Snooze

by Michael McGirr

  My teaching career did not begin well. In 1988, I was twenty-six years old and had already spent eight years studying as a Jesuit. Having risen rapidly through the ranks, I was suddenly appointed deputy assistant dormitory master in a boarding school conducted by the order. There were also classes to teach, which was lucky for my students. I had all the answers. I had no formal teacher training, but that didn’t matter. My self-importance would more than compensate. History was about to be put on the right path. Sadly, humility was the form of self-discipline I most lacked.

  Before long, there were fireworks in the classroom to rival New Year’s Eve. The racket in my rooms could be heard from one end of the building to the other. The whole situation was descending into chaos and farce, saved only by the good nature of the students whose sense of comedy was opportunistic but seldom cruel. One boy, George, had fled with his family from South Africa.

  “You need the riot police,” he suggested.

  Chastened and confused, I sought the advice of colleagues. This was not hard, as in those days, the entire staff assembled at recess in the middle of the morning. They didn’t come for the tea and even less for the cheap instant coffee, the curse of which was so legendary that an empty tin was used as a prop for the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth. The daily get-together was essential for the exchange of information and news. We didn’t have computers, and text messaging was even further in the future. So people had to talk to each other. They still do, of course, but mostly to complain about computers.

  The first person I approached was Jack. Jack was hewn from old timber. He had been in the air force during World War II and had been a chronic insomniac ever since. This is a common manifestation of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). We will hear more about it later. In some respects, Jack had never gotten out of uniform. He referred to the students as “the enemy.” At the conclusion of recess, he’d join the end of the long line of staff waiting to tip their unpalatable coffee down the sink and announce to the stragglers, “Well, back to face the enemy.” Jack was known to fight for both sides. When the deputy-head walked the corridor, he sometimes announced an air raid and got his class to take cover under their desks. Jack refused to put comments on reports. He couldn’t see the point. The school insisted and eventually Jack had to give some ground, which was not his natural instinct. He simply wrote “G” for good, “VG” for very good, or “VVG” for very, very good. The underachievers got “POOR.” No further embellishment was warranted. It was a far cry from the highly strung and meaningless gobbledygook that teachers are expected to produce these days. The language of modern reports is just one symptom of the culture of anxiety and exhaustion that has taken hold of education: teachers are required to generate more and more words to say less and less. Jack’s pithy comments were created in the same impeccable handwriting as covered the board at the end of every math class he taught.

  Each morning, Jack would announce to the staff room how many sleeps it was until his retirement—hardly the most positive approach to a job. At the time we met, the figure was still in the thousands. Years later, after Jack had retired, I ran into him in the coastal area to which he had retreated from the enemy. He said he missed school and told me how many days since his last class. Jack was a recovering alcoholic although hardly anonymous, making no secret of his membership in AA. He regularly invited some of the people from his AA group to come and talk to the boys. This made a significant impact. Many things change in education, but dealing with compulsive behavior, especially with regard to alcohol, is a constant, whether it is in the lives of parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, siblings, or the students themselves. It was Jack who first told me that “the addict is emotionally absent,” an insight I have worn to the bone with constant use. Sleeplessness tends to hang around with one of its dishonest buddies, addiction. You only have to look into a casino at 2:00 AM to realize that.

  It is not just the presence of gambling and grog that makes trouble but also the absence of everything that these things replace. In my first year of teaching, I was advised by an alcoholic colleague, Tony, that the secret of his success was “a brandy before the first bell.” The problem was that there was no secret and not much success, only a life half lived and a fine mind gone to waste on endless repetition of the same tired gags. He hid behind endless deception both of himself and others. It was Tony who first told me that teaching was a branch of show business. There is truth in this, but actors need sometimes to be able to take off their paint.

  Jack was usually one of the last to leave the staff room after recess. So it was, lagging behind and trying to delay my own return to what I was beginning to think of as a battle, that I found myself asking his advice. He was never anything but direct.

  “Always make sure you’re the first in the room,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I have seen struggling teachers try to cut short the lesson by arriving late and leaving early.”

  This described me at that moment.

  “Never show fear. Get in there early. It’s your turf. Make sure you hold your ground. Never give an inch. It’s your turf.”

  Even in the circumstances, this was too belligerent for me. I didn’t want to win the battle. I didn’t want to have a battle in the first place. “Thanks, Jack. I’ll think about what you say,” I told him.

  “Never surrender,” he said.

  Surrender is, of course, the first and most powerful step of Alcoholics Anonymous. I wonder even now how Jack ever managed to take it. It is also the first and most powerful step toward sleep.

  Next, I sought help from Cath, another math teacher. She was much younger than Jack, and while she took no nonsense from the students, she had a much warmer disposition.

  “I’ll give you one piece of advice,” she said. “Never be late for a class if you can possibly help it.”

