Firestarter
Wisconsin Review
She was a dutiful student, reading fluently and writing sensitive responses to the literature we studied. In this my first year teaching, at a challenging urban junior high school, she made me feel like she was truly learning. Occasionally, she and a few other Cambodian friends would skip lunch and come to my room to chat and laugh, revealing small details about their world outside of school. M’s mother had been a teenage mom, and though M promised she had no interest in becoming a young mother, she dated high school boys. One of the neighborhood Cambodian gangs was becoming a family for her. Her older siblings were deeply involved in the gang scene, and I knew she was just the right age to begin the process of initiation.
Sometime in early spring there was a fight outside my classroom. Fist fights were fairly commonplace but usually tamed quickly. This was a bloody one. Two eighth grade boys from rival gangs were slugging one another, and there were no other teachers in the hallway. I stepped over the threshold of the classroom just in time to see the final wallop, and the fresh blood from one boy’s nose seeped slightly over the lip of my door. By that time, the school administrators were on the scene, and the campus police officer had shuttled both of the boys into the office. I wiped up the blood and tried to get back to the lesson while the kids in my classroom shouted and whooped with excitement, spitting Khmer across the room to one another. All the while it felt like I’d been watching something that was supposed to happen, a re-enactment of the same scene that had been rehearsed for years in this community, despite the teacher-actors trying to stave off the drama.
M wasn’t in my classroom that day, but several days later she enacted her own play in the girls’ locker room bathroom. She’d returned from the weekend with a homemade tattoo on her bicep. L’il Lady. When I asked about it, she seemed embarrassed, but some other kids told me it was a gang initiation ritual. It was first period, and I didn’t even notice that she’d taken the bathroom pass; we were engrossed in developing painfully formulaic five-paragraph essays, which was de rigueur at the time, as lifeless as it made their writing. The fire alarm interrupted us, and our class filed out to the far side of the parking lot along with the rest of the school. Revere Beach was only a few blocks away, and the smell of sea water mixed with a cold spring breeze. Three of my students linked arms walking out of the building, and I distinctly remember thinking they would make perfect poster children for a diversity campaign: one girl was red-haired and freckled; the boy had caramel skin and hair like a soft cloud around his head; the other girl was from Thailand, with glossy hair and gorgeous features. We were outside for at least an hour, and we knew it was not a drill.
The smoke-smell was only faint when we returned to the building. In my classroom wastebasket the police found a lighter, and M was taken away. I’m still not sure how they know it was her; the teachers pieced together the details afterwards, with tips from too-talkative students. I figure she snuck into the school before the bell, past the groups of posturing pre-teens crowding by the front doors. Her long black hair was pulled back from her oval-shaped face, her makeup carefully applied, a V-neck T shirt tucked into tight jeans. In the bathroom she emptied the entire paper towel dispenser and tore the wrapping off the spare toilet paper rolls. Meticulously, she began wadding up the paper and placing it around the perimeter of the bathroom, up against the concrete walls.
After leaving my classroom, M walked back to the downstairs locker room bathroom. She flicked the lighter beside the brown paper towel, skipped on her toes to the other corner to light that area, and ducked out the door. It closed behind her with a resolute bang. She strode casually back upstairs, lingering to talk to a few friends in the hallway, biding her time before the alarm went off. There was plenty of time for her to re-join our class as we left the building, and she stood outside with us for the entire hour. We talked and laughed, she and her friends bantering in their Khmer-English dialect. The rest of it happened too fast for me to remember in detail. They searched my room, called M to the office, and last I heard she was in juvenile court facing charges. It was a requirement of the gang initiation: lighting fires in public spaces was considered a creative expression of allegiance. I couldn’t help being relieved that she chose a foolish, ineffectual device. Paper towels against old, painted concrete walls don’t hold a flame for very long.
Every initiation is a trial by fire, of sorts.
On a good day, my current students and I laugh and wrestle with words, and I can get them to examine their own language. We’ve had a series of monster snowstorms and missed school days this winter, the plows groaning outside the classroom, the fields resting white and smooth. At one point I brazenly required the eighth graders to read poetry about snow days (the direct Billy Collins and the more indecipherable but haunting Mary Oliver) and then craft their own. There were surprisingly few groans, maybe in part because they were asked to write about themselves; solipsism can be freeing. They produced some gorgeous phrases, and they paid attention to word choice and connotation, which was the goal.
A vexed blizzard whips snow onto slick and slippery roads.
_____________________________
Falling snow is intensely colorless.
_____________________________
A tepid bowl of Italian Wedding soup sits on the counter.
______________________________
Bleached windows replace the usual daybreak view of sturdy oaks and hemlocks.
Teaching doesn’t always work, but for this poetry exercise a community was formed, and its heat warmed the room. The art of it seems to lie in some immeasurable connection: it’s not simply the talent of the instructor or the receptivity of the student, but some nebulous, unpredictable spark called “learning,” which hovers temporarily like a lit match somewhere in between the two parties.
