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Losing My
Faculties: A Teacher’s Story by Brendan Halpin Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Instructive You don’t need to be teacher to enjoy
Brian Halpin’s new book, Losing My
Faculties: A Teacher’s Story. Halpin presents the workplace in universal
terms: relations with bosses, co-workers and customers (in his case, students
and parents.) At times, Halpin’s writing will take your breath away. He finds
a precise and clear way to present a situation that will seem familiar to any
worker, whether it’s involving a difficult boss, an unmotivated co-worker, or
the lack of cohesion on a work team. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 28 (pp. 96-101): Even though things are going well in most
respects, I am not happy here. At the end of my fourth year both Kurt and
Jesse leave Northton High. They both live far away and so have good reasons
to leave, but the bottom line is that this is just not a place where they can
see themselves staying. I
feel the same way. In fact, I've always felt the same way, which is why I
always send out resumes in the spring. In fact, while I've gotten better and
better at working with the kids, and I even handled the two pain-in-the-ass
parents okay, the other teachers here are driving me nuts. I have started to
just really hate them. It gets to the point where I write a thinly veiled
attack on them that I actually read to one of my writing-workshop classes. I
call two of my colleagues "weasel boy" and "the eggman"
in this masterpiece. So
it is October of my fifth year at Northton High. I have two very high-energy
classes of sophomores who talk about getting drunk all the time, but I don't
really feel like its anything I can't handle. I have what may be the best
writing-workshop class ever. And
yet . . . I
can't sleep. Every night I lie down, tired to the bone, and I can't fall
asleep. It's like I have forgotten how to fall asleep. I lie awake for hours.
Sometimes I get up and watch TV. Once I see the Ben Folds Five on Conan
O'Brien and there are only three of them, and they rock, and, like the old
men when I was a kid who thought Molly Hatchet sure had a deep voice for a
girl, I thought they were a five-piece piano pop band, and here they are
rocking with guitars on late-night TV. I question whether there is even a guy
named Ben Folds in the band. Probably not. Am I dreaming this? If
only. I won't dream anything until I finally fall asleep. Usually this is
somewhere between two and four in the morning. I get up at quarter to six. I
go to the doctor. He gives me a prescription for Ambien. I take one and sleep
for six hours in a row, though I wake up feeling not very refreshed. I am too
familiar with both Valley of the Dolls and the
life of Elvis Presley to be really comfortable taking a pill to fall asleep.
I take it one other time, then flush the rest of the bottle down the toilet. I
go to a therapist. We have some nice talks. He tells me I need to get a book
on "sleep hygiene." I don't. I
go to a homeopathic doctor. He gives me a dose of sulphur, or rather of
lactose powder, which once touched something that touched something that
touched a molecule of sulphur. Friday
nights I sleep fine. Saturday nights I sleep fine. Sundays I can't sleep, and
won't sleep again until Friday. The same thing happens every weekend. It
doesn't take a genius to figure out that this has something to do with work.
So what is it? Well, fortunately, I have a lot of time to think about it.
Here is what I come up with. I
have done okay at Northton. Actually I have done better than okay. I have
gone from a second-year teacher who knew nothing to a sixth-year teacher who
is, mostly, very good at his job. My classes used to be easy—now I do actually bust tads' butts
sometimes. I created a writing elective. I love my students and have been
really lucky to build some nice relationships with a lot of them. And
yet Northton is a totally white suburb of Boston. I am spending two hours a
day to get there. I now have a nine-month-old daughter and time is getting
more precious. I feel strangely disconnected, like I am disintegrating. I'm
hopping between two cultures. At home, I live in this diverse neighborhood
(though we liberal white folks who like to crow about this never talk about
how, for the most part, it is carefully segregated street by street. So when
we say we really value the diversity, we mean we see people browner than us
at the supermarket, but very few of us live on the same street or in the same
building as them). I am part of the city, I want to make the city a better
place, and yet I am using the (only skills I have to do that twenty-six miles
away. I meant it when I said I belonged in the city, but I couldn't get a job
there, and I got one here, and working in the city was the reason I got into
this, and after five years, I feel like my dream is slipping out of my reach. My
students come from a culture that is getting more and more foreign to me.