  My heart fell. I thought I was going to get the same machismo about holding your ground and defending your turf and showing no fear and all that stuff that won the war.

  “I always try to be the first in the room,” continued Cath. “And as each child comes through the door, I try to catch them eye to eye. Just for a fraction of a second. Because their eyes never lie. And as I catch each eye, I remind myself that every single person entering that room has seen different things since the last time I taught them. Every one of them has a story that they bring into the room with them. Perhaps they have forgotten their lunch, they may have just broken up with someone, they may have fought with a friend, they may have just got a part in a play they really wanted, they may have just been selected for a team or missed out on a team, their parents could be fighting, their grandfather could be dying. The list is endless.”

  She had me thinking.

  “I teach math,” Cath said. “I know the difference between infinite and irrational. The square root of two is irrational. The possibilities in the room are infinite.”

  I laughed.

  “I remind myself at the start of every lesson that there is a wealth of experience coming into that room,” Cath said. “Sometimes I don’t know what it is. Sometimes I do. Sometimes kids need you to know their whole story. Sometimes school is a welcome break from the rest of life. But the classroom is not just about me. My job is to enlarge and enrich that experience. I am not there to please the kids or be confined to what they happen to be interested in. My job is to meet them where they are and try to take them someplace fresh.”

  I took Cath’s advice, trying to catch the eye of every child as they arrive for the lesson. With each passing year, they seem a little more tired and frazzled. Part of the load that each person brings into the room is the burden placed on their shoulders by their culture. Foremost is the expectation that, from the age of ten or even younger, they will live frenetic lives. I have seen sixteen-year-olds nodding off at 9:00 AM in the morning.

  “We all know where they are at 9:00 in the morning,” a dear colleague once told me. “But you need to know who they ar
e, not just where they are. And if you want to know who they are, you need some idea of what’s happening in their world at 9:00 PM.”

  Fatigue narrows the moral vision of people and clouds their humanity. The truly exhausted can’t see past the hands on the face of their watch. In When Breath Becomes Air, a beautiful medical memoir about life and death and the fine line between the two, Paul Kalanithi writes of trainees in surgical oncology who have so many sleepless nights that they even privately hope that patients who arrive on the operating table may turn out to be inoperable, that their cancer will be more widespread than anticipated and thus surgery will be unnecessary. Desperate young doctors would then be rescued from another nine-hour surgery that would otherwise be “stretching out” before them. Of course, when they wake up to what they are really thinking, these budding doctors experience “a gnawing, deepening shame,” but fatigue eats the moral core. This is why it is of such concern to teachers.

  The irony is that the very fatigue that is caused by having too many choices in the world ends up crippling the ability to make those choices on the basis of what Jonathan Swift would call “faith and reason.” Swift was among the first to articulate the way that the habitually tired are at the mercy of unruly emotions and end up getting drugged on “an amusement of agreeable words.” The 24-hour news cycle is both a cause and a result of exhaustion. So, too, are endless consumer choices and excessive time in the thrall of screens. Those who are saturated with information actually absorb very little, let alone think about what they hear. They make choices on the basis of cheap emotion for precisely the same reason that an exhausted professional eats junk food on the way home from work. They are too tired to sort proper ingredients into a proper meal. Teaching is about helping young people sort out the world in all its wonder, beauty, and complexity. An athletics coach needs to start with people who are fit. A teacher needs to start with people who are properly awake.

  When, my daughter Clare was ten, I was surprised how easily she memorized a good part of William Blake’s “The Tyger.” It’s a poem that tends to stick to the memory; its rhythm does half the work for you. I was delighted to see her mind chewing on the textures of strangely shaped words. Sleep helps to create memory; learning things by heart helps the memory build muscle:

  Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  The author, William Blake, might have been surprised to find his work between the covers of a Bedside Collection of Children’s Verse. His Songs of Innocence all have a dark tinge. Blake was uncomfortable with the materialistic explanations of the world that dominated the century in which he was born, the so-called Age of Enlightenment. He described it as a time when “the soul slept in beams of light,” meaning that too much understanding of one kind can allow deeper kinds of understanding to slumber. In an 1802 letter, Blake wrote some of his best-known words: “May God us keep / From single vision and Newton’s sleep.”

  Blake often took aim at Isaac Newton, a man who did an extraordinary job of approximating the whole of the physical world to a small number of mechanical laws. For Blake, the world was simply not a machine. He painted Newton as a naked man in a cave, transfixed by his measurements and drawings. All around him is darkness, but his single focus doesn’t notice. He may as well be asleep.

  Nevertheless, the sleep physician I met—Dr. John—had opened my eyes to the role of science in understanding sleep. There are indeed lots of things about sleep than can be measured and calibrated; my overnight sleep study had made this clear. Eventually, Dr. John sent me off to a chemist with a prescription for the CPAP machine, the device that would help me to breathe through the night by keeping my airway open. I hadn’t realized that snoring, the stuff of comedy, had been for me a sign of a nightly struggle to stay alive. I literally fought against suffocation for hours on end. No wonder I was tired. Yet the solution was simple and scientific.

