Wow, I used to be a teacher.

I forget sometimes that I used to grind away the precious moments of my youth teaching unpleasant and oily teenagers about empires and countries that I'd only heard about in the funny pages of Ziggurats & Janissaries magazine. Just kidding! No such magazine exists. But ziggurats and janissaries surely do, and lucky for me I've forgotten almost everything I taught about those two weird ancient human phenomena.

And lucky for you that I am a chronic insomniac and my tossing and turning can only be alleviated by the best soporific ever: my old journals! In my trolling I found something from almost two years ago, when I started "co-teaching" at a shitty, shitty middle school in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx. My God, was this place a school-shaped rat turd. The infrastructure sucked: we had two huge industrial fans that cooled the subtropic school to a barely tolerable, wilting 95 degrees but produced a baritone throb that drowned out all instruction. Most of the students were decent kids who had fucked up in school somehow. But man alive! My "co-teacher," a woman who proudly showed me pictures of her "shorty" 5'3" husband, with whom she had taken a two-week honeymoon the last October--yes, that meant that she had deliberately planned two weeks of vacation during the second month of the school year--and whose utter disinterest in teaching translated into her half-hearted attempts to read lesson plans aloud verbatim, including the parentheticals that only teachers are supposed to read, silently, like, "Solicit responses from students on the following question: 'What did Michael Jordan learn from playing basketball?'" This woman was so fucking lazy that she just sat in the back of the classroom and read children's books while the majority of the class lay their heads on their desks and panted from the heat. Wow.

Below is a "field observation" I wrote for one of my grad classes that summer. I've diplomatically changed the teacher's name, since she is now a high-ranking White House librarian. This is what I used to do:

7/22/03

My field observation #4 for Mercurio’s class:

This observation is not a direct response to a specific argument made in the Ryan book, but rather it is a series of related notes that respond in general to Ryan’s ninth unit, on inclusion.

Today was probably the worst day I experienced thus far in summer school. There were individual and classroom-level discipline problems, and I had to bear the brunt of it because my cooperating teacher left the room for ten minutes to sharpen pencils – an act which, by the way, I resented because it left not only an uncertified and therefore illegal teacher in the room, it also left someone in the room who could not command authority with the kids. I am seen in the classroom as something of a colorful appendage, an occasionally helpful voice but definitely a subaltern to the grand mistress, Mrs. Linda.

Specifically, my frustrations began when the two most troublesome kids in the classroom, Damien and Tyonna, sauntered in at roughly the same time, both about 90 minutes late. Damien has been in summer school three times – and this for a class that has met for four weeks already! That’s an attendance rate of 18%. Both Damien and Tyonna routinely brag about how they prefer to smoke marijuana before coming to class or miss class entirely. They are friends and scofflaws in arms. Because both have missed so many class days, they were not able to participate in the group exit project, which everyone else was working on. Thus, I was left with the onerous task of setting two notorious fools to work.

However, when I approached Damien, I realized that I was singularly without any means of motivating him. You’d think this wouldn’t be the case for a summer school, where the natural incentive is promotion. When I made this case to him – that he wouldn’t be going to high school unless he passed the class – he rebutted me by saying, “The Board of Ed told me that I don’t even need to be in summer school. I just need to pass the Regent’s exam.” I confirmed this with Mrs. Linda, and it’s true. He does not, in fact, need to be in school at all. I could not help but think, Why is he in school? On those rare occasions he does attend, he spends the class hours either 1) scowling menacingly and bullying the other kids in the class, who for the most part are decent workers willing to put in some effort or 2) hanging his body out the classroom door, setting a terrible example for the other students and inviting disorder or 3) wandering the hallways unchecked. Tyonna, his lackey, is in a similar situation (doesn’t need to be in summer school and so only causes trouble in class.)

I found it difficult to level with these two kids, not only for their insolence but also because I didn’t know how to impress upon them that summer school work was important, when in fact, it is not important at all. Mrs. Linda has given up on these children, and she does nothing to stop Damien from cruising the halls. (Not much can be done, anyway. Sometimes I really begrudge the legal injunction on touching children, because nothing short of a Silence of the Lambs-esque straitjacket will keep Damien from the hallways. I followed him out and asked him to speak to me, but he responded by walking away. I was left in the disgraceful position of either following and haranguing him and his deaf ears, or walking away without having asserted power. I chose something in between, and ended up only angry and unheard.) Mrs. Linda tells me she won’t try because they won’t try. She tells me that I can’t reach all of them.

While I’m frustrated with Mrs. Linda’s opinions, I’m also reaching my breaking point with these two students. Tyonna is less of an asshole, and, if sternly pressured, she will dolefully and insouciantly chicken scratch her barely literate and nearly incomprehensible answers on a worksheet. Damien, meanwhile, is impervious. He fancies himself a badass and thus answers to no one. But who could make him answer? Even the Board of Ed condones him. I can’t stand letting Damien bring the whole class down, which is effectively what he does. When he is in class, he disrupts and bullies, and the other students respond to him by disrupting and bullying each other. I can’t be his friend, and I can’t be his mother. What the hell do I do?

I thought this might fit into Ryan’s framework because Ryan exhorts us to include all students, especially those in need of extra assistance or special education. But what is there to do when the student is so stubbornly and violently resistant? I can’t stop the kids from walking out of the classroom. I stand in front of them, but the walk around. I turn my back, and another one slips out the door. I didn’t come here to literally be a gatekeeper. Sometimes I just want to smack the kids in the face; Damien worldview seems to include the belief that respect is only due to those who can physically dominate others, and sometimes I want to slap him in the face, rip out his eyes, spit down his throat, if only to humiliate him and get that one ounce of thug respect. I hate this attitude, and I hate what it makes me do. Today, as he walked away from me in the hall, I had the displeasure of shouting after him, “Well, Damien, you were just complaining that a teacher was yelling at you, and now that a teacher wants to talk to you, you walk away. That’s just the way it’s going to be for the rest of your life.” I wanted to lock him in prison, because that’s how I foresee his dismal, criminal, pathological future. I’m also tempted to tell him to go away and not come back, especially now with the revelation that summer school is utterly perfunctory. Why bother? Let him stay at home, smoke his brain away, and let the other students learn. Ryan’s platitudes are lovely in the book – love everybody, try to include everyone – but when it comes to the classroom, Damien’s presence is actively annihilating the learning potential of everyone else in the room. Let this one go, Society, this is a kid who will never amount to anything but a potential murderer, rapist, thief, petty criminal.

I hate this attitude, but days like this provoke this kind of reaction.