Yes, we are all white, and yes, economically I have a lot in common with many
of them. But I have never lived this kind of life, never lived in the world
of basement rec rooms and hanging at the mall, and every day when I drive
through the long rows of identical ranch houses to get to work, I think to
myself, what the hell am I doing here? Some of my students laugh openly when
I mention the neighborhood I live in. Many more ask me if I've ever been shot
at. They are not joking. In some fundamental way, I just don't fit in, yet it
looks like I am stuck here. Of
course, many of my students feel sort of the same way, which is why I bond
especially to the kids who don't quite fit in the rigid social atmosphere
here, the kids who, like me, think it's creepy that cheerleaders are assigned
a football player and have to bake cookies for him and decorate his locker
before every game. And,
as I said, my colleagues are driving me insane. Some
are incompetent. Besides the guy who requested the level-three classes so
nobody would care if he wasn't working, there is a teacher who calls everyone
"sweetheart," and nobody gets below a C in her class. (Her
relentless friendliness also hides a passion for the status quo and a fear
and loathing of anyone different. Caroline and I develop this personal litmus
test where we figure that the few kids who see through this lady are really
something special.) Captain Jack only periodically showed up drunk and then
stopped drinking when he got cancer, so he's still there and sober and in
remission, though he is still not really doing much teaching. Some
are racist. Last year, a teacher who should have packed it in years ago, a
walking cloud of bitterness, was finally given the gate for saying to the one
Hispanic kid in his class, after the kid wasn't paying attention when he
asked a question, "Why don't you get welfare to buy you a hearing
aid?" Caroline was actually instrumental in getting the kid to report
this, and as a result she is a total pariah with most of the faculty now.
She's also looking for another job. In my second year, the lady who runs the
student community-service club has kids pretend to be dead on some
drunken-driving-awareness day. As the day goes by, more and more kids
"die" from drunk driving. They signify that they are dead by painting
their faces black and not speaking. I complain about the incredibly racist
symbolism, talk about Ralph Ellison and black invisibility, and she listens
politely. Dead kids continue to wear blackface annually thereafter. Many
more are just old, tired, and bitter. They complain about everything. All the
time. They don't show any passion for their work, and I wonder if they ever
did. The school lets out at one forty-five. It's an absolute ghost town by
two, though our contract requires us to stay until two-thirty. The people who
are quickest to file a grievance when the administration doesn't adhere to
the contract, including our union rep, are impossible to find by two. Some
young people have been hired, but by the end of this year everyone under
forty who was there or was; hired since I was will have left. Why not? Why
stay here? These are not people who are iin teaching because they love
it—they are in teaching, by and large, because they wanted a dependable
civil-service job, or they wanted to be able to spend their entire summer on
the Cape, or they wanted to coach hockey. Teaching is an inconvenience. And
you can't ever talk about it. They are all so insecure that they view any
talk about teaching as an attack. (Though from the little I know about the history
of this place, sometimes it really is an attack, so maybe they're not
as paranoid as I think.) So
the people I work with feel more like the people I work against. When I see
the students for between forty-five and ninety minutes, and I try to get them
to use their minds and open up, they are coming from hours of lackluster
classes in which they are either beaten down, bored to death, or insulted
with easy work. And
the worst part—and this is the part, I think, that is keeping me from
sleeping—is that I am turning into one of them. On my worst days—days like
tomorrow, for example, when I will be barely functional due to lack of
sleep—1 am doing a better job for these fads than most of the people I work
with. So why try to be excellent, when even good enough is better than most?
I am starting to mail it in. In another year, or two, or five, I will be
mailing it in every day. And
I will be bitter because I am stuck in a job I no longer love. I will be
bitter because I hate myself and the people I work for and with. The
burnouts' victory over me will be complete. I will have become them. Over
the course of several sleepless nights, I come to a conclusion. I have to
stop working here. I would rather not teach than continue to teach here,
because I will soon be the kind of teacher that gives teaching a bad name.
This must be how people feel when they decide to end a problematic
relationship (I was always on the receiving end, so I am only speculating
here, analogy-wise). It breaks my heart, and I don't use that loosely, I mean
it really makes me sad in the way that saying good-bye to someone you love
makes you sad, to think that I might not be teaching. But if teaching means
staying here, I can't do it. I'm still in love, but this relationship just
isn't working. Come January, I decide, I will send in my letter of
resignation. This is well before the teaching job hunt gets under way. So I
will be committed. I won't let myself get trapped by the security, the
insurance, the pension, and I will not tell Northton High that we can still
be friends, though I will say it's not you, its me. You’ll finish reading Losing My
Faculties and reflect on what makes you happy in some jobs and miserable
in others. He puts words and tells stories about feeling each of us may have
at work. Steve Hopkins, October 28, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the November 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Losing
My Faculties.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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