Nice Try

by Josh Gondelman

  I’ve spent the last decade figuring out all the niceties of physical intimacy that I assumed my peers had grasped years earlier. At what point do you trust the efficacy of birth control pills and stop using condoms? How fast can you shower after sex without it seeming like a direct insult to the person you’ve just slept with? How do you know when it’s going to be a one-night stand? Sometimes women want you to choke them, even after deciding to sleep with you based on your exceptionally not-chokey personality. What then?

  Sex, for me, aside from the fun and excitement and intimacy and pleasure, has always been shot through with trepidation. The part of sex I’d been taught to think of as sex was awkward and hard to initiate. And for a long time it was routinely brief, which for the women I was with may have been a mixed blessing, in a “the food was terrible, and such small portions” kind of way. And all that is on top of having what’s technically known as “a pretty mediocre dick.”

  I was jealous not just of people who were great at sex, but of people who were bad at it and fine with that. I don’t admire them, but I’ve always envied the guys who reach sexual climax and go, “GAME OVER! TIME FOR SLEEP!” What a simple, clearheaded existence that must be. I imagine guys like that aggressively sending back overcooked steaks at restaurants and demanding hotel vouchers when their flights are delayed. It’s not a life to aspire to, but I can see the appeal of going through life feeling good and feeling good about it, no matter the cost to others, like you’re a Republican senator.

  Not me, though!

  Throughout my adult life, I’ve always blamed the experience gap for any anxiety or poor performance, but maybe that’s not the case. Maybe it’s just a thing I’ll always be fine but not great at, like parallel parking or sautéing broccoli. And over time, I’ve gotten less nervous and more competent. I’ve figured out how to minimize my deficiencies and make up for them with good listening, sincere effort, and, of course, apologizing when I screw up badly. Weirdly, that’s also how I got through my time playing youth sports. Because at heart, I’ll always be an aimer, not a thrower.

  . . . Try, Try Again

  Weathering the Tantrums

  I worked as a full-time preschool teacher for four years, which came as a surprise, even to me. Part of the shock stemmed from the fact that I didn’t go to school for education. Now, that sentence could (accurately) refer to the amount of time I devoted to extracurriculars instead of homework, but what I meant was: I didn’t have formal training to be a teacher. And even if I had, I’m not sure a degree in education would have prepared me for the greatest challenges of the job, like what to do when a student wedges a Cheerio in her nostril, or how to react when a four-year-old hears you curse under your breath.

  I graduated with a double major in English and creative writing with a minor in Spanish, so the only thing I’m qualified for is esto (that’s Spanish for “this”). I knew I wanted to be a writer, but at the time I finished school, that wasn’t an immediate option, on the technicality that I had never written anything good enough for someone to pay me for it.

  As the end of my final college semester approached, I started scanning online classified ads for a job. Like, any job. Years earlier, my dad had forbidden me from following his footsteps into a career in construction. Of course, my overall lack of physical strength and coordination would have been an impediment as well, so he didn’t have much to worry about. What kind of jobs do people even have? I wondered.

  I revealed my aimlessness to my mom over the phone, and she asked a question that should have occurred to me already.

  “Why don’t you look for a job teaching preschool? You know you’re good at it, and you don’t hate it.”

  Oh, right, duh, I thought. My mother had been the director of a small independent school for the previous twelve years, and ever since I was old enough to have a summer job, I’d worked there as an assistant, dousing squirming toddlers with sunscreen and providing an extra pair of eyes on field trips, in case a restless three-year-old made a break for the otter enclosure at the zoo. Parents get very upset if you let otters eat their child, and only slightly less upset if you let their child eat an otter. (“You know we are raising Hunter on a plant-based diet!”) My last four semesters of college, I’d even worked through the school year as a part-time Spanish teacher for grades kindergarten through eight, a job my yet-to-be-completed Spanish minor left me woefully underqualified for.

  As unfit as I was to do my father’s job, I was—though I hadn’t realized it—incredibly well prepared to follow in my mom’s career footsteps. My hours of classroom experience, plus a bachelor’s degree, meant I was just a single self-taught community college class away from a head teacher certification, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I could teach as a job job, partly because it was fun. It didn’t feel like going to work, the way most people talk about it. And teachers still seemed so adult to me, so noble and dedicated to the mission of cultivating the minds of young people.

  Obviously there were exceptions to that rule. When I was in high school, a substitute teacher named Mr. Burns (a rough name to have so close to the peak of The Simpsons’ popularity) was fired after sitting idly by while three students pooled thirty-five dollars and paid a fourth student to masturbate into a Dixie cup under his desk. While the firing was clearly justified, he was subbing in a Business 101 class, and those students had provided a vivid, disgusting object lesson in the principle of supply and demand, so . . . was it really that wrong? (It was.)

  As we embarked on our young careers, several college friends and I signed a lease on a house in Allston, an outer Boston neighborhood best summed up as “your parents’ basement away from your parents’ basement.” By the time we moved in, I had whipped through my Child Development 101 course at Bunker Hill Community College without ever meeting a professor, and I’d started applying for teaching positions. With employment on the horizon and my Ikea bed frame assembled (with considerable help from my numerous roommates), my adult life seemed to be coming together after all—at least, as much as an adult life can when you have an Ikea bed frame and numerous roommates.