I’ve been in middle school now for more than fifteen years; a tenure that feels liberating rather than confining. This isn’t where I envisioned myself; early on I was pretty sure I’d be elucidating the works of Bishop and Plath for college undergrads, and today some of my students don’t know the difference between a sentence and a fragment. I’d like to think I’m long past that loftiness. What strikes me now is the difference between the way young adolescents perceive their teachers, and the way we imagine ourselves effecting change.
It isn’t that as an adolescent I thought teachers slept under their desks and lived only inside the walls of a school. But I can’t say, either, that I ever considered their personal lives and struggles. Granted, my middle and high school experience, all of one block of time in a sixth through twelfth grade private Jewish day school, didn’t require our teachers to deal with much controversy. My peers weren’t in gangs and certainly didn’t stage fights or confront the teachers; parents stepped in when we couldn’t work out our own differences. But wealth and a shared culture did not preclude some painful histories. We had a handful of kids already experimenting with drugs, the usual cattiness of girls and boys, some sexual experimentation, and a few incidents of cutting and vandalism. Nothing compared to an urban school, for sure, but certainly not befitting the image of a Jewish day school, fifty kids per grade, a “Drug Free School Zone” sign prominently placed in front of the entrance.
Several incidents stand out from that eighth grade year, a year probably more memorable to me because of my current position teaching that very age group. We had one student with a penchant for exposing himself to unsuspecting girls. The teachers eventually noticed. “He took IT out” became our Seinfeldian catch phrase that year, and most of us thought it was pretty funny, if not a little disturbing. I’d already seen a penis in sixth grade, the same kid’s twice, actually. Though I have two brothers (and a father), this was my first exposure to the male anatomy. The first glimpse was unintentional: too-loose shorts while my boyfriend climbed across the seats of a school bus. This boy from summer camp had a house surrounded by fields and woods ripe for exploration, and he and a group of “wild” kids rode ATV’s, smoked cigarettes, and belonged to a brotherhood of alluring boys. Shockingly white haired and rebellious, he was bent on impressing the girls. He revved his engine and rolled over fallen tree branches, or angled one back wheel on top of a boulder, on which the machine would jolt and shudder. His older brother and friends were supposedly monitoring him, but I felt nervous when I saw the ATV flip. There was just a small batch of flame hovering over the surface of the engine like alcohol burning off. My boyfriend whipped out his member and quickly pissed the fire out. It steamed and stank and I was suitably impressed. Was he trained to do that by his posse? Was this some kind of membership ritual, passed down by his older siblings? He’d acted so quickly, so physically, it seemed hard to believe this was his first time.
There was also the disrespect for property that I always figured came from being white and privileged. We had so much freedom then, including a morning break of twenty minutes and a forty minute lunch, during which we were completely unmonitored and wandered the school grounds and surrounding neighborhoods. It was absurdly easy for the high school kids to run home, smoke a joint, and make it back with plenty of time to spare, stumbling into class distracted. On one occasion, a few of us sat on the hood of a teacher’s car, and some bold moron decided to climb up and jump around on the roof. A few other boys followed suit until a dent was made, and an adult caught them. I watched, entirely unmoved.
The upshot was that there was considerable cosmetic damage to the car, and it turned out to belong to our own humanities teacher, who was angry and upset. The crux of this for me, though, is that I can’t remember caring at all. I had no sense that she would have to pay for this, that this was her property we’d (collectively) abused, and that she had a home and bills and adult responsibilities that I knew nothing of. I’m not sure I thought the incident was funny, but I just didn’t really think much of it. And I wasn’t a passionless kid; quite the opposite, I had a near obsessive drive to help others. But this was only when the cause was indisputable: prisoners in need of amnesty, needy families, the Shriners’ hospital patients.
Even as late as tenth grade, we still held our distance from certain teachers. One English teacher was cruelly referred to as “the chinless wonder.” She was a somewhat bland, uninspiring teacher, but she was in no way incompetent or mean. Another teacher, haughty and out of touch with children, stood with her back to us as she wrote on the board, and she accidentally passed gas, a long, comical snort that couldn’t be mistaken for the scraping chalk. We held it together until class ended and we burst into the hallway, weeping with laughter. A friend of mine even drew caricatures of her with flames engulfing the woman’s buttocks. The following day in class, our teacher, with a deep breath and probably as much dignity as she could muster, thanked us for our restraint the day before.
“I’m taking a medication right now,” she said calmly, “that causes extreme, sometimes uncontrollable flatulence. I appreciate that you did not laugh at my expense.” And that was that. I imagine her now, the night before, cringing and wondering how, or if, to broach the topic. Or perhaps, as a fifty-something year old woman, she was secure enough to endure the image of twenty sniggering teens laughing at her bodily emissions. I still don’t know whether her approach worked. Our class talked about it for awhile, laughed some more, and then it passed, replaced by some other embarrassment or gossip.
There were teachers who were loved, despite their own obvious imperfections. As a rule, the looser, more informal folks got the most respect. Two men in particular stand out: both short, unattractive, liberal guys who let us call them by their first names and favored open and honest discussion in the classroom. It didn’t matter especially that the older one smelled musty, had hair coming out of his ears and a weird inflection to his voice. But some teachers were targets of frustration or sources of ridicule. I never longed for that kind of stage; it seemed impossible to command successfully.
