School Daze Angst

      I’m outside my portable classroom with my brand-spanking-new students, reviewing the material we’ve just gone over. It’s a good lesson, creative, because it gets the kids up and about, but having to do with the task at hand. That’s how I roll: reach them, teach them.

      But when I ask for a choral response, all I get is “Huhs?” and “Whats?” and looks stuck somewhere between confused and just plain “I don’t give a care.” After all these years, I’ve ended up with a class of freshmen zombies, The First Period of the Living Dead.

      I raise my voice a few decibels, but I might as well be speaking to the proverbial wall. Nothing I do works. In fact, I start getting pushback.

      “This is boring,” declare a few snarky fishes.

      And then my “favorite” insult comes from some lump slouching against his homies: “This is so gay!”

      Derisive laughter rises from the throng. I can feel my blood pressure rising, sweat pouring from under my arms like a tap’s been opened. I’m ready to wade into the middle of them and take no prisoners. By golly, this is the first day. I can't allow this!

      Then, fortunately, I wake up. Another anxiety dream! I guess it's no surprise. A former colleague warned me after he retired the same thing happened to him. After all, for a quarter-century I wore down carpet or linoleum to threadbare church-mouse thickness, cajoling, proctoring, mentoring — in other words, teaching — easily a couple thousand high school students, mostly in majority poor schools.

      Of course, no one's more surprised than I am that I actually made 25 years as a high school teacher. Some are born to teach. I was just not one of them. I didn’t get into teaching because I'd an overwhelming desire to be around teenagers. In fact, just the opposite was true. I figured I could stand the little punks until something better came along. But the truth is, as the years went on, I began to feel truly blessed by being around so many fine young men and women.

      I’ll always remember my first year, 1988, at Stroman High School in Victoria, Texas, awaiting the usual baptism of fire reserved for new teachers. But before I could even do that, I had to go through mind-bogglingly boring in-services the week before school. The labors of Hercules were a cinch by comparison.

      During that in-service week, I, a college graduate, had parts of the teacher handbook read aloud word for word, as if I couldn’t do that myself. On one particularly torture-filled day, I was barred from working in my room because I had to listen to some motivational speaker’s incredibly lame attempts at humor.

     And that’s pretty much what all teachers go through before the start of school. I’m no prognosticator. I've no idea which of the 20-odd Democratic candidates will win the nomination. But during these first weeks of school, I can safely predict that the anxiety level will be dangerously high for teachers. If you know one, be patient. That person is passing through a circle in hell. It can all work out and usually does, even if, at the time, that’s hard to believe.

      That first year, my last-period class was senior lower-level English. Think Welcome Back, Kotter’s sweathogs, and you’d have a pretty good approximation of the bunch I found waiting for me. Since it was the ’80s, all the girls had their hair teased and moussed up to what looked like a foot or more. They all wore black clothes and globbed on dark eyeliner so thickly they could have auditioned for The Bride of Frankenstein. My rookie knees were shaking. But as has fortunately happened to me more often than not in my career, I grew to love that class.

      Schools all over this country, brimful with anxious teachers and nervous students, will begin or already have begun. I had 25 years of those high-anxiety beginnings. May this year’s crop of teachers have as much luck and fun as I ended up having.

Just Another Pretty Face

      No longer content to hide under our beds, Russians are everywhere these days from fake memes and online trolling to NRA galas, Trump Tower and, maybe, even the White House. It takes me back to my year in Moscow, 1988. Gorby and glasnost were in, as was rock, long hair, and dissent. I felt so at home.

      I was working on my study, which I hoped would be the crowning achievement of my academic career, “The Moral Advancement of the Soviet People Because of Their Contacts with Americans.” Although, much to my surprise, things weren't going so hot. My interviews with Russians would go well, until they found out I was American. Then they'd try to interest me in smuggling, you know, the usual – designer jeans, Playboys, nuclear warheads, toilet paper.