  I lined up a few interviews right away. Part of my good luck had to do with the timing. It was a year before the housing crash imploded the economy, so people still had the income to send their kids to private preschool, as well as jobs to go to that made it necessary to hire people to care for their children during the day in the first place.

  The other part of my good fortune was sexism, which I realize might require a little more explanation.

  When I tell people I used to teach preschool (or mentioned it at the time, even), I get mixed responses. Generally, people without kids recoil, thinking (at best) Why would you put yourself through that? or (at worst) I am definitely talking to a pedophile right now. People with kids are generally enthusiastic. “That is so important. There are so few men in that field,” they often say, although occasionally it carries an undercurrent of, “Of course you spend all day around babies, you giant wimp.”

  Still, simply being a man (which I technically am, although I think of myself more as a “dude” or a “guy”) got my foot in the door. The scarcity of male applicants helped me stand out, request a flexible schedule, and even negotiate a livable, if unspectacular, salary. I guess what I’m saying is, I had the exact experience that men have applying for pretty much every job, and the opposite experience of a woman applying for a position in a male-dominated field. I’m not proud of that fact, but I am aware of it. And, not to flaunt my privilege, but most of the time, I had the men’s bathroom of the church in which our school was housed to myself for the entire day. I could have used it as a storage unit or boutique haberdashery, and nobody would have caught on.

  Unlike me, my colleagues were real-deal teachers. Which is to say, they were much more knowledgeable and dedicated and professional and experienced than I was.

  Committed early childhood educators don’t make as much money as they deserve, but they’re so important. Devo
ted preschool teachers can instill their students with the social and emotional grounding they need to thrive for years to come.

  Another, less well-known fact about preschool teachers is that they party like monsters. There’s a phenomenon known, possibly problematically, as “teacher Tourette’s,” in which as soon as teachers are out of earshot of their students, they’ll immediately start cursing like a mob lawyer on the phone with a loan shark. Not to mention the drinking. On a few occasions, a group of teachers from my school came to see me do stand-up, and they were reliably the rowdiest table in the club. It was like performing for a bachelorette party with no bachelorette. Once I did a show at a rehab center a few blocks from our school, and a coworker whom I will not identify smuggled in booze in a Dunkin’ Donuts cup. I was amazed at her hard work and tenderness with the kids day after day, especially since every time I saw her at night, I would think, I sure hope you get home okay.

  I was less of a partyer, but after late nights at shows or hanging out with friends, I would wear a shirt and tie to work the next morning to trick people into thinking I was put together. “You look so nice today,” my boss would tell me. I’d thank her and then return to counting down the minutes until I could spend my lunch break in my car, napping in the driver’s seat.

  Because I wasn’t crafty or organized, I tried to find other ways to make myself valuable in the classroom, mostly to avoid being revealed as dead weight. My coworkers excelled at the teaching part of teaching, so I needed to carve out my own niche, which was tricky because teaching was the entire job. My first plan was to introduce Spanish lessons into our classroom. I’d never taught Spanish to kids quite this young before, but the beauty of teaching any specific skill to four-year-olds is that nobody expects them to learn that much. If they can count to twenty and pick up the words for enough body parts to play Simon Says in another language, their parents will do cartwheels with glee.

  I also learned that while the school held a yearly holiday party in December and a graduation ceremony in June, there was no real performance element for the children. This seemed like an opportunity for me to inject some of my expertise into the job. My expertise, at the time, consisted primarily of pretending I had expertise. I took the initiative and wrote a holiday play (a nondenominational “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” parody) and rehearsed it with my students a few afternoons every week leading up to the party. This served the dual purposes of getting the kids ready to go onstage and avoiding learning how to make caterpillars out of egg cartons and other things that better teachers do.

  Over my years in the classroom, I came up with a simple formula for writing a children’s performance. Number one: Make sure an adult narrator is doing all the talking. Write the dialogue in a way that describes the action for the audience and literally tells the performers what they should be doing at every moment. (“All the snowmen and snowwomen became very sleepy . . . even Lucas.”) Number two: Throw in a few songs. Just the hits. “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” “This Old Man,” stuff like that. No need to get fancy and try to teach them a Beatles tune. Nobody cares how good your taste in music is. This is all about how few of the children start crying and run offstage. (Anything less than 20 percent attrition is a major success.) Finally: Keep it short. No need to draw this thing out. It’s not Angels in America. And even if it was, it would be a shitty version of Angels in America because four-year-olds are bad at acting. You want to get in and get out before all the younger siblings get bored and start running full speed into each other. Nothing derails a holiday party like a toddler with a concussion.

  The play, as rudimentary as it was, was a hit. It turned out that I was moderately skilled at something. I wasn’t dead weight in the classroom. I was more like . . . I don’t know . . . regular weight.

