a ninth-grade class. By and large, these kids have been successful in school, and they do the work and do it well, and enough of them do their reading assignments that we are able to have some really good discussions.

  My “transition” class is more of a struggle almost immediately. For one thing, I have two kids in here who have pretty severe special needs. What I mean is that they are cognitively impaired in such a way that they are nowhere near where they need to be in the ninth grade, and they are going to need some serious one-on-one intervention to get there.

  I’m tying myself in knots not to say anything about these kids that could ever be interpreted as unkind, but not surprisingly, the other kids are not quite so delicate. They see these kids and immediately feel, like the kids I had so long ago in Newcastle, that this is “the retard class.” So they start going out of their way to separate themselves from the other kids by being mean to them. We just about get beyond that when both of these kids are “counseled out” of the school, which is a fancy way of saying that the special-ed director sits down with the parents and tells them that we can’t serve their kids here, which I think is kind of dicey from a legal standpoint, but in any case, we are able to recommend some programs in the regular public schools that are more suitable for them. So we exist not as a counterexample to the regular public schools but as a sort of parasitic organism. Because there is somewhere for us to send these kids, we don’t have to spend all kinds of money creating programs for them, which would divert money from our small class sizes and lower our test scores.

  I sit in on one of these meetings with Cicely, an incredibly sweet girl with pretty severe special needs who all the teachers love. I am horrified as the special-ed director tells Cicely’s mom how pretty Cicely is, how sweet Cicely is, how much we all love Cicely, and how Cicely really needs to go somewhere else. Tears spill out of Cicely’s eyes during the whole speech, and finally she says, “I don’t want to go to another school! I really like it here!” and it’s like I have been time-warped back to the meeting with Jorge at Famous Athlete, and once again I have the sick feeling that a kid I really care about is getting screwed.

  At some point after Cicely’s departure, we end up having what will become known as “the transition talk,” in which the class sounds off about everything that’s bugging them. Tallulah is angry about Cicely being kicked out. I try to explain that she wasn’t kicked out. Harrison complains about having a different schedule. Barry hates this corny school. I offer lamely that, like, 40 percent of the freshman class used to fail at this school, and that they (and this is the really uncomfortable part), not because they are dumb, because the whole program is really predicated on the idea that they are not dumb but just need some more work, have been identified as the kids who were at high risk for failing everything, and this is really trying to help them, blah blah blah. It’s all true, but nobody wants to hear that somebody thinks they might fail, and nobody can believe it when I say we think you would have failed but we don’t think you’re dumb. It’s true, but it’s so foreign to anything they’ve ever heard before that they think I’m full of shit.

  Despite this, though, I manage to forge a pretty good relationship with them. They make up a nickname for me, which is almost always a good sign. Well, they don’t actually make it up, but they adopt it and make it their own. They call me “Mr. Chips.” Some kid who’s not my student gives me this name because I’m “mad corny,” and he doesn’t even know that Mr. Chips is some kind of hero teacher from the movies, it’s just a play on corn chips, but my transition class starts calling me first Mr. Chips, then later just “Chips,” which is when I know for sure it’s affectionate. “Aw, come on, Chips,” Travis will say when I give homework. In fact, while this nickname will never catch on with any of my other students (my advisees will end up calling me “Big H,” which I suppose starts out ironically because, you know, I’m really not that big), this particular group of kids will continue to use it with me for the next two years. And I will like it way more than I could ever let on.

  Early in the year, Jessie has this idea that we should put on a mock trial for George for our final project on Of Mice and Men. With the help of everybody else in the transition department, we end up doing this sometime in November. It’s a huge hit. We do it at night with parents present, and it’s my class for the prosecution and Jessie’s for the defense. The lawyers dress up in suits, the migrant farmworkers dress up in overalls, Curley’s wife dresses like a … well, appropriately, and Chip, the principal, serves as the judge. It is a spectacular success—the kids construct arguments very well, they speak well in front of a crowd that for most of them includes their parents, and they succeed at school, which is something that many of them tell us they have never done.

  It measurably improves the tone of the class for weeks. But before long it goes downhill again—we have a student in this class who walks with crutches, and the kids start picking on him because he gets all kinds of special treatment. At first I can’t believe how these kids are being cruel to a cripple, but eventually it becomes clear that the kid is just really hard to get along with. He stirs something up quietly, then watches as the other person flies off the handle and gets in trouble. Or sometimes he flies off the handle but doesn’t get in trouble. This is because his mom is a gigantic pain in the ass who comes in with the “what the hell is wrong with you for wrongfully accusing my baby” routine every time he gets in trouble, so our vice principal, who is big into “holding kids accountable,” stops holding him accountable, and the kids notice that the kid with the crutches gets away with all kinds of shit that they would get in trouble for, and it is a mess that never really gets solved.

