Losing My Faculties

by Brendan Halpin

  Which might not be so bad, except that I really want to see these kids graduate. It’s the main reason I didn’t just walk out the door when Dr. Watkins said that anybody who wasn’t willing to give 110 percent should walk out the door. Or at any number of other points. I bring this up all the time with my colleagues—mostly the four teachers I share this basement room with. (Everybody else keeps moving out of this room, but I stay because it’s far away from the office on the second floor and all the gossip and drama that goes on up there, and this year it is really a fantastic sanctuary, and I really like sharing the room with Hillary, Michelle, and Carol, who are all new this year.)

  “I just need to hang on till June and see them across the stage,” I say, and eventually I end up saying something like this to the advisory when they are complaining about how the school is fucked in some way, or some person is pissing them off, or whatever. “Let’s just focus on graduation. Whatever your problems here, you have something you want to get out of this situation, so let’s focus on getting there, and then, at the end of June, we’ll all walk out of this place together.” This is quite early in the year, and way before I have made my decision to leave this place official. It never hits the school rumor mill, which I take, rightly or not, as a nice example of the trust that’s built up between us.

  55

  At Northton when I was sick and tired of all the bitter old fucks I worked with, I wondered how they got that way. I used to ask Terri this because she wasn’t a bitter old fuck, but she started teaching there at the same time they did. They would occasionally tell stories about those days—they all used to room together and go out together, and somehow these cranky old fifty-five-year-olds were once fun-loving twenty-three-year-olds. It seemed impossible at the time.

  Terri would try to explain. She would talk about strikes and the bitterness they engendered, about years of persistent disrespect from various school administrations. She had come to the conclusion that the Northton administration was, in fact, not evil but just dangerously stupid, and that their incredible disrespect for their staff was to blame for the staff becoming bitter old fucks.

  I would listen and think, yeah, well, whatever. The past is the past. Move on already.

  And today I sit in a department meeting as Roberta relays the latest evil and/or stupid dictates from the administration, and when I am not declaiming about their stupidity or evil, I am interjecting shitty little comments. For example, Roberta tells us we will all need to spend our department-meeting time being trained in the ATLAS protocol of looking at student work.

  Now, I don’t know shit about the ATLAS protocol. It may well be the best thing since sliced bread. But I feel compelled to mock it because we used to be able to set our own agendas, and in fact we have a lot of legitimate stuff we want to work on this year, and here’s the administration jumping in and telling us not only are we not allowed to set our own priorities for the department anymore (remember, this school was supposedly founded on the principle that teachers set the priorities for the school), but we don’t know how to look at student work together. And, frankly, anything that’s coming from them, after our horrible time with the Buzzword Institute, is suspect.

  So I make some shitty comment, like “That’s sure to be a good and valuable use of my time.”

  And I look across the table at Julie. Julie is new this year, and this is her third year of teaching. I find her kind of suspect because she was brought in by the hated new administration from their previous school, just as the bitter fucks at Northton found me suspect because I was hired by an administration they hated. In my mind, I have given her provisional “one of us” status, but I haven’t blocked out the possibility that she’s “one of them.”

  And she gives me this look that says, “How did this guy get to be so incredibly tiresome? How did bitterness become his overriding emotion?” And because my negativity pisses her off the way negativity used to piss me off, she takes a thinly veiled potshot at me: “We actually used the ATLAS protocol a lot last year, and no matter how great you think you are, you can still learn something from it.”

  So here I am, the bitter old fuck that the new teachers in their twenties hate. And I want to explain, explain about the dream that existed here of a place where teachers mattered and how hard it is to watch it die, explain how hard it is to be disrespected when you’ve got what you think is a fair amount of expertise under your belt, how degrading it is to sit in these trainings with condescending nonteachers who say things like “If you decide to make a commitment to these kids” when we work with kids and these assholes just fly around the country boring and insulting people with PowerPoint presentations. I never wanted to end up like this.

  I would say this is the fate of all teachers, but I know from working with Gordon Stevens, from working with Terri, that it doesn’t have to be this way, that there is a way to get old in this profession without getting to be a tiresome, bitter old fuck.

  I guess I just don’t know what it is yet.

  In the meantime, I will continue to be a bitter old fuck. But I’ll have plenty of company, as just about every day somebody is upset or outraged about something, whether it’s a new, strange dictate coming down from above, or Erik making an incomprehensible discipline decision or an insulting evaluation or spot-check visit. You pick. But everybody’s always angry, and it’s not unusual to see people red-eyed from crying.

