Teacher Man: A Memoir (16 page)

At the college a man with a bullhorn announced teachers were expected to keep their classes together.

The assistant principal from my school told me they were relying on me to keep order in my class. That class had a reputation, he said.

I led them into the auditorium and stood in the aisle while they pushed and shoved and argued over seats. The Puerto Rican boys asked if they could sit far away. When Serena called them Spic and Span, the girls went into fits of giggling that didn’t stop till the ghost of Hamlet’s father appeared and terrified everyone. The ghost appeared on stilts draped in black and the girls oohed and aahed. When the spotlight dimmed on him, and he disappeared into the wings, Claudia, sitting beside me, called out, Oh, he’s so cute. Where he goin’? He comin’ back, teacher?

Yes, he is, I said, embarrassed by whispered shushings from serious people all over the auditorium.

She applauded each time the ghost appeared, whimpered when he left. I think he’s so cool. I want him back, she said.

When the play ended and the cast took their bows and there was no ghost, she stood and called to the stage, Where the ghost? I want the ghost. Where that ghost?

The other twenty-eight stood, too, and called for the ghost till an actor left the stage and the ghost reappeared immediately. The twenty-nine applauded and cheered and said they wanted to go out with him.

The ghost removed his black hat and cloak to show he was just an ordinary college student and not worth making a fuss over. The twenty-nine gasped and complained the whole play was a trick especially that phony ghost up there and they promised they’d never go to a phony play like this again not even if they had to sit in class with that Mr. McCourt and his spelling and stuff, not even if all the other classes in the school were going.

On the way home they fell asleep, all except Serena, who sat behind the bus driver. When she asked if he had any children he said he couldn’t talk and drive at the same time. It was against the law but, yes, he had children and he didn’t want any of them to be a bus driver. He was working to send them to good schools and if they didn’t do what they were told he’d break their ass. He said you had to work harder in this country when you were black but in the end that made you stronger. When you have to push harder and climb harder you develop muscles and then no one can stop you.

Serena said she’d like to be a hairdresser but the bus driver said, You can do better than that. You wanna stand there the rest of your life fixin’ hair for cranky old women? You’re smart. You can go to college.

Yeah? Do you really think I can go to college?

Why not? You look intelligent enough and you talk good. So why not?

Nobody never told me that before.

Well, I’m telling you, and don’t sell yourself short.

OK, said Serena.

OK, said the bus driver. He smiled at her in his rearview mirror and I suppose she smiled back at him. I couldn’t see her face.

He was a bus driver and black and the way she confided in him made me think about the waste of human beings in the world.

Next day Claudia wants to know, How come everybody be pickin’ on the girl?

Ophelia?

Yeah. Everybody be pickin’ on that poor girl an’ she not even black. How come? Guy that makes all the speeches has a sword to fight people so nobody pushes him in the river.

Hamlet?

Yeah, an’ you know what?

What?

He was so mean to his mom an’ he a prince an’ everything. Why didn’t she just get up an’ slap his face? Why?

Serena, the bright one, raises her hand like an ordinary kid in an ordinary class. I stare at the hand. I’m sure she’s going to ask for the lavatory pass. She says, Hamlet’s mom is a queen. Queens don’t act like everyone else slapping people around. You a queen you gotta have dignity.

She looks at me in that direct way that’s almost a challenge, eyes wide and beautiful and unblinking, a hint of smile. This thin black fifteen-year-old knows her power. I feel myself blushing and that starts another round of giggling.

The following Monday, Serena does not return to class. The girls say she’ll never be coming back on account of how her mother was arrested, For drugs an’ stuff, and now Serena has to live with her grandmother in Georgia, where, they say, Black people are treated like niggers. They say Serena will never stay there. She’ll be in trouble in no time talking back to white people. An’ that’s why she said the bad word, Mr. McCourt.

With Serena gone, the class changed, a body without a head. Maria raised her hand and asked why I talked funny. Was I married? Did I have any kids? Which did I prefer,
Hamlet
or
Cold Turkey
? Why did I become a teacher?

