35 YEARS OF TEACHING - a retrospective of sorts

THE BEGINNING AND THE END…FIRST AND LAST DAY….

Christmas vacation, 1971, soon to be 1972. 

       A weekday in a chilly, empty school.  I was sitting in an old wooden chair with casters in room C213, central wing, Clifton Senior High School, in what was going to be my first classroom.  Four classes: two junior English honors, one A-track, one C-track.  Only four classes because the elderly woman that I was replacing halfway through the school year had been in poor health and her department chairman had given her one fewer class than everyone else, replacing it with a hall-monitor duty that amounted to little.

       I had just finished my student teaching in the senior (or north) wing in the week before Thanksgiving break, and had evidently made a good impression on Mrs. Rudin, the English department chairman, who had come in to observe me six times, not the usual procedure dictated by my college. My cooperating teacher had left me (gladly) with her least desirable three classes (two D-track, one C-track), keeping her two A-tracks for herself.  Two days of “observing” her right at the start of the school year – the observations amounting to hearing her yell a lot while handing out books and forms to be filled out – I had told her I was ready to start on that Thursday, September 7^th.

                “You want to take over a class tomorrow?!” she had asked with some surprise in her voice, having been used to other student-teachers who had observed for two weeks before taking anything on.
                “No, give me all three.  I want to get started now,” I had replied, explaining that since it was the beginning of the year, I would be more like their teacher from the beginning instead of replacing her a couple weeks in.  I wanted to start teaching; I had done enough “observing.”
                So she gladly left, only to reappear twice in the following two-and-a-half months to do the required (by my college) two teacher observations and fill out the accompanying forms.  But she had also raved about me to Mrs. Rudin (I guess she had heard some kids talking about my classes) and without my knowledge, they had already decided that I would replace Mrs. Eckstein, hence Mrs. Rudin’s stern request to me that I not accept any job offers from other schools between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.  I also found out later that year that students in my cooperating teacher’s other two classes had constantly bugged her about why they hadn’t gotten me for their teacher, too.  If I never mentioned it, Mrs. Moeller was long overdue for retirement, not because of her age as much as the fact that she hadn’t changed her teaching in twenty years…some of the worksheets she had offered to me had been brown with age.  But she did give me an A for student-teaching, glowing reports to my college, and was instrumental in landing me in that creaking wooden chair that I was now occupying in room C213.

                After what had begun four months before in a different wing of the school, now I was sitting in what was to be and would become, on January 3^rd, my classroom.  I stared at the class lists on the nicked and scarred wooden desk in front of me.  I had read the brief notes my predecessor had left for me, about which kids might give me trouble.  She liked to use the word imps a lot.  But considering the level of homogeneously-tracked classes I had inherited (Clifton Senior High School had made English classes in ability groupings, from Honors down to D-track), and being in a suburban New Jersey school that sent 97% of its graduates (average graduating class: 1,000-plus to four-year schools, many of them Ivy-covered ones, I didn’t foresee problems.  After all, I hadn’t had any with the three classes of “sweathogs” that I had received from Mrs. Moeller, my cooperating teacher.  In fact, those three classes would be ones that threw me such memorable goodbye parties on November 22^nd  that I would never forget them – the parties or the kids. 

                  The D-track kids used to like to say that the school gave them that designation because “it stands for Delinquent…Degenerate…Derelict…Doofus…or just Dumb.”  These were kids that were able to understand, to read, and to actually enjoy Beowulf; they hated Ethan Frome.  They couldn’t understand why Ethan didn’t just “boink” Mattie when Ethan’s wife Zeena was out of town. I had tried to explain the morality of the time period, but….and I still don’t think that one D-track class paid for the Seiko watch they gave me…but I was afraid to ask how they managed to raise the money. And yeah, it was a real Seiko, not a New York City sidewalk knock-off with plastic gears.
                So in a few days, the day after New Year’s Day, I would meet four classes (average of 25 in each) of students that I would be able to call “my kids” and not kids that I would have to return to another teacher, like books at the library.

                The room itself, one wall made of tilt-in windows covered with banks of Venetian blinds, the rest painted cinder blocks with attached chalkboards and a bulletin board along the back, smelled faintly of chalk dust and floor wax.  The desks were relatively new, with chairs that slid under them instead of the old one-piece desks that I would inherit in subsequent years in subsequent classrooms. (We never got to keep the same classrooms from year to year, one of the numerous annoyances perpetrated but an unfriendly-to-teachers administration, led behind the scenes by a vindictive and evil assistant female principal who preferred women (both in her little coterie and in her sex life).  It was always a real thrill trying to find a janitor who wasn’t on “light duty” to help move the full, three-drawer file cabinet to the next rooms at the beginning of each year, the new room which was often on another floor; the custodians were trusted with keys to the elevator, but we college graduates, most with master’s degrees, were not.  The principal himself was a spineless ex-shop teacher who had been appointed by the politically connected (and politically appointed) superintendent to be a complete ‘yes man.”  When the principal took one of his very infrequent walks out of his office (which was far removed from where any learning was going on) just before Christmas break to wish each of us a “happy holiday” (he was Jewish), kids would always ask who the man was.  One year, a kid named Stanley thought he was Bela Lugosi.

