At
school’s midpoint I’m exhausted, frustrated, and distracted by a
hundred or so fish nibbling on my lines, while papers to grade stack
up like one of those illustrations for the national debt – all the
way to the moon and back.
I
comfort myself with the thought that I’ll get it done. Haven’t I
always gotten done this teaching thing – this half science and 100%
art thing – for going on 20 something years now?
But every year it’s
the same. Halfway into it I wonder how am I ever going to reel in all
these lines I’ve let loose in the pond of learning. Truth be told,
high school teaching is an absurd calling. It’s Sisyphus trying to
inch his boulder up a mountain with dozens of adolescents hanging on
it, all the while asking, “Whassup, fool?”
Little
wonder that in recent movies, teachers come across as babbling
burnouts or malevolent sociopaths. Of course, I’m ignoring a whole
cottage industry of filmdom, the inspirational-teacher movie wherein
said teacher motivates the previously unmotivated in time – always
just under an hour and a half – for the big showdown. Life would be
pretty if it were so.
In
real life, teaching means long hours, when despite all your training
and knowledge, you are often thrashing around in the dark. Then a
light bulb goes on. Sometimes over the students’ heads but just as
likely over the teacher’s head.
Oh,
I imagine I have inspired some students along the way, but I’m not
fool enough to believe that’s all I’ve done. I’ve uninspired my
share, too.
Perhaps, it’s the
cold but lately my failures, not my successes, keep popping into my
mind. Their faces rise like helium balloons, their eyebrows curled
like two question marks, perpetually
asking why?
During
Christmas break, my family and I were dining at a Mexican restaurant
when one of the waiters sauntered up to our table and introduced
himself. Turned out he was one of my students from about twelve years
ago. He was pleased to see me and when he asked if I remembered him,
I, of course, lied and said yes.
After all these
years, I forget their names the minute the door hits the jamb on the
last day of school, but usually I recall faces. Yet his face was so
different, I didn’t recognize him. But he did remind me of one of
my greatest failures, a student I had about the same time.
This boy was in my
newcomer class made up of immigrant students who had just arrived in
the U.S. He had a face that loved to smile and was always a quick one
with a quip. Though he was one of our slower students academically,
he was always good at any games we played, but forcing him to write
was like chaining him to a hundred-ton ball. Oh, how his face would
drop if he had to sit still in his desk and write.
To this day, I can’t
explain the why of it, but somehow we got crossways. And I got the
fool notion that what this kid needed was some tough love delivered
by yours truly. He needed to get with the program, and I was just the
teacher to do it, even if I had to drag him screaming into the belly
of this beast called English.
It didn’t work, my
being hard on him. It clammed him up, completely shut him down. He
refused to learn and later stopped coming to class altogether.
But he was not a
dropout. He was a kickout. I kicked him out. Oh, maybe he had
problems in other classes. And maybe he wouldn’t have made it
anyway. But just maybe he could have. I’ve seen enough students who
have come to us barely literate in their own language somehow grasp
this crazy, contradictory English language.
The last time I saw
him he was a street vendor, a paletero,
hawking paletas
(Popsicles) near the school. I knew then that I’d failed him. Still
to this day, he is like a pebble in my shoe.
But
don’t get me wrong. I don’t wear his memory like a hairshirt to
remind me of my utter baseness. I don’t dwell on my failures, but
for my students I have a duty to think about them because, strange as
it might seem, I like teaching – this messy work of half
inspiration, sometimes 100% desperation.
Yet, I have to
admit, it’s never been easy for me. While, I guess, there are some
who were born to teach, I’m not one of them. I didn’t get into
teaching because I had an overwhelming desire to be around teenagers.
In fact, just the opposite was true. I figured I could stand them
until something else better came along, but, the truth is, at the end
of every school year, I feel blessed to have been around so many fine
young men and women.
Yet
invariably when I introduce myself as a high school teacher to other
adults, the person to whom I’m being introduced will lean forward
and, in a very sympathetic voice, whisper, “I am so sorry.” They
needn’t be really.
To
hear on some frigid, wind-blasted morning, the sound of one
previously suspicious and slow moving student finally taking the bait
is more perfection than most people get in a lifetime. And I am lucky
to hear it, if not every morning, more often than I've any right to
expect.