  I find out that I have totally misinterpreted the situation when I yell at the class after this kid, Vladimir (he’s not Russian—go figure), leaves the room because somebody says something, and I totally blow my stack and say, “Look! In this life you are going to have to work with people you don’t like! You don’t have to like everybody, but you have to shut up about it!”

  At this, Josette, who is pretty much the star student of this class both behaviorally and academically, the kid who is our poster child for the success of this transition program, because she always sat in the back of the room feeling stupid in previous grades and now she is doing really well, in fact she will be the only student I will ever give a 100 to on a piece of writing because it is just that freakin’ good, lets me have it. She gets furious and starts yelling: “Don’t you tell me to shut up! That kid annoys me every day when I am trying to learn and nothing ever happens to him, and if I say anything, you tell me to shut up! Well, I won’t shut up!” Eventually she calms down and I apologize and realize that my whole take on this thing was wrong wrong wrong. Ooops.

  Vlad and Barry, another student who is otherwise calm and cooperative, seem to have a special antagonism, and Barry starts obsessing about Vlad’s behavior, so that even when Vlad is not specifically bugging him, Barry is getting angry about whatever it is that Vlad is doing, and this usually ends up with them both yelling at each other to fuck off, nigger, and this gets them automatic trips to the office of Erik, the vice principal, and Barry gets sent home for the day and Vlad doesn’t.

  After about the third or fourth time this happens, I am wondering aloud in the teachers’ room what can be done about this situation, and Kathleen says, “Go down and take Barry out for a cup of coffee or a soda or something and just tell him that he’s not crazy. Tell him that Vlad is getting special treatment, and you know it’s not fair, but he has to focus on himself.”

  So I take Barry down for a soda or something, and I tell him that he’s not crazy, and that what’s happening is unfair and totally sucks, and I’m sorry. “It’s mad frustrating,” Barry says, and I say, yeah, I guess it probably is, and h
e says, “Something about that kid just gets me mad heated,” and I say, yeah, you’re not the only one (I don’t tell him that at least three other teachers have expressed similar feelings). It doesn’t solve the problem, but it’s a nice human connection with a kid, and I appreciate the fact that Kathleen gave me both the advice and the permission to do this.

  By the end of the year, things calm down somewhat because everyone can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Barry and almost everyone else in the class stays, and Vlad’s mom withdraws him from school in a hail of recriminations, complaints to the Department of Education, and threats to sue.

  (Four years later, Vladimir’s mom almost runs my daughter down with a stroller in the mall and doesn’t acknowledge that either my daughter or I are there. Vlad is with her, though, and he gives me a friendly hello. I stop and have a brief conversation with him and find him very pleasant and articulate. His mom is obviously exactly the same, but he, at least, seems transformed.)

  When spring comes, we have suffered through The Odyssey, we have suffered through I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (though we haven’t suffered as much as we did with The Odyssey, no matter what Kathleen says), and the next item on the curriculum is Julius Caesar. Well, Julius Caesar, in case you’ve never read it, totally sucks, and is way less accessible to teenagers than Romeo and Juliet, so Jessie and I bring this up in the department meeting, and Kathleen says she once had a student who killed him-or herself, so the play that ends with the teen suicides is not happening, and the discussion is pretty much over.

  So, in the tradition of teachers everywhere, we decide to do Romeo and Juliet anyway. It works great. Jessie makes these fake swords with dowels and silver spray paint and we both have a great time putting scenes together with our classes. One day Erik, the vice principal, strolls by when we are rehearsing and completely spontaneously gives an hour of his time to train the kids in stage combat, which is something I had no idea he knew about and would never have known to ask him. I end up taking my classes over to a nearby park with a little amphitheater to practice their scenes, and this is great because it’s a nice day and we’re outside (and, unlike when I tried this at Northton, there is nobody to complain about the noise except a few people hitting balls on the nearby tennis courts), and though I freak out when Shane, as Romeo, and Malika, as Tybalt, get a little carried away in their sword fight and whack their “swords” together so hard that one shatters and a really nasty, splintery end comes flying at my head, overall it’s a really positive experience. When we have to actually perform the scenes we get several days of rain, so we end up doing them inside, but it’s still fun, and more important, the kids do not leave at the end of it feeling like Shakespeare totally sucks, which should really be the greatest goal of a kid’s introduction to Shakespeare if you ask me, but nobody was asking me, because they worked really hard on this curriculum last year and, lest we forget, fine-tuned it on the Cape. Whatever. It is an irony that Jessie and I remark upon that this is supposed to be a “teacher-driven” school, whatever that means (it seems to mean that teachers do a lot of administrative work, though we do also get to approve the budget, which is a really unheard-of power), but here we are, teachers trying to drive, and we are told we can’t do it. We suspect that maybe Kathleen had a particular teacher in mind when she founded a school based on teacher leadership.

