I’ve run through a long list of words searching for one that best describes my first year of teaching, discarding some as too dramatic, others as too mild, a few as wildly inappropriate.
It was a confounding year. Look at the definition: “causing surprise and confusion; mixing up (something) with something else so that the individual elements become difficult to distinguish.”
Make it a dream. You’ve been assigned to a house. It has your name above the door. When you enter, a crowd is meandering and some running randomly from room to room, up and down staircases, shouting, whispering in two’s in the corner. The noise of clattering and glass crick-cracking are coming from the kitchen. The lights are flickering. A fight breaks out. Three dogs are chasing each other between legs, over furniture. A couple of older people (who are they?) are smiling and telling you something, but it is so hard to hear them. You smell smoke. Water is coming in a continuous drip from a dark spot on the ceiling. You have not taken more than a step or two into the house, your house, the one you have chosen.
In September of 1975 Owen J Roberts High School was led by a nice guy Principal who could not bring order to a building devolving into daily chaos. Almost 1500 kids in 4 grades were stuffed into classes that averaged about 35 and often went over 40. Students switched classes and teachers every 8 weeks in Language Arts and Social Studies. Cigarette smoke poured out of bathroom windows during classes. A smoking area at the end of the wings filled up to the count of 100 and more between classes — big farm boys and tough looking girls hulked about in flannel shirts and army surplus jackets and smoked doobies the size of my thumb. We had duty time out there. We were supposed to keep kids from smoking doobies the size of my thumb. I’ll bet we averaged 3 or 4 fights a week. Fights, not posturing. Bare knuckle, swing from the rafters, pound ‘em, screaming “I’ll fucking kill you” fights. Girls fought too. Cafeteria duty was a nightmare. Bus Duty was a nightmare. We pretty much stopped having assemblies because they became so unruly. We had one or two days of in-service time and then students arrived in buses, in muscle cars, in pick-up trucks filling “Hick Row”, most of them with rifles slung on mounts behind the couch seat. They roared into the poorly lit hallways, jamming them between classes — a cacophonous, profane, human circus time. We were to stand outside our doors and keep watch. Many veteran teachers hid. But the rookies were out there, me too, my eyes as wide as if I had leaned back into an open cable 120 volt current. Where am I? What is this? I watched a senior boy, Jack who looked like Jabba the Hutt and was seated in the front row of a writing class, dismantle a fly he had snatched out of the air, ripping the legs off with something approaching delicacy, and then assembling them in a neat row with a pencil point — torso leg leg leg leg leg leg. I didn’t know what to do. I tried ignoring him, but then the class became entranced by his silent, meticulous actions, and we all were watching in fascination and horror. I finally said, “Jack, what are you doing?” “Killing flies,” he growled.
Kids on high powered dirt bikes wearing helmets darkening their identities sometimes came clacketing into the Commons between the wings and did donuts. A Phys-ed teacher knocked one off his bike with his enormous set of keys and then paraded him down the hallway in an arm lock. A girl poured an entire container of hot pea soup on the head of the Homecoming Queen because she was sleeping with her boyfriend. I was the only one on Caf duty. I grabbed the perp and half-carried, half jerked her away from the mob looking to tear her apart, ran into the custodian’s office, locked the door and called for help. The perp, a blond whose hair looked like someone had used a lawn mower to style it, smiled the entire time. Outside, wild women banged on the door yelling, “You’re dead. We’re going to fucking kill you.” After a while “I’m going to fucking kill you” lost all its power to bother you. Ok, yep, you thought, “kill you”, dum de dum de dum. In a study hall I looked up from helping a student to see a deranged looking boy who looked like a young Marlon Brando pour a full cup of chocolate milk over the perfectly coiffed hair of a very pretty math teacher and then sit down and laugh while he waited for the vice-principals to come get him. I had piles of napkins in my hand trying to help her wipe her face and hair. She never cried. She never said a word to the boy. She just looked at me with eyes hard as coal. I think she would have killed him.
On my fourth day as a teacher, my fourth day as a paid teacher, my fourth bloody day, a Friday, the last period of my first insane week, with 30 some ninth graders coming into a grammar class, one boy said, “There’s a fight outside.”
We all have moments when something snaps, and in doing so, something else snaps into place, and we become someone more fully, not someone else, but a more complex version of who we might be that had been held in abeyance until this flash point of pressure arrived. How we respond to the pressure can change everything. In the presence of conflict we choose who we become.
In Loco Parentis, in the place of a parent, is a part of the Pennsylvania School Code that commits teachers to some limited power of parents when students are under our supervision. I may stop a child from harming himself or herself. I may use reasonable force to protect a child from harm.
I do not remember ever running toward a fight. I had a few in high school, stupid affairs, one or two punch detonations or idiot-wrestling on playgrounds. All around, I had been a pretty timid kid in a pretty peaceful place.
This was different. I was responsible for another’s well being. They were mine, my students I mean, they were mine; others had given me moral and legal trust to protect them, and they were children, even the ones bigger than me were children, and children require someone to stand between them and violence. It was a duty.
I did none of that reasoning at the time. I did not reason. I felt nothing noble. I was not afraid. I was not courageous. I ran. I felt urgency. That’s all. Get there quickly. That’s all. I ran toward the doors that led to the smoking area that led to the fight.
