Memory #10: Cornfields

The farmlands are alternately emerald green and saffron yellow; patchwork squares that glisten in unadulterated sunlight. The morning sun: a buttery white disc afloat in a sea of clean cornflower blue. When we drive past, the squares shoot by and seem to blend together. Green, yellow, green, yellow. Every now and then, a clump of healthy trees, a wooden farmhouse, a billboard emblazoned with Bible verses.

The rock star sits in the seat in front of me. He has toured in Japan. His very presence seems to speak to me of black jeans, electric guitars, cigarettes, booze. Hours later by the campfire, after my clothes and hair have dried, he will say to me, “Cool jeans,” and my heart will skip a beat. For now, it is hard for me to picture such a character on a canoe in the river. I am silent, in the back, watching flatlands as they pass, content to study the back of his head, the nuances of his voice as he converses easily with the other people in the car.

“Look at that house,” he says, pointing at a neat construction of blue- and white-painted wood, tiny in the distance. A long white gravel ribbon cuts its way from the black of the highway to the fluffy golden swath of cornfield. “That’s what I’d like.”

“What?”

“A house like that. That’d be great…get a wife, move to the country, live on a farm. Just get away from it all, you know? That’s what I need, man.”

I do not understand him at the time. I cannot think of anything I’d want less. I am in high school and scrambling to grow up. On weekends we trek into the city and giggle our way through the thrift stores and fetish shops around Belmont and Clark; at nighttime we drive aimlessly around the thick black woods of Barrington and take midnight repasts at Denny’s and IHOP; on Friday nights we go to suburban teen clubs, clad in skimpy polyester and adorned with glitter, and dance to pounding music with young Marines in training–all out of the searing desire for something more exciting, more glamorous, more independent, more grown-up. Every day I feel myself reaching for something indescribable. I can’t help but feel that somewhere in the world is a more memorable way of life that I am missing out on.

To me, the rock star encompasses everything I want at sixteen: the cachet of urbane coolness and the lifestyle of an international troubadour. In my head, I see the rock star navigating his way through a swirling world painted entirely in gritty blacks, grays, silvers, and neons. Why would anyone want to exchange that for a static life colorized in Crayola?

But I am just sixteen. I have yet to feel the heartache of being utterly alone in a metropolis of millions. I have yet to know the soul-crushing weight of starting each gray day before dawn and returning home each day feeling ten years older. I have not yet learned to yearn for sunlit air, wide plains, breathtaking vistas. I have not yet grown to appreciate certain qualities. Stability. Security. Simplicity. Serenity.

***********************************

In time, I will know. In time, the fetish shops around Belmont and Clark will be replaced with fast food franchises; the gutter punks will wander off to some other soon-to-be-gentrified enclave. In time, the woods of the Northwest suburbs will gradually ebb, making way for McMansion developments with generic, bucolic names and status SUVs. In time, Club X will be shut down, and stretchy black pants and body glitter will fall out of fashion. In time, I will find myself halfway across the country, on a schoolbus at an age way past the normal schoolbus-riding age, sitting across from ____________ from Indiana. He looks too young and too sheltered to be moving to the gritty city to teach foulmouthed children. Like me.

We sit across from each other on the bus home from summer school. The grotty vinyl of the seats sticks to my legs; my face is coated with a fine film of oil and sweat; wisps of hair are glued to the edges of my face, neck, and scalp. The windows of the bus are open, letting in the oppressive humidity of a mid-Atlantic summer and all the offensive smells and sounds that come with it. But the look on ___________’s face tells that he is miles away. He leans his head against the seat in front of him in a way that is effeminate and boyish all at once. “I miss the cornfields,” he says to me.

It’s all he says, but between two Midwestern transplants, it’s all he needs to say. And in time, I will miss them too. I will realize that my mind keeps coming back to them at the strangest times. And by that time, _______________ will have already left the city.

