Why Teach? - chapter 2

The truth of the matter was that I never planned to teach, never wanted to be a teacher.

The truth of the matter was that I never planned to teach, never wanted to be a teacher. Not that I hadn’t liked school, or been a good at it. I had; I was. But the profession never held an allure for me as it does for some. Not once did I ever look at one of my own teachers and think Yes. That. I would like to do what he does for a living. To the contrary, if someone had told me when I was a 17- or 18-year-old that I would grow up to head a classroom, I’d have likely read an implied insult in the statement. My earliest understandings of teachers came from my father, of Morris, Able, & Morris fame, the school district’s chief legal counselor. The “those-who-can’ts” he called them, and “school marms,” “baby sitters,” and “mother hens.” His most withering appellations were reserved for the men in the profession. “The eunuchs,” he called them. Trent Richards, the head of the Social Studies department and longtime head of the Teachers’ Union, with whom my father annually negotiated contracts, he referred to as “the Eunuch in Chief.” (As legal counsel, my father occasionally took up cases on the behalf of teachers for the school district, but more often than not acted on the side of the school board and administrators against the staff.) And so I had liked some of my teachers, and even admired some of them. Many, in fact. But to be a teacher, I understood, was to pursue the lowest of the professions a person with professional ambitions might pursue. Not something I was interested in.

If the twin shames of my life at the age of twenty-five were 1) the fact that I had returned to my hometown after college, and 2) become a teacher, then the place I found refuge from my humiliation was the apartment I rented in the Douglas Building above Main Street, downtown. Once a hotel, then an agricultural office building, now converted to a number of hastily divided and rough-hewn apartment living spaces, I lived in a three-room space on the fourth floor there: a small bedroom, a small living room, and a small office, laid out train car-style along a narrow interior hallway that ran parallel to the cigarette smoke-filled hallway outside my door. My apartment featured close proximity to the building’s laundry room just down the hall, an elevator at my end of the building, and the oft-used back staircase, also at my end of the building. While these amenities were nice, the feature that most sold me on the place was the view it offered from its western-facing windows. Looking out over the tops of the Wendell and the Riley buildings across the street in the foreground, these views reminded me of big city life as depicted on television sit-coms and in Hopper paintings: “Night Windows,” or “Room in Brooklyn.” In the distance, on the other side of the railroad tracks and the empty riverbed, I could see the grasses of the high plains moving sea-like on a windy day, and could watch far-off thunderheads gather and sheets of rain sweep across the prairie when it stormed. On a hot, still, clear afternoon in the summer, I could almost see—almost imagine I saw—a ghost outline of the far-off Rockies.

Which is all to say that in my apartment on the fourth floor of the Douglas Building, I was both aloft from Plains City and aloof from it, too. I slept in on the Sunday morning after the funeral, picking up my coffee and a breakfast sandwich at Wonder’s Bakery on my building’s first floor when it opened at ten-thirty, and I read and watched television by turns throughout the late morning and afternoon as my air conditioner cycled on and back off. I stepped out again a little after five to pick-up takeout at Dos Amigos across the street, and came back upstairs to eat it on my couch, my worn, clothbound Webster’s Collegiate dictionary serving as a makeshift TV tray while I watched a movie I had received in a red envelope in my mailbox. Then I finished the evening on my couch reading more of my book and watching an episode of Cheers and an episode of Frasier before turning in around eleven. It was a day in which I had only spoken to two other people and probably shared less than thirty words between the two; no wizard self-exiled in his tower could have passed a day more contentedly.

But then when I woke it was Monday, time to shave, shower, dress, and descend the Douglas building’s back staircase, a descent that meant coming down in more ways than one. I was never so miserable as when I was driving the eight blocks down Main Street to the high school I had once graduated from, feeling lower and lower at each of the stoplights that I had to stop at along the way, leaving my elevated life behind.

If I felt low on my drives to school, however, it was a lowness I knew, after three years’ experience, I wasn’t destined to suffer for long. Invariably, walking the halls and seeing the eagerness, awkwardness, and merriment of the students would lift my spirits—or seeing their torpor, misery, and loneliness would prompt me to dig deep and bring out a better version of myself for their benefit. This morning my turning-point came sooner than I expected. As soon as I stepped out of my car in the teachers’ parking lot, I met the front end of a cadre of band students coming back in off the practice field after their zero-hour marching practice.

