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,
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 7th.
“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 3rd, 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 22nd 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 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
Anyway,
the kids came back on January 3rd 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
THIRTY-FIVE
YEARS PASS….
Last
day of school, June 2nd 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, 
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.
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