A half-moon of students penned in the fight against the back brick wall of the west wing. They were shouting. They were packed together. I could not see. I rammed through, forearming and slipping between bodies to come to the inner edge of a cleared space. Two large boys, the victim with shoulder length hair. The aggressor, taller and wiry, had him pressed up against the wall. I had missed the beginning. Long Hair was bleeding from the mouth and around the eyes. He had blood on his hair. Tall Boy pressed his forearm into his throat. I hesitated for less than a second although it felt much longer. I had seen fights but never a beating. In that swirling instant, Tall Boy rammed his knee into Long Hair’s groin.
He did not see me coming. I broke from the pack at a dead run and hit him from the back, yanking him away by the shoulder and turning him to look at me, his face seeming to widen in surprise. I smashed him into the wall with my left hand and with my right grabbed him by the throat and screamed, “If you ever fucking do that again, I’ll rip your fucking throat out and make you fucking eat it.”
That is exactly what I said, word for word. I have not forgotten anything.
The crowd had gone completely silent. Then it erupted in howling and cries I could not make out. I kept moving. I had both boys by the arm. We were walking toward the interior of the U shaped Commons, to a door, and during that short walk I turned to Tall Boy, still gripping him by the bicep and said, “Sorry for what I said to you”, and then we were into the hallways and hurrying to the nurse’s office where I dropped off Long Hair and then down the hallway to the main office and its tiny alcove where a dozen or so boys were yelling at the receptionist and the vice principal about what I had said and done and the principal came out looking bewildered, but he at least took us back to his office and closed the door and then looked at me and shouted “What did you do?”
I stammered through a word salad, it beginning to dawn on me as the adrenaline wore off, what I had done. He turned toward Tall Boy and asked him if I had hurt him. He had kept his eyes to the floor the entire time and been silent. Now he looked up and said, “He didn’t say nothin’.” The principal blinked. The room was so quiet. Then he told Tall Boy to leave and go home. He walked out and gently closed the door behind him. I couldn’t speak. I was amazed.
The principal told me to sit down. I had retreated into another place by then. I heard him yelling. I remember thinking only one sentence over and over, “It’s the 4th day and I’m going to be fired.” Then he was sitting in a chair next to me, and he was smiling and speaking quietly, and he offered me a cigarette. We sat smoking in that warm office and the period ended and the school began emptying and I cannot remember one word of what he said to me, just his smile and the cigarette and the warm fall slant of the light.
The kids had gone by the time I walked back to my room. A veteran English teacher, a good one, said to me, “What did you do!?” and then said firmly, “You need a drink, You will come to the Pub. I’ll wait for you.”
I don’t know how many teachers crammed in around that table. I drank a beer. I told the story. They roared. They asked me to repeat what I had said. They roared. They told me who Tall Boy was — a senior, the alpha male of the school, the toughest of all the tough guys, leader of a crew of motorheads, a non-druggie smashmouth weirdly honorable thug.
I drove back to Reading. I did not want to be in my miniature basement apartment where husbands and wives fought in the parking lot once or twice a week and where my across the hall neighbor looked like Riff Raff, only creepier, and kept inviting me to come over to smoke a spliff. I went home and told my parents, who were genuinely concerned for me, and then I slept deeply and the next morning the weight of what had happened fell upon me.
The following Monday night, the School Board met, and in a public session one member asked since when had they started hiring teachers who used such foul language with students.
Also that Monday, members of Tall Boy’s crew began lingering outside my classroom door, following me when I walked down the hall, joining me in the bathroom, muttering ugly things, just loud enough for me to hear. I said nothing. I just kept moving. Tall Boy kept his distance.
Then it stopped. They disappeared overnight.
At the same time I was struggling almost every class period with how to keep order, how to manage so many preps, how to deal with the physical strain of the job, its daily unwieldly demands of body and soul. I came home and collapsed onto my bed and slept for a couple of hours and then got up, choked down food and began to work.
One boy, a nemesis, George, a sophomore, big-shouldered, one of a handful of true sociopaths I have ever taught, disrupted every one of his class periods. I had no idea how to reach him or stop him in his disruptions. Almost every period ended with a problem.
About three weeks after the beating of Long Hair by Tall Boy, another class ended with George shouting, me simmering, trying to find a way to make him stop, unable to do so, watching him sneer and walk out the door, watching a hand reach out from the right and take him by the collar, watching George yanked into disappearance, hearing “Whap Whap Whap Whap,” moving now, reaching the hallway to see George staggering away holding his head and Tall Boy leaning against the lockers and smiling. He looked at me and said, “He won’t bother you no more.” That’s all he said. Still smiling at me, he turned and walked away.
I became the teacher advisor to The Motorheads Club which consisted of opening my room to Tall Boy’s crew. I covered for them when they were having bad days because of awful home lives or they were sleeping off a drunk or because they were so angry and if they came to my room, they wouldn’t hurt anyone. A boy would appear at the door while I was teaching and say, “Could you let Vince sit for a while? Bad day.” I always took them in. He would go to an open chair all the way in the back and put his head down. My classes got used to this. My problems with other kids diminished. No one wanted to be on the wrong side of Tall Boy. George didn’t bother me no more.
He only explained his change to me once in his typical, laconic way: “When you jacked me up, and then said you were sorry, you treated me like a person. No teacher did that.”
There was more to the year of course — the real kindness of many experienced teachers in offering advice and friendship, the centimeter by centimeter acquisition of and understanding of my craft, occasional successes in the classroom, a beginning to an intuitive reading of individual students and of a room of students as a whole, the sweep of the seasons, the great pleasure of snow days, the year then turning downhill, summer coming, release coming, one of the great trips of my life coming. I would not believe myself to be a ‘teacher’ until half a decade had passed, but I had outlasted the first year, and I wanted to come back. I had already begun to make plans.