  Terri’s words about the Northton administration (“They’re not really evil. They’re just very, very stupid”) echo through my mind these days as I watch what’s being done to Better Than You. Evil or stupid? I guess it says something about my values that I just assume evil because that feels more respectful than assuming stupid.

  Well, it quickly becomes clear that our supposed genius new president has no fucking idea what he’s doing. Or else his pack of toadies doesn’t know what they’re doing and he doesn’t care. We get a bunch of new mandates from on high on what seems to be a daily basis. People will be in your room every day! No they won’t! Never ever have a kid in the hall unattended! No, actually that’s okay, go ahead and do that! After sending down the new stupid rules, the administration seems to forget about most of them. (The ATLAS protocol, for example, never materializes.) It is the same kind of shit that I’ve done when I’m over my head with a really difficult class—I remember my multiple seating arrangements and ever-changing rules in my ninth-grade class way back in Newcastle. I was flailing. They are flailing.

  Or are they really just trying to make everybody miserable? I think that might not be true when we have a faculty meeting sometime in late November, and Watkins stands up to address us, and even though it’s not licit in the room, he’s dripping sweat like he’s on his fifth set at Wimbledon. He tells us that everything that’s happening here is for the best, and if we’re not convinced by now that he wants the best for kids, there’s really nothing he can do to convince us. I feel great at the end of this meeting, because it feels like he’s begging us to stay.

  Then, one Monday in January, we all get a memo. It talks about how there is going to be a new definition of what it means to be a teacher at Better Than You next year. It’s going to include everybody being a mentor teacher. The explanation is that—well, it’s complicated and boring, but it has to do with the fact that the school has a lot of grant money attached to teacher training.

  So they wish to know as soon as possible whether we wish to apply for positions at Better Than You next year.

  Apply for positions.

  Teachers in good standing, the memo assures us, will be given priority consideration.

  Ooo! Priority consideration!

  On the back, the memo has two boxes to check: one for “Yes, I will be applying for a comparable position at Better Than You next year,” and another for “No, I will not be applying for a comparable position at Better Than You next year.” Where, I wonder, is the box for “Bite me”?

  At first I laugh at the chutzpah, but as the week goe
s on, I stew, talk to everybody else who’s angry about this, and manage to work myself into a really unhealthy state of almost perpetual rage. It renders me vaguely insane, as we’ll see momentarily.

  On Thursday, I talk to my advisees about all of this. They are threatening to walk out of school to protest their lack of a full-time college counselor. I tell them how my own morale is not particularly high and why. We’ve had a problem this year with our senior boys, many of whom will sort of cover up their mouths, thus directing their voices to the side, and say in a loud but rather high-pitched and almost unidentifiable voice, “Shut up!” or “This is corny!” or “This sucks!” when a teacher is talking. They do this pretty much constantly in town meeting, which, as I’ve said, I have a certain amount of sympathy with, because, by and large, it is corny and it does suck, but they also do it, for example, in my English class, going “Shut up, Halpin!” as I’m giving the homework, and then I always do it back, going, “Shut up! You owe me five papers!” Just as with the shiz-nit thing, this is not the best way to convince them that this is an inappropriate thing to do in class. I’d like to put this down to the fact that I’m going insane because of the daily shit storm here, but it remains a big flaw of mine that I love to get a laugh from my captive audience. So there you go. Even still, I don’t think I should need to apply for my job back, especially given that I have done a pretty good job here in ways that are quantifiable. (It’s too boring to get into, but let’s just say that due to some data collection I did on the transition program, I have graphs to prove the point.)

  I tell my advisory, which contains two side-of-the-mouth shut-up offenders, that I should start doing this during my meetings. (What the hell—I’m already doing it in class.) “Shut up, Chip!” I say. “This is corny!” “Watkins sucks!” I told you I couldn’t be professional in this room anymore. We all end up laughing, and the ninth-graders coming in have to kick us out because we don’t notice that it’s time to change classes.

  Friday comes. I am doubly cranky because, in addition to having to apply for my own job—well, I mean really in addition to being denied the satisfaction of telling them to take this job and shove it—the kids are leaving for two weeks to go to internships at local businesses. So we’re launching into two weeks of meetings with no kids, which is probably a special circle of hell waiting just for me when I die.

  Speaking of a special circle of hell, I am supposed to talk about Dante’s Inferno with my seniors, but two thirds of them skip class to work on this other megaproject that’s due in another class today, so I end up, in a total lapse of professionalism that I’ve come to expect in advisory but is new in class, complaining to the eight kids who did show up about how I’m being asked to apply for my own job.

  After lunch Chip asks me how I am. I tell him I’m beside myself with anger. This is probably not the most politic response. Like I said, I am really taking leave of my senses. He seems kind of terrified, mumbles something about helping me process, and runs away.