Notes From the Classroom #1

L_______ is telling me about her father’s death.  “We’re going to go to his grave on Memorial Day because it’s the 26th.  He died on the 26th so we’re going to go every month on the 26th, get it?”

“Is this the one-year anniversary?” I ask.  It seems so strange to be talking so casually about this, let alone with L_______.  I am not close with her.  She puts up a prickly exterior that keeps me, her teacher, away.  I do not know much about her personal life, other than the parties she talks about every day in class.

“No, miss!  He died on April 26th.  It’s the one month anniversary.  We’re going to go every month.”

A pang of guilt from my end.  How did I not know?  But!  There is so much our students do not tell us.  How was I to know?  I try to think back to April 26th.  Was there a time when L________ had seemed unwilling, inattentive?  And had I been quick to jump to conclusions?

It is so important to know your students.  Some of them were like 7-11s: always open, fully stocked with personal information to provide you.  L_________ is like one of those wormholes they used to talk about on the science fiction  TV shows I used to watch with my dad as a little girl: remote, volatile, seldom unshut.  The moment is surreal: the whole class is listening in.  A spell has been cast between us; a spell I do not want to break.  I have to tread carefully.  “You seem to be dealing with it well, ” I offer tentatively.

Right now she is searching for words.  “Do you remember a couple weeks ago when I was all quiet?” she asks with furrowed brow.  “Like, I wasn’t saying nothing.  I seemed kind of sad?  I was being real good?”

I nod.  “You did kind of seem not like yourself.”

She nods too.  “That’s why I just sat there and did my work.  ‘Cause I don’t like thinking about things like that.  Like, I didn’t even cry after it happened.  I don’t really like to show my emotions.”

I look at L_________ for a moment.  I have indirectly experienced so many deaths this year alone through the students in my classroom: the suicide of a cousin, the murder of a mother and aunt, the passing of a grandmother, the too-soon demises of brothers and half-brothers and step-brothers.  And I have directly experienced so many deaths in the past few years just among the people I know: the fathers of friends, my own grandmother.  The one thing linking all these far-flung earthly exits was that I was never good in these situations.  And I never knew what to say.  We didn’t express our emotions very readily in my family; I guess when you’ve dealt with a lot of pain, you become callused and worn.

But for once I know what to say.

“Like, I didn’t even cry,” L_________ repeats.

Evenly, I respond, “Sometimes it’s okay to cry.”

And just as evenly, L___________ says, “I know.”

Memory #8: The Dust Bowl

Listening to C________ read to me about global warming from her 8th grade project, an idiotic idea dreamed up by our administration as a pathetic attempt at academic rigor. All 8th graders were expected to write a 5-page paper on a topic chosen from an arbitrary, randomly-selected list, while also preparing a 10-min presentation with either a trifold or a PowerPoint presentation. Failure to complete said tasks would supposedly result in being detained in 8th grade–a laughably idle threat. That many of our students could barely speak English, navigate a computer program, or write a grammatically-correct sentence, never seemed to cross our administration’s mind.

The onus of seeing our students through the projects invariably fell upon us, their classroom teachers, who were already busy teaching our own subjects. And so the help we gave our students really only extended to those who possessed the motivation, discipline, and initiative to ask for help after school or during lunch or in homeroom. I had spent 2 hours after school teaching C________ , T_____, and J___ to create PowerPoint presentations. They were some of the only students from their class to bother to finish the project, and some of the only students in the school to bother trying most days of the year. I snuck pizza into the computer lab. It was my pitiful attempt at matching the image of the caring, selfless urban schoolteacher that so many of us had hoped to embody when we embarked on our journey two years ago.

