Period Three Prophet

Our prophet was an unlikely fellow. A hip-hop artist, cleverly calling himself MC Language Artz, joined us for the morning in my difficult third period. He was only a little taller than I, and apparently my own age, but the weight of the serious hip-hop underground community lay heavy on his hoodie-clad shoulders and baggy-jeaned knees, so that I felt, as I do so often among the truly hip and urban, like a sheltered child, less experienced than even my own fourteen-year-old students, much less this guest.

He had come to talk to my students about the critical importance of expression as a doorway to freedom and adulthood. I sat in the corner on a tall stool, leaning against the wall and thankful just to have an hour to remain silent and listen. I had been losing my voice all week, fighting a cold and regretting the decision to read stories aloud to my students at the end of the semester. The three days of stories were not connected to any unit to come, and we had done almost no writing at all about them. "We're just going to enjoy some stories together this week," I'd told them.

"No homework?" they asked.

"None."

"No assignments?"

"I doubt it. Let's just relax into some stories together."

They didn't understand this, really, but I did. It was like those teachers who show movies to their students when they're tired of teaching. But I'd already done that this year, so like the conscientious parent I dredged out some stories to tell my children. This is peace for me, and even some kind of healing, that we hear the same stories and, despite these huge divisions, can share one little experience in the vastness of our collective memories. And we'd enjoyed it, but now I had no voice. So I listened to the hip-hop guest speaker talk to my students about literacy.

He was harsh. He told them things they didn't want to hear, that they were isolated and pretentious and too concerned with being cool. He told them that state governments used elementary reading tests to forecast the number of prison cells that would be needed two decades down the road. He told them that one in four inmates in high-security prisons was illiterate. And they shuddered in silence, my squirrely third period class, in the presence of this stone-faced young prophet.

The guest speaker shared a piece about racism and the achievement gap between rich and poor, issues that I see every day among my students but could never express with such grace or relevance. And as I listened and watched the faces of my students, feeling like a guest in a world to which I do not belong, I thought about the importance of language. That I could have told them the same things, but that he, hip-hop prophet, knew the words they would hear, the tones that would crash through ninth-grade indifference and hopelessness, enough to frighten and inspire.

At the End of the Day

It was an aptitude she had, never to look half finished; when she was really exhausted, as she often on her return to Hetton after these days in London, she went completely to pieces quite suddenly and became a waif; then she would sit over the fire with a cup of bread and milk, hardly alive...

-Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust

A few times a week, I fall into a trance at the end of the day, staring into space and trying to forget the last fifty minutes. These dazed minutes come on the days when the last class drives me to distraction, when I spend more time in the hallway, talking to individual miscreants, than inside teaching anything at all. At the end of such a class, especially on a Friday, no amount of grading, planning, or preparing on the horizon can drag me from the meditative state, nor can I get anything done until I've spent a few indulgent minutes reading movie reviews on the Seattle Weekly web site. No, the Times will not do. The real paper is for when I'm mostly alive and awake--times like these call for cynicism to match my own.

It is two boys and a teacher who interrupt me today. I look up slowly, carefully, and take in the presence of guests. I'll have to pull myself together enough to have a conversation. With the teacher, I discuss plans to attend the basketball games this afternoon, which sounds less and less attractive with each passing Friday minute. Then, our conversation turns to the two students who are obviously waiting for my attention. One of them is quiet and sweet, and he sits pleasantly in a desk to wait while I scowl at his companion.

The friend is tall and lanky, the captain of the freshman basketball team, and had contributed to the demise of my third period today, which crumbled to chaotic ruin about halfway through. He now bounces on the balls of his feet eagerly.

"When's the last JVC game?" my colleague asks him. He shrugs. Typical, I think with scorn.

"Can I use your computer to check, Ms. D?"

I raise my eyebrows skeptically, and shake my head. "Nope."

He laughs. "She thinks I'm going to eat her computer, or something. Just cause I got sent out today."

"Well, just let me know when you find out," my fellow teacher is saying. I consider the captain, standing there with his hands in his pockets, and I know he'll ask about his grade in a minute and request some assignments I've already given him. Still, it's just a computer, I hesitate. Maybe I'm being a little protective. With an overly-dramatic sigh--a teenager sigh--I stand up and motion to my wooden desk chair.

"Oh, you're going to let me use it!"

"Wait, stop! Are you taking a bite?" the other student jokes.

Fifteen minutes later, after I've given the good grades lecture to both students and the other have gone, the team captain lurks at a desk while I stand up to straighten up the tornado disaster of my classroom. I still have papers to grade, a spreadsheet to create, and an assignment to write before I leave today, but I can carry on a conversation while I clean. And it's clear that he has more to say. We begin to talk about the varsity team, which seems to fall apart toward the end of every season as its players' grades dwindle.

"You just need to promise me that you will still have good grades when you're a senior," I say, picking up dropped pieces of paper from under a desk.

"Oh, I know. We'll be great." There's something amiss in this answer, though, coming from the tired captain at the end of a losing season, some disappointment at the prospect of three more seasons like this one.

"No, really, you're great people," I insist, tossing the paper in the recycle bin and poking at the media projector on the ceiling with a broom to turn it off.

I hope he understands, that he can see far enough ahead to realize why it might mean something that he has a collection of outstanding gentlemen on his basketball team. For me, it means not worrying that we are training athletes only, grooming them for a life on the court that they can't sustain beyond it. It means knowing that they are stellar all-around. For him, it will mean four years with the same team, with boys who grow to young men of responsibility and consistency. I'm not a coach, but I would have great hopes for this team if I were.