“Hey Able,” a voice called. I turned and saw Dylan Bell, the captain of the drum line and an alumnus of my class. The white and silver snare drum strapped to his front glittered in the morning light.   

“Morning Dylan,” I called, and even as the words were flying my mouth, Dylan was rat-a-tatting and calling “Fall in!” to his charges. Then there was more rat-a-tatting, the sudden, twinned ta-dumps of the bass drums, and the wild pounding of the other drummers spinning up to their full feat of syncopated madness. I became, as I walked into the school with my satchel slung over my shoulder, a kind of Pied-Piper figure, the grinning head of a parade of irreverent band students returning to their lockers.

* * *

“Yo Mr. A, what’d you do this weekend?” Javier Galvon asked after the bell had rung to start my day’s first class.

At the beginning of the year, I had tried shutting Javi down when he invariably launched off on one of these tangential discussions at the start of class, but the young man was irrepressible, a born talker with perhaps some undiagnosed ADHD. Trying to shut him down sometimes made him sullen and spiteful. And I had realized that his attempts at conversation weren’t mean-spirited or particularly designed to drag the class off course; he was just being friendly and trying to connect. I had found that if I humored him a little bit early in the day, I could often get him to work for me for the rest of the period. This morning the class was light by more than a half-dozen students, anyway. Talking to Javi for a few minutes might give some other kids time to show up. “Read books, mostly,” I said. “Did you have a good weekend?”

Javi ignored my question. “Nuh-uhh,” he said, stretching out the last syllable. “I heard you hit the club.”

In a town the size of Plains City, where there were really only so many places to go on the weekend, and where so many of the high school kids had older siblings and friends who either visited the Oasis regularly or worked there, there was little point in trying to guess where a junior football player like Javi might have heard about my weekend outing. “I did,” I said. “I hopped on a private jet Friday after school and flew out to Miami. We were in the club all night. I saw Lebron and Kobe and that rapper you guys like. What’s-his-name. Five Dimes.”

“Who?”

“Give me a sec. Not Five Dimes.” I shook my head, pretended to think. “Ten Nickels?”

Marcos Dominguez, Javi’s closest friend from the football team, barked his short laugh. “He’s talkin’ Fiddy,” he called. “Fiddy Cent.”

I shook my head. “No, that doesn’t sound right. Half-a-Buck. Is his name Half-a-Buck?”

Javi and several of my students groaned, a reaction I couldn’t help but smile at.

“Hey, Able. Did you do some shots?” Raphael Lerma wanted to know. “Jaeger bombs and tequila?”

“So many shots,” I said. I pinched a finger and thumb in front of my chin, extending my pinky. “But we weren’t shooting Jaeger or tequila. It was espresso.”

There were more groans.

“Espresso?” Raphael’s look was disgusted.

“Lebron kept buying. When he’s done with basketball, he told me his next dream is to get into the rap game. He wanted to talk about rhyme schemes and poetry. We both like Tupac.”

“Man, I know you didn’t—” Javi started, his voice going high, but I cut him off, pretending I had just remembered something else.

“Jay-Z was there! And Beyonce! They didn’t show up until pretty late, but they wanted to talk about poetry, too. We’re thinking about collaborating. We wrote a bunch of stuff down on napkins.” I patted my pockets, as if I might still have some of these notes with me. “It was lyrics for a song we’re going to call…”

My students leaned in.

“‘English Grammar!’”

They fell back. More groaning. This was enough for Javi. He threw his hand up in exasperation. “Man, I ain’t even gonna play with you,” he said. “Teach your class, man.”

* * *

My lesson for the day was from the so-called ‘old curriculum,’ a traditional junior-level tour of American Literature. Having finished our beginning-of-year unit on Native American creation myths and trickster tales, and having moved through some writings of the first European explorers and colonizers, I was getting ready to start my unit on the Puritans, beginning with some old poems, sermons, and historical context before reading Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible. Before I got that ball rolling, today I wanted to squeeze in a poem I had been thinking about over the weekend, which I had made copies of when I’d walked into the building. I was halfway finished passing my copies of it down my students’ rows of desks when Mrs. Hirsche, the district’s Head of Literacy, walked into the room. Austerity personified, Mrs. Hirsche was a former fourth- and fifth-grade teacher who had picked up a doctoral degree and joined the ranks of the administration several years before. She was wearing a white blouse, red jacket, black skirt and black stockings, and had on red lipstick and a not insignificant application of rouge. Affixed to the lapel of the jacket was the silver title badge worn by all of the Central Office staff: Janine Hirsche, Head of Literacy. She looked, perhaps more prominently than she ever had to me, like the hope-crushing, nightmare-inspiring villain from one of the Disney movies of my youth. Cruella Deville, or the evil queen from Snow White.