The profession came to me anyway, in a roundabout way. In the late 1990’s with a masters in English, I couldn’t find any work. So with a quick path to Massachusetts teacher certification, I was sure I could make a difference. I’d already taught elementary school for several years, and after cutting my proverbial teeth working with high school students in Boston for a summer term, I figured seventh grade would be manageable. My lessons began in an urban district right outside of Boston, where 12 and 13 years olds were initiated into gangs, classroom fist fights were the norm, and reading levels were far below grade level. I met some lovely kids there who wanted to learn and who were hilarious, smart, and savvy. The discipline problems in the school, however, were certainly obvious. There were so many students labeled “behavior problems” that an entire classroom in the middle school was devoted to them.
The school was not simply diverse; it teemed with different languages. I mispronounced nearly every name on the first day of school: names from Africa, Pakistan, Brazil, Thailand, Vietnam. The Cambodian students were a tight-knit group. They were first generation in this country, their families refugees from atrocities that were not discussed. Their language, Khmer, has such a distinct melody. It is sharp, staccato at times, and it was delivered rapid-fire during class, in the hallways, across the lunchroom. I began to hear fragments of it everywhere I went, and the tones stuck with me for years afterwards. There are no conjugations in Khmer. Some of these teens embraced me and tried to teach me their phrases, cracking up at my pronunciation attempts. They made fun of white people, and when I protested that I was white they insisted that my Jewishness made me separate, an exception. I’m still not sure if this was enlightened thinking on their part or the indication of a more divisive attitude.
Writers made some progress in my English class, even while I stumbled as a novice teacher, grew too attached to the students and befriended them too earnestly. I still made a sincere effort to create effective lessons and offer constructive, actionable feedback to the kids. Learning itself is obviously so hard to quantify, and deciding what is worth teaching is just as hard. As an English teacher, I’m hard pressed to distinguish lessons about writing well from lessons about the human condition. But who am I to offer a tutorial on heady topics, and how much of my own biases make objectivity impossible? When we read novels, poems, short stories, even non-fiction, we touch on every topic imaginable. While I want the students to meet the ever-changing standards (we’re deep in the Common Core now, which places quite an onus on teachers for its rigorous expectations), I want them to meet the challenges of their lives as well, and often this is hard to separate. I try to create a positive community in my classroom, but the larger community tends to pull even harder.
What kind of a fire is teaching really? There’s always the cliche of curiosity and learning and all the “higher order thinking skills” we try to ignite in the brains of our students. Clearly, a relationship exists between good teaching and student performance, and surely some of this has to do with the ability of a teacher to enhance a particular skill and also touch off some self-starting instinct in the learner. But on some days, there is no spark whatsoever. When the desks are lined up just so, and the students file in and out as the clock dictates, the classroom can too easily resemble a factory. And on certain mornings, the dull pairs of eyes don’t even dart among themselves, and there is an eerie assembly line of open laptops, keys dutifully clicking while I drone on. A veteran teacher I know is fond of saying that school is where students go to watch teachers work, all but wielding invisible remote controls that, try as they may, won’t budge from this infernal teaching channel. It’s rare that I can set ablaze the whole class.
On certain days, in certain classes, it feels like my job is as much about urinating on fires as kindling them. The world the students bring to the classroom is as much about their family and community life as it is about what they have been taught in school before they reach my door. Homophobia rears its ugly head, as does classism, and the social dynamic gets in the way of all the lessons about semicolons and comma splices or theme and tone. And it isn’t only the fault of the family unit. Is it possible that it is the very culture of adolescence, the time spent outside of school with peers, that creates the ennui and disenchantment with the process of learning? How can students whose outside lives have no connection to the perceived drudgery and meaningless tasks of the school environment be expected to maintain any level of interest?
Every time I come to some agreement within myself about the best way to manage 80-odd students and their 80-odd needs, I am forced to re-evaluate. I hope my efforts yield the kind of spark we all yearn for, and I begin each new year, each new week, even each day with the same hopeful intentions. For the first few years, approaching a class of middle schoolers was daunting and sometimes soul-crushing. There were many tears and embarrassments. These days, almost twenty years in, I am more seasoned and relaxed but certainly less earnest and idealistic. Some of us like to think of teaching as an art form, a careful dance that communicates and touches our audience. At least, we hope it is dancing; some days we are surely just farting.
After my first two years in that urban school district, I’ve since moved on to small-town Maine, where my students are as docile as the Revere kids were spirited. But there are still always a few each year who remind me of ME. I look for the connection that will keep them safe, the moments of comprehension, the spark that invites them into serious thought and conversation. For some of them, the community of my classroom will never be enough, and they will turn away, back to the accustomed. The characters we read about will be too alien, the grammar too unfamiliar, and their own traumas and hardly simple adolescent angst will take the lead. One humbling lesson after another, becoming a teacher means contending with the incendiary, unpredictable nature of our charges.