He nods, but does not reply. After a minute, he looks up at me, watching me chase fragments of paper around the classroom floor with a broom.

"Hey, can I help? Like, can I sweep, or something?"

As I hand him the broom and begin gratefully to sort the assignments scattered across my desk, I'm thinking that the freshman basketball team has a great deal of potential with this sort of leadership. But I'm mostly considering the ways I feel kindness. This act of service has redeemed the day and brought me back from the brink of cynical despair. I remember a few months ago saying that I didn't mind that no one ever brought be flowers or took me out for opulent dinners; the most romantic gesture I could think of was someone coming and mowing my lawn or fixing my car. At the end of this dreadful day, the boy who is silently sweeping the floor, without being asked or offered any extra credit, has given me something worth a thousand bouquets of flowers.

The Greener Pastures

It was snowing Tuesday morning as I drove in the dark to school. I had sloshed through a meager quarter-inch of melted snow on the sidewalk, and by now, twenty minutes before dawn, it was too warm for the snow to stick to pavement. My tires squeaked along merrily on the shining black road, as I rounded the corner onto Greenwood and the tragic snow splashed down heavily ahead of me. It was not even white enough to show up in the headlights, only identified by the crystalline puddles it made on my windshield, cold and grainy like ancient photographs. If this day were the setting of a book I was just beginning, I would gird myself up for doom, for disaster. As it was, I was already bracing for the day. Wild students, a tired young teacher, a dark, wet day that would have been a snow day except that we're slowly melting the earth by a process I haven't yet gotten around to understanding.

I pushed into a breath of warmth in my classroom, pulled up the shades to realized that it had stopped snowing exactly as the sun came up dimly from behind the clouds. I looked at the floor of my classroom, which I still remembered sparkling clean at the beginning of the year. It read like a log of the past few months, like the tabletop at my parents' house, where somewhere in the wood grain are the remains of my uncle's algebra homework and my mother's sewing projects. Over there was where the boys were rough housing during break and spilled a carton of chocolate milk. There's the splashes of hot cocoa from the holiday party. Here's the splashes of chalk dust that a certain student made when he used to violently throw the erasers at the floor.

Sitting down at my desk, reflecting on the affectionate chaos of the day before, our first day back from vacation, I was prepared to look at the dusty floor with a shrug. Floors get dirty, I thought. Kids spill milk. No use crying, right? I returned to that room hours later, dusty and exhausted from a day of research in the library, my feet sore from circling the computer lab, my head hurting from the endless tapping of chair levers, and my ears still echoing with the day's chief command, "No, don't you roll your chair over to me. Stand up, for heaven's sake. Stop rolling!" The floor did not look so good then. In fact, it was so dirty that I would have mopped it if I didn't have to prepare a plan for a substitute. So I glared at the floor while gleefully writing Post-It notes to the sub, contemplating the one-day retreat ahead.

I was going to a training. I look forward to trainings several reasons. They afford me hours at a time where I need not say anything if I don't want to do so. I can simply listen, luxuriating in the deep bliss of having nothing to do but learn. I am allowed to interact with adults, to stay mostly clean and neat, and to drive downtown, staring at the tall buildings and dreaming of what it would be like to commute. Trainings are a novelty, a brief shake-up in the routines of my life. I had an unusually nebulous concept of what this one was about, but I was excited, all the same.

The next day, at lunch, I found myself staring down an Escher-esque hall on the upper floor of our district headquarter building. The training, for which I had held such high hopes, had already proved to be dull, and would have been disillusioning if I had been paying better attention. I had escaped for a moment from lunch to find a past mentor, who I suspected had an office somewhere up here. The "up here" has always seemed clean and quiet, if a bit sterile, and on harrowing school days I think with longing of their giant windows and cool grey carpets that are probably free of chocolate milk puddles.

This hallway, though, is different. It is colorless and silent, and endlessly long--so long that I suspect an illusion, some kind of mirror trick, and wave to see if I can find a tiny Kristi waving back in the distance. In the absence of a mirror, I venture down the hall, which has windows along one side and the grey cloth walls and doorways of cubicles on the other.

The dull buzzing of the cubicle floor simply adds to the grim impression this day has already made. Many times throughout the morning, I have stared at the clock and daydreamed of the activities I had planned for my students in my absence, wondering who was making trouble and who was going to finish his or her project on time. In the hesitant, testing-the-waters questions of my colleagues, I begin to crave the straightforwardness of teenagers. I long to get up and move, to be involved directly in the learning of another person, rather than manipulating a garble of hypothesis and data. I can squint and see myself, an educational consultant or a district employee. I can see myself clicking through the PowerPoint and saying the right words, the words I still remember because I was in college just moments ago. But as I walk down the quiet hallway, thinking how very different is the colorful hall outside of Room 120, I know I wouldn't be happy here.

I reach my mentor's cubicle after miles of hallway, turn to the left and meet her smiling welcome. She tells be about her newest job, tells me about the pre-school teacher she is just heading out to observe. She is happy this year, doing something she loves and believes in, working with students she knows she can help. We talk about some students we shared, about the direction in which my career is heading, about the future and the past. After a delightful ten minutes, I have to return to the training and she has to go out to a school, so we turn down the long hall.

"So, you have your own little cubicle down here," I comment unnecessarily. I don't mean to be pejorative, though I am immediately afraid she'll take it as such.

I am staring down the hall, down to where I'll need to find the stairs and return to the training like far less than my own classroom. She is looking out the window.

"Yes," she nods, looking with deep satisfaction at the sky that is starting to clear up. "And I have a window!"