They were building bridges where we could travel back and forth. I answered their questions and didn’t give a damn anymore about giving them too much information. How many priests had I confessed to when I was the age of these girls? I had their attention and that was all that mattered.

A month after Serena left, there were two good moments. Claudia raised her hand and said, Mr. McCourt, you really nice. The class nodded yeah yeah and the Puerto Rican boys smiled in the back of the room.

Then Maria raised her hand. Mr. McCourt, I got a letter from Serena. She said this the first letter of her life and she wouldn’ta wrote it but her grandma told her. She never met her grandma before but she loves her because she can’t read or write and Serena reads the Bible to her every night. She said, this gonna kill you, Mr. McCourt, she said she gonna finish high school and go to college and teach little kids. Not big kids like us because we just a great pain but little kids that don’t talk back and she say she sorry about things she did in this class and to tell you that. Someday she gonna write you a letter.

There were fireworks in my head. It was New Year’s Eve and the Fourth of July a hundred times over.

T
en years into my teaching career, thirty-eight years old, and if I’m to assess myself I’ll say, You’re doing your dogged best. There are teachers who teach and don’t give a fiddler’s fart what their students think of them. Subject matter is king. Such teachers are powerful. They dominate their classrooms with personality backed up by the great threat: the red pen inscribing on the report card the dreaded F. Their message to their students is, I am your teacher, not your counselor, not your confidant, not your parent. I teach a subject: take it or leave it.

I often think I should be a tough, disciplined teacher, organized and focused, a John Wayne of pedagogy, another Irish schoolmaster wielding stick, strap, cane. Tough teachers deliver the goods for forty minutes. Digest this lesson, kids, and be ready to throw it up on exam day.

Sometimes I joke, Sit in that seat, kid, and be quiet, or I’ll break your bloody head, and they laugh because they know. Yeah, isn’t he something? When I act tough they listen politely till the spasm passes. They know.

I don’t see a class as one unit sitting and listening to me. There are faces showing degrees of interest or indifference. It’s the indifference that challenges me. Why is that little bastard talking to her when he could be listening to me? Excuse me, James, there’s a lesson going on here.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

There are moments and looks. They may be too shy to tell you that was a good lesson but you know now from the way they leave the room and the way they look at you whether the class was a success or something to be forgotten. The approving looks warm your heart on the train home.

No matter what happened in your classroom there were rules from the officials who supervised the high schools of New York:

Children are to keep their voices down. They are not to roam rooms or hallways. There can be no learning in a noisy atmosphere.

The classroom is not to be a playground. There should be no throwing of things. If students want to ask a question or answer a question they are to raise their hands. They must not be allowed to call out. Calling out could lead to pandemonium and that would make a bad impression on Board of Education officials from Brooklyn or educators visiting from foreign parts.

Use of the lavatory pass must be kept to a minimum. Everyone knows the various ploys with the lavatory pass. A boy given the pass to go to the lavatory on the second floor is sometimes found squinting through the window of a room where a girl he has recently fallen in love with is sitting and making loving faces right back. That is not to be tolerated. Some boys and girls use the pass to meet in the basement or on the stairwell where they are up to no good and found by alert assistant principals who report them and call their parents. Others take the pass to smoke in various secret places. The bathroom pass is for the bathroom, to be used for no other purpose. Students should not stay away with the pass more than five minutes. If they do, the teacher is to inform the office of the principal, which will send a dean to inspect the lavatories and other locations to ensure there is no improper behavior.

Principals want order, routine, discipline. They prowl the hallways. They peer through the windows in classroom doors. They want to see boys and girls with heads bent over books, boys and girls writing, boys and girls with hands raised, excited, eager to answer teacher’s questions.

Good teachers run a tight ship. They maintain discipline and that is crucial in a vocational high school in New York where gangs sometimes bring their problems to school. You have to keep an eye out for gangs. They could take over a whole school, and it’s goodbye to learning.

