She perches on the edge of the desk, dressed in black leather, one well-manicured hand on her sexy black-rimmed glasses. The class, a diverse crowd of teenagers whose earrings and tattoos and mannerisms would intimidate most people, watches her every move, riveted. She’s saved them. They’re convinced. Because of her, they will learn now, and watch every door open to them as they move forward in their lives.
It’s the teacher’s daydream, made Hollywood real in the 1995 movie Dangerous Minds, starring Michelle Pfeiffer. Would the audience have found Pfeiffer as sexy if she’d spent 60% of the movie attending district-required trainings, updating her grade book, emailing parents, and attempting to hold her urine for eight hours? Of course not. What’s sexy is the engagement with students. See Mr. Holland’s Opus. See Dead Poet’s Society. The movie teachers know what actually matters in a school day: the students. That’s why they change lives.
I, on the other hand, am a real teacher. I teach English at a vast city high school with as many challenges as the one in Dangerous Minds. In the desks in my classroom are: disengaged freshmen trapped in poverty, senior football players angry that graduation requires English, immigrants from tens of cultures who carry their parents’ hard-won expectations on their shoulders, kids of all backgrounds who lack confidence in their reading and writing and do not believe they’ll succeed. If I were a movie teacher, I’d connect with each of these kids, find out what each of them needs, take them on field trips (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest style), expose them to the world, build their confidence. Each one of them would realize that they want to and need to learn, and they’d all embrace learning (even the kid who seemed resistant to it all -- a requirement of the movie genre), and it would be because of me.
Instead, I spend all day running and failing. 6:45, out the door, traffic on I-25, the right turn into the sea of the parking lot at South High. 6:55, wrench the tall classroom windows open with one hip and the strength of my lower back. 7:00, write the lesson plans on the board, write the “content/language objective” on the board for each class in case an administrator walks through to check for that district requirement. 7:10, run to the copy room to make the photocopies I forgot to make because I rushed out the day before to pick up my daughter from school. 7:20, give up on the jammed copy machine and change lesson plans. 7:25, listen to a student who needs me to hear a long story about her weekend. 7:32, set up the projector for the daily announcements. 7:35, update the digital gradebook so parents and students who check it during the day will view an accurate number. 7:40, welcome the freshmen trickling into the room. 7:45, bell. 7:49, remind them that after the announcements, they need to look ready for class: notebook and pen/pencil out, Samsung Galaxy tablet signed in to our class page. 7:50, remind them again. And again. “Ah, Miss, do we really have to read today?”
The day blurs. 1st period, 2nd (seniors in a college-prep class), 3rd (more seniors), 4th (freshmen again). In each five-minute passing period, I’m recording late work, or cajoling someone to come in after school for tutoring, or I’m checking in with the girl who slammed into class and laid her head down on her desk. I drink water because my first year of teaching, I became dangerously dehydrated and nearly passed out, but there is no time to pee. The trick is to drink enough water so I don’t pass out, but not so much that my bladder recognizes it’s full.
Each class, I’m scrambling, no matter how airtight my lesson plan. I love to plan lessons, each day crafted to meet a clearly defined objective with opening activities, models, guided practice, independent practice, closure. But plans never take humans into account. Jordan doesn’t have his book. Mariella has just burst into tears because her boyfriend broke up with her. Two of the boys in that small group neglected to do their homework. Stacey claims she has no ideas and can’t get started. So: I have to start cutting from the plan, adjusting, shifting. I give them time to talk to a partner so I can take attendance on the computer, but an email pops up on my screen from a counselor (she needs to see Teshe immediately), and the laughter in the far corner of the room tells me that group is not discussing the serious essay we just read.
I never sit down. In my memories of high school, the teachers taught from their desk chairs. My AP English teacher leaned back in his, propping his feet up on the desk at times. I circulate, reading over kids’ shoulders, participating sometimes in small group conversation, prodding kids who are stuck. I ask Mario, a 9th grader, to write a little more, and he pounds his fist on his desk. “Why’re you on my case, Miss?” Because that’s what I’ve been trained to do. It’s my job.
Lunch is not lunch. It’s a social worker popping in to talk to me about a student’s new homelessness status; it’s the psychologist seating himself seriously across from me and warning me that IEPs and 504s are legally binding but no, he doesn’t have the paperwork on each kid for me yet; it’s a colleague wanting to know how I’d handle a situation; it’s a student pleading for more time on an assignment; it’s a series of emails from parents and the district saying “Why can’t you fix it Why can’t you fix it Why can’t you fix it?” Sometimes, I grab my tupperware and hide in the break room with the other English teachers who are hiding. We deserve a forty-minute lunch. Don’t we? We’re not sure. We eat quickly, our eyes on the clock. If we worked non-stop -- planned, graded, created, planned and graded some more -- we’d never be finished. Someone tells a funny story. It feels good to laugh. We are human. That’s right. We’d forgotten for awhile.
Now 5th period (team meeting), and then: 6th. My planning period. The only fifty-minute time in the day that is mine. In Dead Poet’s Society, Robin Williams never closed the door behind a class and then collapsed into his chair out of pure, happy relief to have some time to himself (possible deleted scene from Dead Poet’s Society: Robin Williams performs some yoga stretches and heads to the bathroom to pee. Cut to an artistic shot of him standing on a toilet, yelling “Oh Captain, my Captain!”). We never saw Michelle Pfeiffer gorge herself on M&Ms and then burst into tears at the long to-do list scribbled on a purple sticky note on her desk. Richard Dreyfuss never settled into his chair prepared to create a new inspiring lesson plan, only to open his email to new directives from the school district that would consume forty-five of his precious free moments. It shouldn’t be called “planning time,” but “breathing time.” Barely.