I had never quite reached that goal, never had a moment in class when my students were all joyfully engaged in learning, never had students hug me and thank me and call me their favorite teacher. As a social studies teacher I had failed. I didn’t want them to memorize endless dates and names and create giant elaborate projects and papers and partake in carefully orchestrated mock trials and debates (not that I hadn’t attempted to do all those things). All I had wanted for my students was for them to sit up and take interest in the world around them, to become enraged with the direction in which our country was heading, to become young voices for their community. To make connections between then and now. To become as fascinated with humanity, its endless circular themes and little dramas being enacted and mirrored on bigger and bigger scales like the rings on an ancient oak tree. To wake up and realize that even the paltry freedoms they enjoyed as Americans were based on such a tenuous, fragile framework. But instead I floundered when it came to such simple tasks as getting my students to take enough interest in my class to even memorize state names. I was dogged by the scarlet letter of the Unsuccessful Teacher, convinced my more felicitous colleagues mocked me behind my back, dejected when I thought about all the people I was disappointing back home and humiliated when I thought about all the people I was proving right back home, and panicked when I thought about the hundreds of students whose futures were in my inept hands. The sting of shame ate at my heart relentlessly day after day.

“Miss, you look tired,” C________ said hesitantly when she caught me with my head drooping. It was hard to remember a time when I wasn’t always so tired.

In the May afternoon torpor of my stuffy classroom, C________ reads to me from her paper in a voice like cats gently pawing across a kitchen floor. She wants to be a scientist or a doctor. In careful, heavily accented English she tells me about places she has never seen in her life and may likely never see: icecaps melting and polar bears drowning, noxious fumes and disappeared ecosystems, sunken states and searing deserts. At the mention of the latter, she looks up from reading her paper. “Miss, that’s going to be just like the Dust Bowl!” she says in muted horror, eyebrows raised disapprovingly.

A brief thrill flutters in my heart and I am stunned. “That’s right!” And C________ continues reading.

My nose is stinging and I blink my eyes several times. I bend down and pretend to adjust something on my shoe so C________ can’t see me. How could I ever explain the effect her comment had just had on me? In a split second everything from the past two years flickered by in my head like flashing lights in a subway tunnel: the wonderful ideas that never went into action; the nights of two, three, four hours of sleep; the mute shock of Sunday evenings spent in denial on the couch; the failed relationships that had taken a backseat to teaching; the lost 15 pounds from hardly eating for two months; the hurtful graffiti; the profanities; the complaints; the gifts; the tears.

When I sit back up, C________ is reading the concluding paragraph of her middle school opus. And all of a sudden, I feel very tired.

A G-Chat Conversation #4

Or, When Anal Retentiveness Attacks!

The Reamster: I am kind of ridiculous

I’m just throwing it out there

Me: kind of?

haha

The Reamster: in case it was ever in doubt

Me: you really know how to start a gchat conversation

1:43 AM The Reamster: well yes

that’s part of me being ridiculous

I made an excel file

with 15 tabs

that is color coded

and shared it with my Recruitment Associate

Me: haHAAAAAAAAAA

The Reamster: and was like this is everything we have to do in the next 25 days. Let’s get started

do you want to see it?

I think it might entertain you

you can say no

I wouldn’t want to see someone else’s frightening OCD playing out professionally

Me: that’s like asking me if i want to see a snuff film

like i think i would be horrified

but i would also be morbidly curious

1:46 AM why are they so color coded

what exactly are you color coding

area schools?

The Reamster: let me just send it to you

me: i’m looking at it now

this is CRAZY

is this russian

The Reamster: haha what makes it russian?

me: i don’t know

it’s like in another language

The Reamster: no it isn’t

is it?

me: for me, yes

ive been on duff time all summer

i’m rusty with deciphering acronyms

The Reamster: wait but the words are English right?

