Durham, NC
Back to School
It is ridiculous, disorganized lunacy posing as education. It is 141 screaming children whom we attempt to teach in between food fights, hormonal effusions, and group activities that bewilder staff and students alike. It is a place in the woods that could easily be converted into a Branch Davidian-style compound like the one in Waco, Texas where David Koresh tried to take over the world. Yet we sit peacefully in circles, on the floor, and we reflect upon our feelings or sing silly songs or remake the rules of our very own, self-contained universe.
There is mold on the walls and in the carpet; there is a history teacher who knows nothing about history; there is a man who has taught in the same classroom since the mid-1970s and looks exactly the same now as he did then, all the way down to his short-sleeved plaid shirts. The spunkiest, most radiant teacher -- the one with the nose ring and the spiky short hair -- is the one whose husband, also a teacher at the school, died excruciatingly of a brain tumor just a couple of years ago. Every day begins and ends in total silence that merely amplifies the six hours of chaos it brackets. And there are moments of courage, ease, and sanity so lucid, so complete, as to render out the outrageous hours as swiftly and righteously as God drowned the heathen.
I am talking about the school where I now teach, and which I attended from 1979-1989. Last spring they hired me to teach US History -- I'm the one who knows nothing about his own professed subject -- and now I show up there every weekday. Some days I have the bright face of a fifth-grader, others I am haggard and lost. I may arrive at school champing at the bit to get going with class and all the cool things I have planned for today; or I may show up trembling that I have absolutely no idea what to do, nor how -- and it's only a matter of time until the staff, the parents, and especially the students unmask my fraudulence.
All of this in the first three weeks.
sobsey.com is about to take a sharp detour into that variety of travel so many of us perform daily without a thought: going to work, coming home, and what happens between. If you're still craving exotic tales of Lijsa and Laos, tours of ancient Hopi villages and a pilgrimage through the third world of a broken heart, you may be disappointed. These are the Teaching Journals, and it will come as neither a human surprise nor a literary innovation when I say that I, of course, am the student.
But have faith -- as if there is anyone whose faith needs me to reassure it (friend, you're in big trouble) -- have faith that I've got some Amsterdam and Barcelona stuff brewing. Farther flung tales await.