  About ten minutes later our weekly Friday staff meeting begins. Chip still runs these meetings from the front of the room, but Watkins always sits off to the side, looking down, holding his PalmPilot at crotch level and tapping on it. Is he taking notes? Checking his calendar? Playing some kind of game that demands his full concentration? He’s been doing this all year, and nobody’s ever figured it out. I’m so mad that I am just twitching all the time, running my hands over my head, exhaling a lot, and feeling that heart-pounding, pot-of-coffee adrenaline buzz that comes from fury. I wait until Chip is done talking about how next week we’re going to be working on stuff for next year, and I say, “I got a memo this week advising me that I have to apply for a job at Better Than You next year. Can you explain to me why I should work on anything for next year here as opposed to any other school I don’t have a job at?”

  Chip tries to answer, but I’ve essentially called Dr. Watkins out in public, so he puts down his PalmPilot and jumps in, obviously angry. “Every teacher is simply being asked to indicate his or her willingness to work here next year. This is standard procedure.”

  “Well,” I say, “it’s a new procedure around here, and I feel”—I’m still hip to the I statements!—“very angry and disrespected—”

  He cuts me off. “We come from different worlds, Mr. Halpin, and in the world I come from, the world of regular public schools, this is the way things are done.”

  “I worked in regular public schools for five years before coming here, and I never saw this happen at any of them.”

  “It’s standard procedure!” He’s yelling now. “Every teacher in the building gets a notice in April!” He’s referring to the kind of budget-induced pink-slipping that happened to me as a first-year teacher in Newcastle.

  “That’s not true. Teachers with three years in the building don’t get a pink slip. And nobody has to apply.”

  “Well, nobody has three years experience with me!” It continues in this vein, with him twisting facts, arguing against things I haven’t said, and generally trying to bully me into silence. It works with all my colleagues, with the exception of Michelle, who says something in my defense, and Lisa, who makes supportive sounds a couple of times. Everybody else leaves me hanging out to dry and just watches the floor show in silence, which is what people typically and inexplicably do whenever somebody says what everybody’s thinking in a meeting. (I say inexplicably because I am always the jackass opening his mouth, so, for better or worse, the psychology of the other position is kind of a mystery to me.)

  I get strangely calm as soon as Watkins loses his shit, which is immediately. It’s like there’s only a certain amount of hysterical anger to go around, and he’s hogging it all, so my own sanity returns. I keep calmly throwing I statements out there; I even take pains to clarify that I’m not trying to tell him what his intentions were, only how I feel, but he’s on a roll and not about to listen to me. He yells some more, bullies some more, throws some more misinformation about how other schools work in there just for good measure, and winds up with the truly Orwellian pronouncement that my feeling disrespected at being asked to apply for my own job after doing it for three years is actually disrespectful to him and that he can’t believe how we unfairly accuse him of being disrespectful whenever he does something in our best interest.

  My composure, which has been very loyal throughout this conversation, flits away again. I am so staggered by his chutzpah and egotism that I just have to repeat this for the record. “I have to apply for my own job that I’ve been doing for three years, and you feel disrespected?”

  What really amazes me is that as I look at him, I can tell that he really believes this shit. He just has no idea why everybody hates him or why people might be offended at having to apply for their own job. This seems to weigh on the stupid side of the “evil or stupid” question, but it’s not yet definitive, and this question about Watkins and company will continue to perplex me, though eventually it occurs to me that this may not be an either/or situation.

  Anyway, he concludes by basically telling us all to shut up and never challenge him in a public meeting again.

  After the meeting Alison apologizes for not backing me up, which I appreciate. I walk into the hall trying to take cold comfort from the fact that the one who doesn’t fly off the handle wins, so I must have won here even though my school is in the hands of a dangerously stupid individual, and I’ve just added myself to his enemies list (though I was probably on it already—I later find out that he’s got his own personal Stasi in the form of Julie, and probably others too, telling him every little word that anyone whispers. So maybe he’s not so stupid after all, though if he were just good at his job, he wouldn’t need the legion of squealing toadies).

  Two of my advisees are standing at the end of the hall. One of them, Diana, tells me that her calculus teacher never gave her the assignment for the weekend, and can I please go get her teacher out of the meeting she’s in so that Diana can get her assignment? Pl
ease? So I go get Sydney out of the meeting and give the assignment to Diana, grumbling about how I have to do her errands, et cetera, which I guess is the passive-aggressive thing I do with kids—rather than saying no, I grumpily accede to almost anything they ask for. It’s my pathetic little way of pretending I’m not a pushover, but nobody’s fooled.

  “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.