Our eyes met for only the briefest of moments—I’m here; I’m observing your class, hers said—and, without apologizing for interrupting, without a friendly nice to see you, she stalked back to the back corner of the room to begin recording her observations of my teaching. As I watched the last of my dittoed copies move to the end of the last row of my students’ desks, she began moving her pen, counting how many boys were in the room, how many girls, and what percentages of my students seemed to be white, black, Hispanic, and Asian for the ‘demographics’ portion of her walk-through form. Next she would circle descriptors of ‘mood’ and ‘atmosphere,’ then make a note of whether or not any of my students were violating dress code, and another as to whether or not I was professionally dressed before finally copying down the learning goals I had listed on the board for the day. It was a form all of the principals and some of the other district administrators from the central office carried around all day, popping into various classrooms to take their measurements. Some teachers, either as a show of courtesy, or to ensure that they received proper credit for everything they did, slowed down or even paused their teaching when administrators walked in, but I had become impatient with the four- and five-times-a-week interruptions of my class. I typically tried to keep teaching at the same pace I had been moving at before the admin walked in. Sometimes, out of spite, I moved faster.

Which isn’t to say I didn’t let the walkthroughs change my teaching. I did, and didn’t know many teachers—besides Mrs. Rosenbaum or Mrs. Dennison, perhaps—who didn’t. After taking her measurements and copying down my goals from the board, Mrs. Hirsche would begin checking off “high yield” teacherly strategies that I used. The district had measured an average of six “high yield” strategies being used during ten-minute walkthroughs the year before, and had made a goal of eight for this year. Teachers who earned more checkmarks typically saw less walkthroughs as the year progressed; teachers who earned fewer saw more. My average, according to Mr. Avery, the English Department principal, was eleven and a half, though once I had hit nineteen.

As she finished taking her initial notes and looked up, I walked down one of the aisles between my students’ desks to the back corner of the room opposite Mrs. Hirsche, then walked back to the front along a different one. Teacher makes use of proximity to regulate student behaviors: check.

“Alright,” I said. “We’re going to read a poem by a poet name Octavio Paz. Before we get started, I want to take care of a little vocab work on the board, so if you guys would go ahead and get out your notebooks…” I paused and waited for my students to retrieve their notebooks from their bags—an activity that took more time than I might have preferred—then went on, uncapping a marker and writing on the board as I did so. “We’ll start with three vocab words: ‘monosyllable,’ ‘perpetual,’ and ‘syllogism.’” Instructor provides context and background: check. Instructor guides student notetaking: check. Instructor teaches vocabulary: check.

I went through the definitions of the words, providing a few examples of monosyllable words and several of syllogisms (Instructor teaches by example and/or analogy: check), asked the students to read silently (Students practice silent reading: check) and then called on Adrienne Gallegos to read the poem out loud to the class (Students read aloud: check). When she was finished, I read the poem aloud, then, when I was finished, I asked if there were any questions (Instructor checks for understanding: check). There weren’t, and I told my students to pick up their pencils. “We’re going to do some basic annotation,” I said, and guided them through a quick round of mark-ups (Students annotate texts: check) and then I told them to tear out a sheet of paper. “We’re going to write about the poem,” I said. “About a half-a-page. Four questions. What is the situation of the poem? Where does the poem ‘turn,’ or ‘shift’? Why is the poem called ‘After’? And what is the poem about—that is, what does it mean?” I wrote these questions on the board. (Instructor provides both verbal and written questions: check. Students write: check.)   

Mrs. Hirsche tucked her clipboard under her arm and let herself out of the classroom.

“Yo, who is that lady,” Javi asked, scowling after the clicking of her heels had receded down the hall.

“That’s Mrs. Hirsche,” I said. “Don’t worry. She’s here to watch me, not you.”

His scowl softened to a look of sympathy. “Sorry bro,” he said. “She looks like a hater.”

Peter Shull is a Midwestern novelist and educator. His novel Why Teach? is currently being serialized on Substack and is now available in paperback and e-reader editions from Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Kindle Store, and Kobo!

Art credit, all sketches: Maurice Olin

Cover Designer:

Nathaniel Roy