Chapter 2C

“Deadbeats and Losers”

“All right, people! Pass ’em in!” I hollered.
There was a general sound of shuffling as the kids passed their essays toward the front of the room, and I walked to the head of each row of desks and began to collect the assignment.
“Mr. Brock?” One of the students called.
“Yes, Jamilla?” I replied.
“I didn’t get completely finished.” She complained. “I only got one paragraph written from my outline.”
“Just turn in what you have.” I told her, extending my hand. “These are only rough drafts after all.”
That seemed to satisfy her, and she handed me her paper with a nod.
“Okay, folks, grab a seat.”
I glanced at the clock as I turned and scanned the room, preparing to make some last-minute announcements.
“Chris.” I scowled. “Laurie’s lap is not your seat.”
He grinned, totally unselfconscious, and slid over into his own chair.
I looked up to take in the class as a whole to see if anyone else was doing what they shouldn’t….
BRRNGG!!
The bell cut me off, and en masse, all my students jumped up to leave.
Damn! I said to myself, I’ve got to work on controlling that better.
I shouted at receding backs about finishing their reading and studying for the quiz, but I knew it was pointless. Oh well, I thought, I’m still learning, too.
I ambled over to my desk as they left and plopped down into my seat, letting out a huge sigh of exhaustion. My planning period at last!
“David?” I heard.
“Hey, Ellen!” I grinned, motioning for her to come on inside. “What’s up?”
“Have you got a second to talk?” She asked.
“For you, always.” I responded.
As my best friend at school, Ellen and I often shared the joys and agonies of being first-year teachers. But today, I hadn’t expected to see her because of something she’d said at lunch about her grading backlog.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, noticing her frown.
“Oh, I’m upset with Mrs. Stillmann again.” She answered. “I swear all that woman can ever do is criticize.”
Uh, oh, I thought.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Some of us were talking a minute ago, and I was trying to ask Mrs. Hilliard for advice on something one of my students had come to talk with me about, when Mrs. Stillmann came up to us in the hallway and went off on her usual tirade about how I shouldn’t feel sorry for any of these kids and that they’re all deadbeats and losers and that they get what they deserve.”
I frowned. Sounded like Clarice to me!
“I just get so angry around her, David,” Ellen snarled.
“Yeah,” I replied knowingly. “What’s sad is that she’s not alone.”
A look of dismay came over Ellen’s face, and she bobbed her head vigorously.
“I know.” She said, intensely. “Sometimes it seems like all the teachers here do is nothing but put the students down all the time. The kids are either ‘lazy’ or ‘stupid’ or ‘apathetic’ or…. It goes on and on. It’s as if no one has anything good to say about any of them.”
She looked downcast.
“You have to admit,” I responded, trying to play “Devil’s Advocate.” “It has to be hard to have taught for as long as most of these people have. After all, people like Mrs. Stillmann have watched thirty and sometimes forty years of teenagers come through their classrooms. A lot has happened to our society in that time. Kids today are not like kids in 1962.”
“But that’s all the more reason to see them with compassion instead of with bitterness.” Ellen contested. “Take what I was sharing with Mrs. Hilliard. One of my students, Kristie, came to talk to me because her boyfriend has told her that he wants to sleep with her and that if she won’t he’ll dump her.”
“Ouch.” I replied.
“Precisely.” She agreed. “Kristie is scared and upset because she’s afraid that if she says no, she won’t be lovable anymore and that if she says yes, she’ll lose her own self-respect because premarital sex goes against her religious beliefs. She is worrying about what kind of person she is going to become, and Mrs. Stillmann’s response is ‘what can you expect with all the sluts we have in this school.’ “
“She actually said that?!” I replied, unable to hide my astonishment.
“Yes!” insisted Ellen.
There was an awkward silence as I absorbed the news.
“David, do you ever wonder whether what we’re teaching is important or not?” She asked abruptly.
I thought about it and answered truthfully.
“Yes.” I said.
She looked at me intensely.
“Whether all the facts and dates and theories we have our students learn make any real difference in their lives?” She added.
“Yes,” I answered. “I look at the lessons I plan in history and chemistry each day and question all the time whether any of it really matters or not.”
“But shouldn’t it?” She demanded. “I watch what we do here in this place, and I see the needs of these children, and I can’t help but ask myself if the two truly having anything to do with one another.”
She looked into the distance.
“The other day, I was working with Mrs. Hilliard after school.” She continued. “And we were planning our unit on the post-Civil War era. She was getting all excited and running around the room collecting references about the immigrant movements of the 1880s and the Nativists. And of course, I was jotting down all the information she said I should be including in my lessons. But as I did so, I found myself growing increasingly frustrated. The longer we worked together, the more it took for me not to break down and start a fight with her.”
“Why?” I asked, puzzled.
“Because right before we were supposed to meet that day, a student came up to me to talk about a problem she has with her mother.” Ellen replied. “Her mom emotionally abuses her – calls her a whore, tells her she’s worthless – and this girl desperately wants help. But when I asked, Mrs. Hilliard said that since it wasn’t physical or sexual abuse, there was nothing we could legally do about it, and she simply started our meeting!”
Ellen clenched her hands and shook her head.
“How could she do that?” She implored. “Someone needed help, David, and she was more interested in getting the lesson plans together! These kids are walking around with wounded souls, and all any of the teachers seem to care about is whether they know when the Panama Canal was built or who was the twentieth president of the United States.”
She scowled and glared at the same time.
“Something is not right about that.” She asserted.
“Look, Ellen,” I sighed. “I wake up every morning with the exact same difficulties you do. I look at the ‘officially approved’ lesson plan; I walk into the classroom where the naked woundedness of my students’ lives confronts me; and I go home cursing because I cannot heal them with the knowledge of how to balance a chemical equation.”
“So why do it, then?” She demanded.
“Because if you weren’t here the other day,” I told her. “Where would that student of yours have gone? What meaning would she have found then?”