  The chemist to whom I was despatched knew a great deal about the history of sleep. He immediately launched into an entire mythology about these new CPAP machines and the Australian who invented them, Dr. Colin Sullivan. He said that Sullivan was a recluse and a millionaire— all because he had a single bright idea, out of the blue.

  “Everyone was trying to discover what to do about sleep apnea,” the chemist told me. “One night, Sullivan was sitting in a Chinese restaurant in Marrickville. He was the last to leave, and they began to clean up the restaurant before he was finished. He noticed that the restaurant owner didn’t sweep up the grains of rice off the floor. Instead, he had reverse-wired a vacuum cleaner that he used to blow the rice out the back door. That was when Sullivan had his Archimedes moment. What he came up with was basically a reverse-wired vacuum cleaner to push air down your throat all night to let you breathe.” It was that device I was myself about to purchase.

  I finally met Professor Colin Sullivan himself in September 2004. It turned out that almost nothing the chemist had told me was true. Sullivan had never been in a Chinese restaurant in Marrickville in his life, and he was far from a multimillionaire recluse. Intead, his office at Sydney University was still in the same unassuming room in the same building where he had devised the first CPAP machine almost twenty-five years before. He invited me to pay him a visit.

  By the time we met, a million people around the world were using his invention, and it had become Australia’s second-largest medical export after the cochlear implant for hearing. And yet Sullivan’s office still didn’t have air conditioning. When I arrived, he was struggling to get the window open.

  “It gets difficult to breathe in here,” he said.

  It was breathing that brought Colin Sullivan into the area of sleep medicine, which, in the 1970s, was very much in its infancy. In many respects, it still is. Sullivan was drawn to medicine through physiology, the study of the more mechanical aspects of the human person, because it was the closest branch of medicine to engineering. His two elder brothers had both been engineers, and it seemed to be the family default position. His father had been an electrical fitter.

  “My wife calls me a human engineer rather than a doctor because I tend to think mechanically. It’s only recently that I have begun to think of myself as an inventor,” Sullivan told me.

  In the early seventies, Sullivan had embarked on his research under the supervision of David Read, after whom the sleep laboratory in which we were sitting is named. Read became interested in the tragic phenomenon of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) after friends had lost a baby in this way. The diagnosis was still in its early phase; SIDS had only been named as a distinct condition in 1969. Read began to explore the nature of breathing and sleep in infants. Over time, Sullivan moved on to asking separate questions about sleep in adults. He went to Canada and did research on what happens to the breathing of adults during sleep, using dogs fitted with masks to aid his research.

  “We are pretty sure now that, in children, sleep drives the entire process of development,” he says. “In adults, it has more a function of maintenance.”

  Ironically, after thirty years in the field, Sullivan is now more interested in childhood sleep and especially fetal sleep than ever before, developing techniques for studying it. He was trying to ascertain if there were clues in childhood, especially in childhood breathing and snoring, that might provide pointers for the later onset of serious conditions such as sleep apnea. He wondered if they could be headed off before they developed and did damage. He points out that it was once common to remove large tonsils from children.

  “These kids often presented as sickly, and we used to rip out their tonsils at the drop of a hat,” he explains. “Their snoring was interrupting their sleep and suppressing their growth hormone. After the procedure, they’d often have a growth spurt.”

  He went on to explain that babies can spend eighteen to twenty hours a day asleep. Most of that sleep is REM sleep, which is that part
of sleep where the brain stimulates itself. But fetal sleep is even more predominately REM sleep. So what’s going on?

  “We know that by eighteen weeks, the fetus starts to perform the motions of breathing, even though it doesn’t need to,” Sullivan explains. “It gets all the oxygen and nutrients it needs through the placenta. In its last four or five months, the fetus looks like it is breathing a lot of the time, and this requires a good deal of energy, so there must be some point. What we know is that the fetus learns and practices three key activities while it is asleep: breathing, sucking, and swallowing. These are critical to survival at birth. They are learned during fetal sleep. So, like adult sleep, it isn’t exactly down time. It is key learning time.”

  Colin stood up and reached to the top shelf of a bulging cupboard and pulled down a box in which he started rummaging, picking over pieces like it was a box of oddments in a garage sale. These were the first masks that had ever been used for CPAP machines; it was a little box of medical history. They were ugly and cumbersome. There were plaster-of-paris molds in the box as well, masks taken from the faces of early patients. They had all been made by hand and fitted to each patient individually. In the early days, they had to be stuck on every night with glue and then prised off in the morning. It was a hell of a business. But the people who were prepared to sleep with these hideous gadgets stuck to their faces were in dire straits. They were people for whom the most natural thing in the world—breathing—did not come naturally, at least not in bed.