So You Think You Can Teach?

 I stood outside of a bar on a Sunday afternoon in 2009, smoking a cigarette and reading this story in the Philadelphia Weekly – http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news-and-opinion/Elementary-school-dropout.html. It’s about a guy who taught in Philadelphia for two years under TFA, a program that according to the article “turns recent college graduates into teachers in high-need schools.”

I read this article on a lovely September day with disgust and disdain. I remember thinking that Mr. Beck was a quitter (and every possible negative connotation associated with that word) and a loser who had no business being in a classroom, and that once he had figured that out after two awful years playing a teacher like in a child’s game, a whiner and complainer about something he remained well-intentioned but ignorant about. Recently I scoured the internet (not remembering if I had read the article in Philadelphia Weekly or City Paper, or what year I had read it) and found the article. I reread it, wondering if I’d still think the same thing.

My curiosity in whether my opinion of the article had changed was more than just seeing if a sober 32 year old reading it at home found anything different than a drunk 29 year old reading it outside of a bar in a timeout during day drinking. I’ve changed in the three years since this article was published in ways that I haven’t yet come to terms with, but I’m sure affect how I view education, teaching, and people like Beck (I’ll get into what that means in a bit). I’m more sober now, and I don’t mean the not-drunk kind of sober. I can feel the youthful ambition and idealism melting away from me as if my soul had been napalmed. I guess there’s no advantage to being napalmed so my simile breaks down, but I hope that I’m a better teacher these days. Not that I think I was a bad one before, but I’ve grown and adapted and changed over the last three years. I fear stagnation, and while I reluctantly have retreated from some of the impassioned views of my heart, hence the need for napalm, I haven’t abandoned them. I’ve learned to do what is most expedient for me and my students, to make the most of an irreparable situation that doesn’t have to be as bad as it is. But before I get too off-task, let me bring this back to the article. Because it still pisses me off.

Ordinarily, I’m opposed to the idea that an outsider has no right or ability to comment on that which he’s an outsider to. For example, I read The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron in grad school. We looked at some of the criticism Styron received because he was a white guy writing as a slave. The basic criticism was how could a guy on the “enemy” side be able to put himself into the (nonexistent?) shoes of a slave. As a white man, so the criticism went, Styron had no right, and no ability, to write as a slave. While I think it’s possible, and probably true, that an insider has better, more heartfelt knowledge than an outsider, because we are human and despite our differences still share the same fears and hopes and desires no matter how tweaked and molded to look differently on the outside by culture and other outside influences, I can’t help but think everyone has the right, and maybe the duty, to imagine what it’s like to walk a mile in someone vastly different’s shoes. Maybe Bill Styron isn’t an expert on what it was like to be Nat Turner. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t get a shot to try to see. And if he’s off, then lambast him for that, not the attempt.

Ordinarily, that’s what I think. But when it comes to teaching, I must admit my Romney-esque flip-flopping. I’m a hypocrite. Because when a (self-admitted) non-teacher says “Teaching is hard” as Beck says in the beginning of this article, I become one with rage. It comes down to this: I don’t need anyone’s sympathy or understanding about the difficulty of my job. If you really think my job is hard, and that’s truly coming from a sympathetic or empathetic place in your heart, then do something about it. Vote differently. Join a school board. Raise your kids better. Volunteer in my classroom. Donate resources to schools. Create community organizations that directly benefit neighborhood schools. Just don’t pat my back and tell me I’m doing a good job because God knows, you say with a chuckle, you couldn’t do it yourself. Exactly. There are tons of jobs I can’t do. But I’m not walking up to a soldier or a physicist or cop and saying, “Hey man, your job is tough.” I’d fully expect to be shot, tied to a rocket, or shot, respectively.

And I think that’s what really irks me about this article. Beck is not a teacher. He was trying to play one because he wants to see social injustices righted. Yet he doesn’t realize, because he doesn’t live the life, that in order to make any kind of differences with regard to social injustices, you have to forget you care about social injustices. You have to forget they even exist. And you focus on the human beings in front of you. You can’t think about why they are the way they are or the root causes of their problems because it will drive you insane. You will die a slow death that not only hurts you but hurts those kids. And kids that are hurt don’t need any more moron adults bringing them more pain.

I can’t help but detect a self-righteous tone in Beck’s article, a veritable slap on his own back that he did the noble thing and got out of teaching once he realized his heart wasn’t in it. Maybe I’m being a bit too unforgiving, but this article is clearly about Beck, not about the kids, the school, or really education in general. Look at the title: “Elementary School Dropout.” All about Beck. Look at the subtitle. All about Beck. Look at the picture that accompanies the article. Not kids or the school or even a stock photo of kids and/or a school. Beck. This whiny buttsniffer who read about bad things happening in the world and thought that from his privileged (i.e. not in a place where social injustices rule the day) station he could dispense virtue and pull the poor basement-dwellers of the world up from the muck they are stuck in felt so guilty he had to write an article about it. He went to confession in the pages of Philadelphia Weekly. As a reader of the article, I am the priest. I do not absolve him of his sins and wish he’d slink back to his white bread suburb where he can slowly destroy his own life rather than kids who don’t need his help doing it to theirs.