The bell for 7th period rings, and I’ve only crossed off “plan tomorrow” from my formidable to-do list. The seniors who lounge into the classroom for 7th resent that they’re still in high school. If they pass my class, they earn college credit, but they’re not as motivated by their own goals as my other two senior classes. Read? Many of them groan. Write? Most of them claim to hate it, “suck at it,” or both. This is my chance to slide into the movie teacher role, to inspire so deeply that, for reasons they won’t fully grasp until they’re much older, all they’ll want to do is read and read and write who they are to the world.
Instead, the intercom buzzes. Please release all softball players at 2:15. Please release all tennis players at 2:15. Football scrimmagers should be released at 2:30. A fourth of my class rises, some apologetically. Some hand me the homework that was due, but all of them leave.
Take attendance. Collect homework. Input grades. Organize the students into groups. Circulate. Guide them back onto task. Circulate. Lead a class discussion. Assign tomorrow’s homework. As we’re clarifying the homework, LaShonda asks me, “You have an English major in college, Ms. Brooks?” I nod. The others are listening. LaShonda clicks her tongue and punches the boy in front of her. “See? My mama says people who get English majors in college can only become teachers. She says major in something else.” The bell rings.
Within a minute: silence.
Outside the tall second-floor windows, students shout to each other across the grass, laughing. Truck engines rev. Inside this classroom, a shaft of soft sunlight across my desk, I have exactly 27 minutes to assess as many papers as I can, input grades, write tomorrow’s plans on the board, photocopy tomorrow’s handouts, and respond to the five emails that have popped up in my inbox (all marked urgent). A male voice below my window: “What a jack-ass!” I click my purple pen open and begin to read a student’s essay on Malcolm X’s thoughts about education. “I’m not so different from Malcolm X. Like him, I have had to learn in the walls of a prison. School has trapped me here, and I’ve had no choice.” A female high-pitched giggle. A male teacher: “Hey!”
3:25. I switch off the fans, yank the ancient windows down, grab a manilla folder of papers to grade at night, pull my bag out of the closet, pull the door closed. The pennants of my educational institutions decorate the doorway’s edge: the BA from Luther College, the MAT from University of Alaska Southeast, the MFA from Naropa University. Every afternoon before I rush to drive slowly in afternoon traffic, I pause to consider these pennants. I could be a movie teacher, couldn’t I? I could inspire. Maybe tomorrow everything will slow down a little. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be able to just focus on the students, the other details be damned.
3:41. I’m late to Mitike’s elementary school, but Meredith is there, smiling, ready with a warm hug. 3:52, I make Mitike a snack, settle her at the kitchen table. Meredith asks, “How was your day?” Without thinking, I say, “Defeating.” Mitike asks me a question about math, and I start chopping an onion for dinner.
“Really? Defeating?”
What is this profession? Meredith has had her own long day. I tell myself: Be calm. Give your best to your family. Leave the stress at school. But all my filters are skewed. I can’t be the movie teacher, and so I feel inadequate at every role. Parent. Wife. Cook. I can’t be the movie anything. I want to sit down on the kitchen tile and cry, or wrap myself in an afghan and read for two hours while other people make me dinner, or venture out into the foothills for a long restorative hike. Meredith would say, “Then do one of those things!” But I have to keep running. I won’t survive otherwise.
8:45, read a little more of Harry Potter to Mitike. 9:00, turn off her light and kiss her on the forehead one more time. 9:10, check in with Meredith. Connect, connect. (I want to connect. I think Robin Williams and Michelle Pfeiffer were both single and alone. Was Richard Dreyfuess? Implication: great teachers don’t need love or partnership?). Meredith and I cuddle next to each other to talk about the Kentucky county clerk who refuses to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. On my desk in my classroom is a framed photograph of my family. The first week of school, a 9th grader interrupted me to ask, “Miss, is that your sister?” I told him no, she’s my partner. He furrowed his brow and quieted, but spent the rest of the class time glancing at the photo. Another kind of education. Kim Davis, Kentucky county clerk, would disapprove.
9:35, down to my orange office where I want to write books. Instead, I grade papers for an hour, then write lesson plans for another hour.
When I finally climb upstairs to bed, Meredith has already crawled into bed. Please forgive me, I tell her. It’s only for the next ten years or so. Just until Mitike graduates from high school.
“But does it have to be this way?” she asks.
I’m not sure.
I wake in the night, at 3:21 a.m., disturbed by a nightmare in which I tried to pull all of my students forward in viscous, deep mud, but some of them sank beneath the surface. I couldn’t save them, though I pulled with all my weight on the thick ropes wound around their waists. IN the darkness, I couldn’t see if I was pulling them toward any kind of safety at all.
6 a.m., alarm. 6:15 a.m., coffee and breakfast, The New Yorker: my civilized moment of the day, though I-25 roars already a few blocks away.
6:45, out the door, traffic on I-25, the right turn into the sea of the parking lot at South High. 6:55, wrench the tall classroom windows open with one hip and the strength of my lower back. 7:00, write the lesson plans on the board. . .
I am not a movie teacher. I have stood on desks and yelled out poetry, but I’m not Robin Williams. I’m just a flawed human being with an English major attempting to complete an impossible job every day, Sisyphus trudging up the mountain again, rolling that round enormous stone ahead of her. Yes, I’d love to wake up each morning and write books, with maybe a college class or two to teach in the afternoon. But for thirteen years, I’ve been rolling this stone up the mountain. Along the way, a student or two learns a few things. Several of them wave at me, smiling, as I lumber past.
Strangely, that makes the entire task worthwhile.