oh, you scared me

me: hahaha yes matt

The Reamster: I thought it broke

me: HA no

1:54 AM The Reamster: look what TFA has done to me

I used to drink beer

now I delight in excel

Harry Potter and the Standardized Test-Based Curriculum

Dolores Umbridge: Your previous instruction in this subject has been disturbingly uneven. But you will be pleased to know from now on, you will be following a carefully structured, Ministry-approved course of defensive magic. Yes?
Hermione Granger: There’s nothing in here about using defensive spells.
Dolores Umbridge: Using spells? Ha ha! Well I can’t imagine why you would need to use spells in my classroom.
Ron Weasley: We’re not gonna use magic?
Dolores Umbridge: You will be learning about defensive spells in a secure, risk-free way.
Harry Potter: Well, what use is that? If we’re gonna be attacked it won’t be risk-free.
Dolores Umbridge: Students will raise their hands when they speak in my class.
[ pauses]
Dolores Umbridge: It is the view of the Ministry that a theoretical knowledge will be sufficient to get you through your examinations, which after all, is what school is all about.
Harry Potter: And how is theory supposed to prepare us for what’s out there?

********************************************

It’s funny to read a Harry Potter book or watch a Harry Potter film now that I’ve got two years of teaching experience behind me, because now there’s a whole new layer to the books that I never noticed before, and that’s the world of Hogwarts’ own instructors.  Their methods, their effect on the students, their relationships with fellow faculty members–well, they’re all very nicely fleshed-out for a book about magical happenings and children.  And furthermore, they’re not that unlike real, non-magical schools and their teachers.

I don’t recall if the exact exchange from above appears word-for-word in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix but it does appear in the film.  I would like to know exactly how aware Rowling is of the state of American education right now, because this exchange was remarkably perceptive.  A curriculum designed purely to get students to ace a big scary test, the total absence of real-world connections, the endless practicing of different techniques and methods but very little true application of the newly acquired “skills,” and who can forget the notion of the government creating and approving a heavily guided, paced, and revised product to be finally shoveled down the mouths of babes.

No wonder our schools are failing so swiftly; there’s no magic going on in these classrooms.  And ain’t no magic spell gonna fix it either.

My friend, the summer wind

The wind blew through my backyard this afternoon, desperate and impassioned and self-important like crazed old lover barging into a wedding ceremony. With it came gorgeous gray masses engorged with rain, the first few times I’d read Wuthering Heights as a daydreamy 12-year-old with her nose in a book, memories of sitting cooped up inside my mother’s house with my face pressed up to the window, with my eyes on summer storms just like this one but my mind in nineteenth-century Yorkshire. It had been wickedly hot and cloudless only the few days before; now outside looked fit for a Bronte novel itself.

If spring is like a newborn, all fresh and pretty and dainty; if autumn is like a bountiful matriarch; if winter is like an old crone–then summer is a teenage girl on the brink of womanhood, overripe and beautiful, but tempestuous and moody and given to torrential tears at any moment. I read Wuthering Heights for the first time at age 9. (I was very precocious.) I made up my mind at that very instant that I wanted to visit the wild moors of northern England one day. Something about it–or perhaps just the way it was portrayed in the book–appealed to me more than any tropical beach or heartthrob-inhabited European city. It was gloomy, it was isolated, and as a teen I too was more often than not gloomy and given to periods of isolation. Catherine Earnshaw, the book’s heroine and probably one of literature’s earliest examples of teen angst, was also given to the kind of emotional outbursts and rash, egocentric acts of impulse that only an adolescent can muster up, and that only an adolescent could possibly hope to get away with.

But Catherine had something I didn’t–besides a darkly handsome partner-in-crime for all her teenage self-indulgence, she also had a more fitting backdrop. Throwing temper tantrums in the servant quarters of your family’s ancestral abode, while the wind whistles around your home, is somehow much more poetic than throwing them in your linoleum-floored kitchen, while your dad listens to NewsRadio. One is Literature; the other is Emo. Furthermore, Catherine could always escape with her handsome gypsy partner-in-crime to the isolation of the moors whenever she tired of her family; I, meanwhile, had to remain cooped up in my room, with my nose pressed to the window. My fantasies could never match up to my realities and therefore I was always dissatisfied with what I had–perhaps a good thing, because it fueled my ambition to leave my boring town with its small-minded people clad in Abercrombie uniforms, with its endless Dave Matthews soundtrack on a loop. The claustrophobic nature of my suburban life could only serve as a pressure cooker for my teenage frustrations.