                Anyway, the kids came back on January 3^rd that year.  It was a magical and challenging year and I remember almost every memorable kid from those four classes.  And the rest is history -- ten more years of Clifton history.

                THIRTY-FIVE YEARS PASS….

                Last day of school, June 2^nd 2006…first day of almost summer vacation. 

             A weekday in an air-conditioned, almost-empty school.  I was sitting in a slightly stained, upholstered, high-back chair with casters that a former principal had bequeathed to me when he got a better one.  The lights were still on in room 121, the inner, windowless classroom that I had occupied for 24 years, the only classroom I had occupied, so it had become the room where “MR. B’S BUNCH” had resided for those years as well, filing in for 180 days under the sign that announced “Through this door pass the greatest people in the world.”  They’d liked that for all those years…at least, most of them, I think.

                It was a room that had developed its own character – probably because of the character who taught there…a room filled with unimaginable stuff – more like the interior of a thrift store, if you disregarded the school desks: a grill from the front of a VW, a hanged teddy bear with a sign that read “SLACKER,”  a rack of sweaters hanging from the ceiling, sweaters for the girls who were always too cold for some reason…too much else to record here -- hanging from the ceiling in defiance of one psychotic fire marshall who had mistaken her fire marshall’s badge for Wyatt Earp’s.  A toilet seat that served as the bathroom pass (“Place over head” it said for the gullible).  The two full-glassed walls covered with posters and signs to keep the distractions passing outside in the halls to a minimum; two full file cabinets bursting with the accumulation of file folders filled with stuff that had been part of successful lessons.  Three bookcases and one tall turning stand stuffed with paperbacks and discarded library hardcovers; three separate tables scrounged and carried up from the dusty storeroom in the basement.  A computer table;  a cabinet like a shelved wardrobe.  And a huge old solid-oak desk once used by the IRS, purchased at a school auction for $40, the top sanded, stained, and refinished twice. 

                     ROOM 121, LOUISA COUNTY HIGH SCHOOL, “MR. B’S ROOM”

        

               On that June day, almost everything was gone; all the posters and personal stuff given away, purchased, or auctioned off to either students or other teachers, enough to buy a used laptop on eBay for $170.  All that remained were the pieces of school-issued and county-owned stuff: student desks, the flag, the computer and printer on the one table...and that stained chair. 

                As I sat in that hand-me-down chair, the sounds of lockers slamming shut and the last students dashing out of school on that last half-day, I thought back to what I had begun this whole experiment in mind-expansion with.  It didn’t seem like thirty-five years.  And I thought of my best friend John’s remark from a few years before, a man I had met and had immediately liked in my first year in Jersey. 

                “Remember old Mr. Hopkins when we first started?” John had asked.  Mr. Hopkins, an elderly history teacher who knew, on any day of the year, how many school days were left.
                “Did you ever think we’d be one of those ‘veterans,’ those old-timers?” John had added.
                I’d laughed a little ruefully and had shaken my head.
               Yeah, I thought about all of that…and all of the lessons I had taught, year after year, lessons that students had annually told me, on their written evaluations of me and my class – whether it was an English class or a writing course -- had had meaning for them.

“It’s over.  I’m never going to be doing this again,” I thought, and the feeling of the stress beginning to leave my body became replaced with some kind of panic.

“Who’s gonna teach them to write?!” The Voice asked me.  “Who’s gonna teach that stuff from Our Town and Huck and Beowulf?  The rest of them (referring to my “colleagues” at the time) don’t teach writing, they don’t teach grammar, they don’t do a damn thing or bring in a damn thing from outside the textbooks!  They teach to the damn SOL (state-mandated standardized) tests!  There’s not a single section of Advanced Comp scheduled for next year!

My anxiety was extinguished – at least momentarily – by a female colleague from another department who came down to give me a hug and wish me a happy retirement.  When she left, I got up and shut off the lights.  On my last classroom…on my last day of teaching.  And I could feel everything slowly draining out of me. 

The Voice returned one more time to tell me that I’d done my part and I couldn’t do it forever.  And The Voice was right, even though there is still no one teaching writing there anymore.

It was a good trip.  And retirement is wonderful.