My incredible Spring

I am sitting in the teachers’ room at a public arts magnet school where all my thoughts of wanting to teach are being dashed like ten-foot waves on a rocky shore. I got a job replacing a theatre arts teacher who has to take the rest of the semester off because of health problems. What’s most amazing to me is that ALL the teachers aren’t in rest homes! It is May. That’s nine months of backtalk, bureaucracy and early rising. I’ve been at it for two weeks and I need a vacation.

When the job was suggested to me I thought “Sure! Eight weeks? Piece of cake!” And, in theory, it IS a piece of cake. (I've been told that the normal pre-requisite for a Sub is a newspaper and a cup of coffee.) But teenagers are not cake. They’re not even cookies. As the regular teachers are not shy about descrying, they are... smaller than that. (Enough said. I know you get it.) At first I was shocked to hear them describe their charges in such colorful terms. Now I applaud them on their restraint.

I don’t want to paint all of the students with the same brush. There are some students that make it a pleasure to come to class each day. They sit, listening attentively, participating to the best of their ability above the din of the other ones; the ones who sit with their backs to you, who can’t stop talking, who answer back with the disdain one generally reserves for worms and rodents; the ones who look at an assignment as a challenge to their autonomy; who couldn’t care less about being here and will say so, unabashedly, to your face.

It may sound clichéd but “when I went to school” you wouldn’t dream of answering back to a teacher. You were afraid of teachers (!) even though the law said they couldn’t hit you anymore. (My husband went to a parochial school where they hadn’t gotten that memo yet and was routinely thrown up against the locker by a belligerent brother.) But these kids… Fresh? Omigod! They talk incessantly and when you ask them to stop they look you square in the face and say they weren’t talking. You start to feel a little crazy, seeing their lips move, hearing the murmurs and being told you imagined it. They lie on the floor, sometimes in pairs. They dress like they’re going to a rock concert. They lie right to your face. In groups!
“Your teacher sent me this lesson plan.”
“Oh, we did that already!”
“You did?”
“Twice.”

They hate us! Maybe hate is too strong a word. They tolerate. They disrespect. They know better. They think teachers were put on this earth to make their lives miserable. It is a cesspool of discontent. And if you demand attention, if you demand respect, if you demand anything, they will tell you outright that their “Mama will come to school and lay a whoop-ass on you” if you write them up. (That is a direct quote.) Oh, yes, ‘The Write-Up”- that is the punishment! I saw the following in one of the classrooms I visited. For a first offense a disobedient punk gets a verbal warning. (Oooooh!) For the second offense they get their name written on the dry erase board. (Oooooohhh! Now I can see this sort of public humiliation working on a businessman who has been caught trying to buy a hooker, but not on a kid who has just defied the authority of a women who comes up to his elbow.) For the third offense, you get “written up”. A formal complaint is lodged with the principal’s office. (Ooooohhhhhhhhhhh! See above comparison of student to teacher and multiply by 0.) For the fourth infraction (Fourth? Really?) your parents have to come to school for a meeting. (Refer to above section where student tells you Mama will lay a whoop-ass on you.) There's "In-house Suspension" where you get to run into the person you disciplined on a daily basis. And, of course, for the most persistent, major offenders, there is 'the boot'. I don't know how bad you have to be to get 'the boot' and I don't really want to find out. I'm just a little scared.

Still, if I had the opportunity, I would do it again. There have been moments - a class where everybody wanted to be there; a thank you from a student who had been praised; a thank you from a student who just had a good time in class. Those good ones... they make it all worthwhile.