      I got so discouraged I spent most of my time wandering the streets of Moscow, foraging for edible food. One twilight I ended up at the University of Moscow, a hotbed of the kind of activism we saw here in the states during the early eighties. Spying the bulletin board with its gigantic posters advertising a Milton Friedman Fan Club, a conference on how to smirk like Donald Trump (hmm, that might explain some things), and a colloquium on unenlightened self-interest, a small notice in the corner caught my eye.

      It was an announcement of a meeting about, of all things, Lenin. Now this was an eye-opener. What would I find at such a conclave – a cabal of geriatrics planning sedition while comparing gall bladder surgeries? I grabbed the address and went straight there.

     At the meeting, I found thirty people crammed into a living room the size of a walk-in closet, literally sitting on top of one another, eating cabbage rolls, sampling just picked mushrooms, downing shots of vodka along with Pepsi chasers, and arguing passionately about all sorts of intellectual topics. I knew right away I'd come to the right place.

      I overheard a distinguished middle-aged gentleman with a salt and pepper beard argue, as he pointed at a bottle of Pepsi, that they “should not drink this sugary example of capitalist thuggery.”

      “Dmitri, this is perestroika, drink up!” a woman next to him replied.

      “Excuse me,” I interrupted, “what is the purpose of this meeting?

      “What you see before you is our national tragedy, men and women who are in the grips of terrible oppression,” Dmitri answered, then began to weep openly and without shame.

      “Dobryy vecher,” said the woman, “I'm Anna. I'm sorry. Dmitri is much too upset to talk. You see, we are a support group for unemployed Lenin statue makers.”

      Dmitri then grabbed my shoulders, sobbing, “All over the world Lenin statues are being destroyed by peasants who don't understand great art. It is too much to bear!”

      “But can't you make other statues?” I asked.

      “Have you ever seen Lenin's face,” Anna replied.

      She picked up a small statue off the coffee table. The room suddenly went quiet, everyone staring at this simple bronze statuette of Lenin.

      “Look at this face,” she said, then she began to sing (to the tune of “Baby Face”):

                       There's not another one to take his place, Lenin's face.

                       I'm in socialist heaven when I see his pretty face.

      “Look at these cheekbone,” Dmitri sobbed. “I can't sculpt anyone else!”

      “Listen,” Anna said, “we all had years of training and were given all kinds of privileges by the state. We enjoyed dachas, vacations on the Black Sea twice a year, and toilets that actually flushed.”

     Men and women began to cry. Some whimpered, “Imagine, a toilet that actually flushes.”

      “But now,” Anna continued, “we have nothing. Nothing!”

      Then Dmitri screamed, “Life is hell. It is unbearable!”

      Anna slapped him, pulled his face close to hers and gave him a big, passionate kiss. Then whispered in a sexy Lauren Bacall voice, “Dmitri, let us dance, until we drop dead.”

      The meeting quickly broke up, and we had one of those barn-burners for which Russians are justly famous. What an experience for an American in Moscow to be hung by his heels out the window in below-zero weather, while singing such great American favorites as “If I Had a Hammer” and “Rainy Day Women  #12 and 35.”

      Those Russians are such cards. I thought they had forgotten me, and to tell the truth, my feelings (not to mention my frozen extremities) were just a teensy bit hurt. But when the party finished, they dragged me back up, and everyone gave each other big hugs and kisses. Then we did the traditional Russian dance of Danceolovich Polnochke, which roughly translated means “The Groin-Destroying Dance.”

      After several more shots of vodka with Pepsi chasers, we walked out into the early morning streets of Moscow,  promising undying friendship. It was one of my most memorable experiences in Moscow, ranking right ahead of finding a clean bathroom in the Moscow subway.

      Of course, there were many things I learned during my stay. Not to eat food without smelling it, not to let fat bearded men who have been eating cabbage kiss you on the lips, but, most of all, that though in Dmitri's word's “life is hell” we can make it if only we have enough vodka and an unlimited credit line from the Russian mafia, like you-know-who who used to smirk so well. Udachi!