With a good decade between my adult self and my teenaged self, I’ve certainly had the time to look back and reflect on my adolescence, but I’ve never wanted to. I can even pinpoint the exact moment I left adolescence behind: the first week of college at the University of Illinois, sitting at my desk in my 11th floor aerie at Florida Avenue Residences, gazing out at the flat green expanse of the soccer fields and the flatter greener expanse of the South Farms beyond and then the clouds dotting blue sky like sheep grazing a pasture, a total Midwestern fantasy, and thinking, I’m happy. College was a never-ending social whirl resembling the lovechild of a cocktail party, summer camp, and 18th century salon, and I was loving every minute of it. I never forgot my favorite novel, however, and even took courses simply because I could write papers on it, but even then I never recalled my own adolescent miseries, instead choosing to focus on things like “light-dark symbolism” or “colonial tensions” or “gender roles.” My professors were not looking for reflection and ruminations; they were looking for hard, cold analysis.

These days I am sort of forced to reflect on my adolescence, for now I am a teacher of adolescents myself. For the past two years I taught history, and soon I will be teaching English. Unlike my college professors, in both those subjects I teach my students to make connections with their own life and what they are learning, and that our histories can inform our decisions about the future. Since they are still young, and they are still forming their own ideas of the world, it’s more important they practice that kind of thinking than present hard, cold analysis–because of course, to present hard, cold analysis, one must have pretty firm ideas of one’s own already. But because they are so young, much of the time they don’t truly grasp why history is important, mostly because they are still in the midst of accumulating their own.

As for me, however, my present is informing my ideas of my past, as I observe my students going through the same stormy adolescence from which I had fled only six years ago. It’s as if they had gotten a hold of the very memories I had tried so hard to bury and are now reenacting them like little medieval morality dramas in front of my very eyes: the cruelly fluid network of best friends; the trip-wire-laden social strata; the unfair expectations; the perfect boy whose indifference is more acutely painful than any insult. Don’t do that, I want to cry out, it won’t matter next week, or in ten years. But even if I did, it wouldn’t matter. Just as spring cannot skip to fall, little children can’t skip the trials of adolescence. If we were never denied what we wanted, then we would never know what’s truly important, for we would never know what it meant to work toward something we desired.

Lately I’ve been thinking about what my 14-year-old self would think of the 24-year-old self if we ever chanced to meet each other. Obviously, I would want her to think I was cool. I would want her to want the kind of life I lead now. I don’t hobnob with celebrities (but I did meet Margaret Cho and Pete Yorn in college, and this one time when I went to New York I saw Famke Janssen at the Soho Bloomingdales, Hank Azaria at the Time Warner Center, and Kieran Culkin at Bar None), I never went to an Ivy League college (I mean, unless a master’s degree from UPenn counts), and I don’t live with a gorgeous boyfriend in an amazingly decorated high-rise in the city (but I do share an awesome rowhouse in Philadelphia with three great friends–and as for the boyfriend, well I don’t have to have one). But I can say I’ve had as many amazing life experiences as other people my age, probably more.

So there I stood, age 24 and cooped up in my mother’s suburban home once again because my car was hundreds of miles away on Fernon Street in South Philadelphia, my face staring out the window of the sliding door, my eyes on the brewing summer storm outside but my mind on 14-year-old me, whose mind was never on the immediate world around her, but fixed in a Yorkshire reverie of windswept moors, craggy valleys, and lonely gray skies. What I can realize now, but probably did not realize then, was that those very moors of which I was so jealous were probably just as suffocating and isolating for Catherine Earnshaw as my mother’s home was for me. Adolescents, in their self-centered way of thinking, have a funny way of turning anything into a prison.