I’ll take a breath and calm down.

But there is virtue in Beck’s sins. He offers the opportunity to talk about this issue, of people in classrooms who really don’t belong there. Teacher evaluation is a hot topic these days. But the kind of evaluation that needs to happen is in the hearts of those that teach every day. Teachers need to ask themselves if they’re there for the kids or for other reasons. And once a person starts asking that question, my how meandering the path becomes. Because it isn’t a simple question and there are no simple answers. Except perhaps this: get out like Beck (because forgiveness can come eventually), and if you can’t, find a way to be something good for those kids. For those thinking about joining the ranks of the teacher underclass on anything less than a God-level commitment: don’t do it.

Travels in Reading: Book 2 – Ghost Story by Peter Straub

After crawling through the first 300 pages of Ghost Story, I raced in hungry bursts through the last 250 pages. The same thing happened with The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a book vastly different from Ghost Story. I wonder if there’s something in my reading tastes that causes me to be bored near to death with the beginnings of some books, hoping and yearning for something to grab me by the throat or punch me in the gut and reading on only because I love the act and a part of me wants to know how every story ends, no matter how banal or poorly told. Or am I always looking for that throat grab or gut punch, that experience that wrenches me out of my existence and into another via mere words? Am I looking for transcendence on every page, a Saul on the road to Damascus in the exposition and rising action of every novel I pick up? I don’t know if I can answer all those questions right now, but suffice it to say that I’m glad that I have the resolve, whatever its source, to stick with a book. Happily Ghost Story was worth it.

 

I picked up GS because I have both of Peter Straub’s collaborations with Stephen King (The Talisman and Black House) sitting unread on my shelf, and before I tackle those, I want to have an idea of Straub’s writing on its own. I’ve heard mention of him from King and many other sources, and GS seems to be very well regarded in what was either the heyday or renaissance of well-crafted almost literary horror fiction in the 60s and 70s (books like The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby) as is Straub himself.

 

So I started the book with King in mind, but I was careful not to make full-on comparisons with him. King is more a protégé of Straub and not necessarily in equal competition with him. On a personal level, the inequality is in favor of King because I grew up reading King and he was my intro into the horror genre. But I will say this: my first impression is that King took what Straub did and made it more palpable to a wider audience. There’s a reason King has sold so many books, and it comes simply down to his writing. When you read King, you feel like he’s someone familiar to you telling you about the horrible shit that hides in the shadows. He scares you in the middle of the day because he’s so good at reminding you what you wet your bed over the previous night. Straub is different. Not better or worse, but different. And I enjoyed that.

 

I don’t want to get into the specifics of the story because although there’s not really any surprises per se, the way Straub reveals connections between events and characters is best savored in his words rather than mine. I will give a general overview of Straub’s method in telling a really scary story.

 

Straub slowly builds the town of Milburn, NY by showing a number of characters and their interactions with each other and the town itself. Milburn is a small town, and the classic horror idea of a small town being ultra-knowledgeable of its inhabitants’ sins being a sleight of hand to show that even in the supposed all-seeing eye of the small-town public, bad things are done and they’re done in secret is used here. As Straub builds this town, he just as slowly shows that it’s a bit unraveled at the edges. All isn’t well even though the surface of things shows it is. I picture this book as a ride on a rollercoaster with the world’s highest initial drop. The first 300 pages is you sitting back at some obscene angle as the coaster cars climb and the ratcheting click click click stabs at the heart of your fear. And then you reach the summit and the world and time pause as you see just how dumb you were to get on this thing in the first place because you see where you’re going and it’s fear there and fear there and fear everywhere. Straub masterfully doesn’t let on exactly where we’ll end up on this ride, but leads us there so at the end when all those unraveled fragments reveal what they were and are connected to, you find yourself doubled over from that punch to the gut or rubbing your neck from someone just now trying to choke you. It’s a wonderful book, and definitely a must-read for horror fans.

 

One criticism I have is that for a nearly 600 page paperback, Straub doesn’t flesh out his characters enough. It’s not so much that they’re cardboard, typical genre fiction characters, because they’re not. It’s that Straub does an awful lot of telling rather than showing. And while I recognize this is genre fiction and that’s often par for the course, it doesn’t mean a genre character can’t have a little meat on his or her bones and interact in and with the fictional word in a way that makes them feel real. I don’t know if this is a matter of genre, personal writing style or what, but too often throughout the book I was left imagining different scenes and actions of various characters other than what was actually happening because Straub left too much to the imagination.

 

I’m halfway done my next book: Their Eyes Were Watching God. I’m rereading this because I assigned it to a student in one of my classes. I noticed too often how I forget so much of what I read in an easily remembered way. I either have the worst memory ever, or this stuff just sinks too deep into my consciousness for it to be easily accessible. Some wonderful memories are flooding back as I make my way through TEWWG.