Teachers learn, too. After years in the classroom, after facing thousands of teenagers, they have that sixth sense about everyone who enters the room. They see the sidelong glances. They sniff the air of a new class and they can tell if this is a pain-in-the-ass group or one they can work with. They see quiet kids who have to be drawn out and loudmouths who have to be shut up. They can tell by the way a boy sits if he’s going to be cooperative or a great pain in the ass. It’s a good sign when a student sits straight up, joins his hands on the desk before him, looks at the teacher and smiles. It’s a bad sign if he lounges back, sticks his legs into the aisle, stares out the window, at the ceiling, over the teacher’s head. Watch out for trouble.

In every class there’s a pest put on earth to test you. He usually sits in the last row, where he can tilt his chair against the wall. You’ve already talked to the class about the danger of tilting: Chair could slip, children, and you could be hurt. Then teacher has to write a report in case parents complain or threaten to sue.

Andrew knows the tilting chair will annoy you, at least get your attention. Then he can play the little game that will catch the eyes of the girls. You’ll say, Hey, Andrew.

He’ll take his time. This is a showdown, man, and girls are watching.

Wha’?

That is the teenage sound you won’t find in a dictionary. Wha’? Parents hear it constantly. It means, Whaddya want? Why you bothering me?

The chair, Andrew. Would you put it down, please?

I’m just sittin’ minding my own business.

The chair, Andrew, has four legs. Tilting on two legs could cause an accident.

Silence in the classroom. Showdown time. This time you know you’re on fairly safe ground. You feel Andrew is disliked by this group and he knows he’ll get no sympathy. He’s a pale thin figure, a loner. Still, the class is watching. They may not like him but if you bully him they’ll turn against you. When it’s boy versus teacher they choose boy. And all because of a tilted chair.

You could have let it go. No one would have noticed. So, teacher man, what’s the problem? Simple. Andrew has shown his dislike for you from day one and you don’t like being disliked, especially by this little shit who’s disliked by the rest of the class. Andrew knows you favor the girls. Of course I favor the girls. Give me five classes with a majority of girls and I’m in heaven. Variety. Color. Games. Drama.

Andrew waits. The class waits. The chair is cocky in its tilt. Oh, the temptation to grab a leg and pull. His head would slide down the wall and everyone would laugh.

I turn away from Andrew. I don’t know why I’m turning away and walking to the front of the room and I certainly don’t know what I’ll do or say once I reach my desk. I don’t want them to think I’ve backed off, but I know I have to act. Andrew’s head rests against the wall and he’s giving me that little smile of contempt.

I don’t like Andrew’s tumbling red hair, the fine features. I don’t like the arrogance of his delicacy. Sometimes when I’ve warmed up to a subject and the class is with me and I’m rolling along, delighted with myself, I look back at his cold stare and wonder if I should try to win him over or destroy him completely.

A voice in my head tells me, Make something of it. Turn it into a lesson on observation. Pretend you planned the whole thing. And I say to the class, So, what’s going on here? They stare. They’re puzzled.

You say, Imagine you’re a newspaper reporter. You walked into this room a few minutes ago. What did you see? What did you hear? What is the story?

Michael speaks up. No story. Just Andrew being an asshole as usual.

Andrew loses his little contemptuous smile and I feel I have him on the run. I won’t have to say much. Continue with the leading questions and let the class damn him. I’ll wipe that smile off his face forever, the little shit, and he’ll tilt no more.

I assume my reasonable, objective teacher role. A comment like that, Michael, doesn’t give the reader much information.

Yeah, but who needs information like that? Is some guy from the
Daily News
gonna walk in here and write this big story about Andrew and the chair and the teacher getting all pissed off?

His girlfriend raises her hand.

Yes, Diane?

She talks to the class. Mr. McCourt is axin’ us —

Asking, Diane.

She pauses. She takes her time. She says, See. Mr. McCourt, that’s what’s wrong with this world. People try to help people an’ next thing other people are trying to correct everything they say. That’s very insulting. I mean it’s OK to tell Andrew put his chair down because he could crack his stupid skull, but there’s no reason to be correcting the way people talk. You do that an’ we never gonna open our mouths in this class. So you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna tell Andrew put his chair down an’ not be an ass.