I guess I would say that the main difference between 14-year-old me and the 24-year-old me is while the former daydreamed about life halfway across the world, the latter wants to know what’s going on right outside the window, with its lonely gray skies and the wind howling outside the house. And with that, I opened the sliding door and stepped outside.

Let’s try this again.

I am starting this because

a) I am going to be in Philly a little longer than I thought.

b) I miss writing.

c) My friend base is now even more spread out than it was two years ago.

I think I’ll start with a story from a few years ago, because I think it’s appropriate, don’t you?

*********************

“I’m sorry, but I think you’re beautiful, and I was wondering if you wanted to join me for coffee later this week?”

I looked up from the book I was reading–I don’t remember the title now–and my eyes panned over a pair of sneakers, skinny ankles with no socks, runner’s calves, a nice face. Probably not a psycho.

“I can’t,” I said. “I’m moving to Philly tomorrow.”

His nice face fell slightly. “Oh.” I wondered if he thought I was lying. I still could barely believe it myself. Then I decided that it was just outlandish enough of an answer to be believable. Fleetingly, I pondered the acute irony of the situation. Here I was, in a bookstore, living a scene right out of a chick flick–the kind of scene that we scoff at, not because of the sheer improbability of it, but because it is not probable–and I was starting a new chapter of my life in 24 hours. That was just the kind of luck I had. I would have found it frustrating or bittersweet if it were not for the fact that I myself was mildly amused at how ridiculous it all was.

“So what are you doing in Philly?” he asked.

“I’m going to be a teacher.” It sounded awkward in my mouth. A lie that wasn’t.

“That’s cool, what are you going to teach?”

“Middle school social studies.”

“Social studies. That’s cool. So why are you moving to Philly to teach?” Prolonging a conversation for purposes that were never going to be served–haven’t we all been there. I tried to see myself from his perspective: small, sitting cross-legged on the carpet like a child, black sweater, pale face, curly dark head bent over a book. How old did he think I was? Was he also doubting my choice to be a teacher, my potential to lead groups of unruly children to academic success? No, he had too nice a face for that. The kind of guy that asks a girl out on a whim in a bookstore is not a skeptic. More likely he found it charming that I was sitting on the floor, when in reality it was just more comfortable. More likely he found it fascinating that I was so engrossed in my book. And now, he probably found it interesting that I was moving halfway across the country to teach. He probably thought of me as plucky, bookish, a risk-taker–and in reality, I am none of those things, I don’t think.

What he did not see. The nervous, borderline-pleased flutterings at picking up and starting over in a brand-new city where I didn’t know anyone, something none of my friends were doing. The anxious stirrings that I would forget something very important behind and jeopardize my whole summer. But most of all, the sheer terror below all that, solid and relentless as a block of ice at my core: what if I failed, what if I made no new friends, what if my students hated me, what if I was actually a terrible teacher, what if I taught them all the wrong things, what if I couldn’t find an apartment, what if I couldn’t earn enough money, what if I got fired, what if, what if, what if. I was blindfolded, walking along the edge of a windswept, lonely cliff. What if I was about to make the biggest mistake of my life? If I thought about the what ifs too much, they started to rise up in my throat like bile.

I did not like to discuss the what ifs even with my closest friends; I did not want to discuss the what ifs with this stranger, however nice his face might be. So, instead of the long, drawn-out answer to his question, the one that I had tired of repeating to people over and over again during the past two months, I simply said, “Well, that’s where I decided to teach.”

“Cool.” He nodded. “Well, good luck.”

“Thank you.” He walked away, his runner’s calves, his skinny ankles. I wondered if he was in the habit of picking girls up at the bookstore. Or perhaps this had been the first time he was able to work up the courage, and look at how it had turned out. Maybe that was his kind of luck. Either way, he had not known how his gamble would pay out, yet he had gone ahead and taken a leap anyway. And in that way, we were kind of alike.