Where Deep Gladness Meets Deep Need

“Why teach?” is not an insignificant question.  Indeed, it is probably the single most important question any educator must answer for themselves, and it probably has as many answers as there are individuals in the profession. But what makes this question so significant to the current discussion is that it exposes the single greatest challenge an authentically engaged teacher must confront: despair.  If being a highly effective teacher requires generating appropriately intimate rapport, then good teaching demands everything a person can offer, and unless you find a motive for doing it that comes from the deepest, innermost reaches of your soul–“where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet”¹¹–then you will not only fail to inhabit your niche in the classroom; you will become like an invasive species–a destroyer of worlds.  For despair leads to complacency, complacency leads to imbalance, and imbalance leads to collapse (if I may be forgiven for paraphrasing Yoda), and when we have fallen off from despair into either excessive intimacy or outright disengagement, we can do only one thing: harm.

What “deep gladness,” though, could possibly be powerful enough to meet the demands and difficulties of teaching? Again, it is perhaps the single hardest question anyone in education must address, and its answers can range from a burning desire to sustain a truly democratic society and achieve social justice to the need to “[face] the lingering pain of [our] own old wounds, many of them inflicted at school.”¹² As for myself:

I teach because I ultimately want a better world than one we have.  I teach because I want our children to become human beings who are worthy, not just worthwhile.  I teach because if I can equip others to grasp the difference between “knowing something” and “making meaning out if it,” then I have hope that we may all someday rise above our compromises and recreate ourselves in the noble image the Divine intended.  I teach because fundamentally I love.  I love my students, and the only gift I have to offer to them is my fragile efforts to draw out from within their minds the faculty and wisdom to conceive the very meanings and visions that will surpass my own.¹³

That is my “deep gladness,” and it has kept me striving toward authentic engagement in the classroom and confronting the challenges of being a co-learner and creating the necessary rapport with my students for the past 30 years.  Each day, I have fought off the despair because I know that if I do not, the world won’t become a better place, and each day, I know there are hundreds of thousands of teachers everywhere in the world fighting off their despair with whatever “deep gladness” they have found for the world’s endless “hunger.”  It is never an easy fight for any of us who live in the classroom; nothing about teaching ever is.  But as the character of Jimmy Dugan says in the film, A League of Their Own: “It’s supposed to be hard.  If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it.  The hard is what makes it great.”¹⁴