  My other special skill, I came to realize, was listening to children cry. In most cases, stoically sitting through a child’s emotional outburst makes you what people might call “a heartless monster” or “an actual sociopath.” As a preschool teacher, though, it’s part of the job. Kids are going to cry. Most of the time, there’s nothing you can do to stop them. (The exception to that rule being if you spot a child within two seconds of them falling on the ground or running right into another kid’s face, you can sometimes trick them with a swift, convincing counternarrative: “You’re okay! Don’t worry about it. Those were just your baby teeth anyway.”) So you have to get good at weathering the tears. Not to brag, but I was very good at sitting calmly beside crying children.

  At age four, children have the skills to articulate why they’re unhappy (“I don’t wanna go inside yet!”), but even after they identify the problem, they don’t have the wherewithal to keep from melting down like an ice sculpture in front of a space heater. Just about anything can set them off: skipping their regular nap, sleeping for too long, being told they have to finish their lunch, running out of lunch to eat, their best friend not wanting to play with them, their best friend wanting to play with the same toy as them. Literally any stimulus can provide the inspiration for a truly seismic fit of histrionics. If you’re not around kids often, you might not know that Johnson & Johnson’s “No More Tears” shampoo doesn’t just refer to the product’s gentle formulation. It’s also a silent prayer that parents and childcare providers utter at least once a day. “Please. No more tears. I can’t take it.”

  I spent at least thirty minutes every day on the floor next to a child in the throes of a full-on tantrum (the child’s tantrum, not mine). Children cried. They screamed. In some cases they tore at their clothes and pounded the floor like tiny, inconsolable war widows. They couldn’t be reasoned with, and in some cases they couldn’t even be comforted. So I sat beside them, offering words of encouragement in my most soothing tone. “I know,” I’d say. “Life can be really hard sometimes. It’s so hard not to get what you want. I’ve been there, too. But I’m sure if you take some deep breaths and relax your body, you’ll get a turn with that green marker very soon. I fully understand that none of the other identical green markers will suffice. It’s important to have standards.”

  My coteachers marveled at my placid stamina.

  “I don’t know how you do that,” a colleague once remarked, after watching me weather a forty-minute-long tsunami of tears.

  To be honest, I wasn’t sure, either. Some of it I chalked up to my natural disposition. But also, as a straight guy in your twenties, you get used to people crying angrily at you. You’re just not good enough at relationships to avoid it. The other teachers, mostly heterosexual women, would have had the upper hand dealing with a stoic child who “just doesn’t want to fucking talk about it, okay, Jennifer?”

  I’d fallen into my job, but I ended up loving it. Even on the most exhausting days, something sweet and nice usually happened, too. I got to see kids hit developmental milestones, form lasting friendships, and be at least intermittently charming and hilarious.

  Some highlights:

  One of the sweetest kids I ever taught was a small tornado of a girl named Della. Her hands were always sticky, and by noon every day, her hair was matted down to her head from sweat and who knows what other thickening agent, with several strands having found their way into her mouth. She had the worst gross motor skills I’d ever seen. She walked too fast, as if she were constantly finding herself on an unexpected downhill slope. She fell over all the time, and she’d often run to hug me at top speed, resulting in an inadvertent head-butt to my groin. At lunch time, we’d have the students pour their own milk and water from little pitchers, for dexterity. Della spilled an entire pitcher basically every day, causing the other kids (and some teachers) to sigh with exasperation. Once a week or so, she poured herself a Dixie cup of milk without any collateral damage, and holding my breath while watching her in those moments felt like witnessing a successful heart transplant.

  Once, right at the end of the school day, all the kids were signing their names on a big group project. Most of the class had pretty sloppy handwri
ting, but almost all of them could write their names from start to finish. One kid hadn’t quite figured it out. He’d write his initials or just a big illegible squiggle, like the world’s tiniest doctor signing off on a prescription pad. But this time, he hit the first letter and kept his focus straight through the second one. The other kids had finished and were getting antsy to move on to our next activity. “No need to rush,” I said to the class, “we’ve got plenty of time.” Really I just wanted to avoid putting a spotlight on this one kid. It took him two full minutes to write out the four letters in his first name, and he walked away from the table with a slight, proud smile like an NBA player who just iced a playoff game with a pair of clutch free throws. There is no way he remembers that afternoon as vividly as I do.

  At lunch one day, the girls in the class started to tease a boy named Liam. “Marry me!” they jeered. “Marry me! No not her! Marry me, Liam, me!” Liam became visibly flustered. (Of course he did. No one had ever proposed to him before.) “You have to choose who you’re going to marry or time’s going to run out and you’ll be left without anyone to marry at all.” Finally, Liam couldn’t take it anymore. “I’m sorry, girls, but I’m going to marry Owen.” We all turned to look at Owen, who had his arms crossed and was nodding deeply in the affirmative. It was very heartwarming. The girls protested, but when Liam held firm in his decision, and I assured them it was not against the rules for a boy to marry another boy, they accepted his choice. It felt, in that moment, like maybe people are inherently good, and maybe prejudice is learned and can be unlearned. And then I remembered that I was dealing with a sample size of fifteen people, none of whom even knew their parents’ first names. So while the conversation gave me reason to hope, it was not exactly a watershed moment in American culture.