She’s sixteen, tall and cool, and her blond hair hangs down her back in a sophisticated way that reminds me of Scandinavian actresses. I am nervous when she walks to the back of the room and stands before Andrew.

So look, Andrew. You see what’s happening here. There’s this big class, over thirty people in this class, and Mr. McCourt up there an’ you tilting on your chair an’ he tells you put it down but you just sit there with your little smile, Andrew, an’ who knows what’s going on in your head. You’re wasting the time of everyone in this class and what’s your problem? The teacher is getting paid to teach an’ not tell you put your chair down like you were some kid in first grade, right? Right, Andrew?

He’s still tilting but he looks at me as if to say, What’s going on here? What should I do?

He tilts his chair forward till it’s flat. He stands and faces Diane. See? You’ll never forget me, Diane. You’ll forget this whole class, you’ll forget the teacher, Mr. What’s-his-name, but I tilt my chair and the teacher gets uptight, and everyone in this class will remember me forever. Right, Mr. McCourt?

I wanted to drop the reasonable-teacher mask and say what was on my mind, Look, you little twerp, put the chair down or I’ll throw you out the damn window so you’ll be meat for pigeons.

You can’t talk like that. You’d be reported to the authorities. You know your role: if the little buggers piss you off from time to time, suffer, man, suffer. No one is forcing you to stay in this miserable underpaid profession and there’s nothing to keep you from going through that door to the shimmering world of powerful men, beautiful women, cocktail parties uptown, satin sheets.

Yeah, teach, and what would you do in the great world of powerful men, et cetera? Get back to work. Talk to your class. Address the problem of the tilted chair. It’s not over. They’re waiting.

Listen. Are you listening?

They smile. There he goes again with his old, Listen, are you listening? They call to one another in the hallways, mimicking, Listen. Are you listening? It means they like you.

I said, You saw what happened in this room. You saw Andrew tilting his chair and you saw what happened when I told him drop it. So you have material for a story, don’t you? We’ve had conflict. Andrew versus teacher. Andrew versus the class. Andrew versus himself. Oh, yes, indeed, Andrew versus himself. You were making mental notes, weren’t you? Or else you just said, Why is the teacher making such a big deal about Andrew and his chair? Or why is Andrew being such a pain in the ass? If you were reporting this there is another dimension to the incident: Andrew’s motivation. Only he knows why he was tilting that chair and you are entitled to speculate. We could have over thirty speculations in this class.

Next day Andrew lingered after class. Mr. McCourt, you went to NYU, right?

I did.

Well, my mother said she knew you.

Really? I’m happy to know that someone remembered me.

I mean she knew you outside of class.

Again, Really?

She died last year. She had cancer. Her name was June.

Oh, Christ. Slow on the uptake is hardly the word for it. Late bloomer. Why didn’t I guess? Why didn’t I see her in his eyes?

She used to say she was going to call you but she had a bad time with the divorce and then the cancer came and when I told her I was in your class she made me promise never to tell you about her. She said you’d never want to talk to her anyway.

But I did want to talk to her. I wanted to talk to her forever. Who did she marry? Who’s your father?

I don’t know who my father is. She married Gus Peterson. I have to go and empty out my locker. My dad is moving to Chicago and I’m going with him and my stepmother. Isn’t it funny how I have a stepfather and a stepmother and it’s OK?

We shook hands and I watched him walk down the hallway. Before he went into the locker area he turned and waved and I had a moment wondering if I should let the past go that easily.

School wisdom says, Unless you can back it up, never threaten a class or an individual. And don’t be such a fool as to threaten Benny “Boom Boom” Brandt, who is famous in the school for having a black belt in karate.

After an absence of four days he saunters into the classroom halfway through a lesson on foreign words in English: amen, pasta, chef, sushi, limousine and the words that start the tittering, lingerie, bidet, brassiere.

I could ignore Boom Boom, carry on with the lesson, and let him go to his seat. But I know the class is watching and thinking, How come we have to bring in excuse notes when we’re absent but Boom Boom can come in just like that and sit down? They’re right and I’m with them, and I have to show I’m not soft.