  Anyway, Kathleen throws a fit, and I always suspect that Roberta does too, and so Jessie and I get called on the carpet and have to go have this meeting with Chip, the principal, and Kathleen. She says all kinds of stuff about how Julius Caesar is critical to the curriculum because all the main works ask this question about who gets to lead, and this is critical to the school’s civic mission. Which I happen to know is complete bullshit anyway. Once a week we have a “town meeting” in which kids are supposed to debate the issues of the day, but of course what they really want to debate is school policy, but they are not really allowed to, or when they do, their decisions carry no weight in terms of policy making, so in the name of teaching them about democracy, we are in fact teaching them that their voices and concerns don’t matter, which they probably could have figured out just by looking at how many city services they don’t get in their neighborhoods and didn’t need a special school for.

  Anyway, Julius Caesar is somehow critical to this. Jessie and I are pretty unrepentant, and the issue is not really resolved, but we at least all get to say our piece. Chip has another meeting to get to, and as the meeting winds down and we’ve been back and forth about seven times, I find some weird reserve of courage and say to Kathleen, “I feel like our department meetings are always about ‘why can’t you be more like Roberta.’ We never brought this up for discussion at a department meeting because we can’t discuss anything in department meetings; we can only argue, and you’re much better at that than I am.” She doesn’t respond, and except for a smile at my nod to her debating skills, I have no idea what she thinks about what I just said. It feels good to get this stuff off my chest, but it doesn’t really solve the debate that was at the heart of the matter.

  47

  The school year kind of grinds to an end. The last big thing that happens is that the faculty votes to change the schedule for next year. Andres, a Spanish teacher, has created this schedule, and Sydney perfected it, so it’s totally a homegrown phenomenon. Although the debate itself is kind of tiresome, the fact that we’re having it is exciting. We are changing the schedule to something we think will be better for us not because some consultant rammed the idea down our throats but because one of our own thought it up and convinced us all, and we get to make the decision. This probably sounds incredibly mundane, but it’s a degree of power over my work life that I have never had before, and it’s thrilling.

  We do a great job creating and changing a schedule, but we seem not to be doing such a hot job of retaining our staff. Jessie is pregnant and not returning. Two of the three new history teachers are not returning. Neither are the woman who replaced the Old Guy in the English department, the director of special education, a math teacher, the long-winded, whitey-hating science teacher, and the guidance counselor. It’s not entirely clear what the problem is, but it’s clear that there is a problem. Yet nobody seems to want to talk about it. Perhaps most surprisingly, Kathleen Shaughnessy is also leaving. She is going off to teach in some foreign country or something. At the time I figure it’s probably because she’s kind of a control freak, and the school has now grown so much that she can’t really control it anymore, and so rather than be a bit player she’s going to leave.

  She makes noises to that effect—time for the school to grow, she will only get in the way, blah blah. It won’t be until much later that I will figure out that she saw the shit en route to the fan much earlier than the rest of us did, so she bailed before she could get splattered.

  I don’t even think of leaving. In fact, I get a call from an old ed-school classmate telling me the school where she works is hiring. They have, like, no men in their English department, she says, and they’re willing to spend money to hire an experienced teacher. They can’t find any candidates, she says. She is about 75 percent sure that if I interview, I’ll get the job, she says. She works in an established high school with a union and a decent pay scale and benefits, and in all the material ways, it would probably be a better job, but my heart is really here, despite all the flaws.

  Sometimes I see my students on the subway, or when I’m walking around my neighborhood in Boston, and it feels good. It gives me this kind of It’s a Wonderful Life, small-town buzz in the middle of the big city. There goes Mr. Halpin! He’s the schoolteacher!

  So I don’t even interview for the other job. And I feel pretty good about this, especially knowing that Kathleen isn’t going to return. At the end of the year after classes are over we have a curriculum meeting that totally sucks. I say, hey, I’d like to teach Romeo and Juliet next year, and Roberta says no, it’s really important that we give it two years with Julius Cae
sar, and I just about lose my mind. Now this is partly due to the fact that I am selling my condo and trying to buy another house, and there are all kinds of complications and snags, mostly brought on by the fact that my downstairs neighbor in the place I’m selling is a complete asshole, but it’s also due to the fact that I have had a long, stressful year, it’s supposed to be summer, and I’m sitting in this fucking meeting to talk about how we can’t change the curriculum.

  So I yell something along the lines of, “Listen, if we can’t change anything, then what the hell am I doing here? Why am I spending a beautiful summer day sitting in a meeting about how we have to keep the curriculum exactly the same! I have to go!” So I storm out. This is the first time I have ever stormed out of a meeting. Later I come back contrite, but I have pretty well killed whatever momentum a meeting about how nothing can change could possibly have, so it fizzles out.

  A couple of days later we have an end-of-the-year dinner at Kathleen’s house. It’s perfectly pleasant—she is really a top-notch entertainer—and, as I’m leaving, she says, “Well, Mr. Halpin, we had our moments, but remember—we wanted you here. After you left your interview, the Old Man said, ‘He’s one of us; he’s a teacher.’”

  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.