Facilities

My school building was small and old. When I first saw it during my job interview, I was struck by how pretty it seemed in the baking summer humidity – inside and out, the walls were a faded lemon chiffon yellow and the trim a flaking cornflower blue. It lacked central AC and an intercom system and it leaked badly, but it was so very pretty. In the heat especially, its aged architecture struck me as exotic, like some remote convent or mission in a dusty North African locale. This school is located in a part of town a bit removed from the dense bulge of central New Orleans The area is called Gentilly, a slightly-suburban feeling region where the houses actually have yards; it's a mix of white and black, middle class and working class. The neighborhood was severely devastated by Katrina. Although I interviewed at nine or ten schools around the city (and was rejected by most, like many new teachers), I wanted to work at this school above any of the others just because of the feeling it gave me. I was thrilled when I got the job.

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I remember the first day that all the teachers were required to be in attendance to ready their classrooms for the coming year. I’d been to the school before, but this date marked the true beginning of the year. The halls were filled with dozens of teachers lugging box after box of various supplies in from the August heat, all wearing that slight sense of awkwardness that comes with repeatedly passing others in the hallway on a semi-shared task – everyone wears stretched smiles at first, then fixes their gazes straight ahead on subsequent encounters – and I recall in particular entering the front doors that morning with a box of paper towels and brightly colored various decorations. A first grade teacher was walking directly ahead of me, a small, quiet, cute old woman with khaki skin who I later learned had lost her husband shortly after Katrina. (The stress and shock of it all, she said.) She wore a long, black braid that added a slight tomboy girlishness to her grandmotherly exterior.

“Well, hello again, building!” she said upon walking in the door, endearing herself to me forever.

“Well, hello yourself!” I said in a deep growl, similar surely to that of a building. She halfway turned around and gave me a puzzled look.

“Ha, ha, ha!” I said, my broad smile letting her know what a fun personality I had. She looked at me like I was out of my mind and kept walking, maybe a little more rapidly. We never really became friends.

*****

I also remember the giddiness of seeing my classroom for the first time. My room was on the second floor of the building and almost at the end of the hall. It was painted in that same cornflower blue, which seemed less appealing closer up: cracked and peeling and somehow sickly. There were two ceiling fans, but only one worked, and the window unit was slowly dying and spat water everywhere. But mostly I just noticed the spaciousness of the classroom. I’d been expecting tiny, and it was vast – one of the largest rooms in the school, in fact.

I couldn’t believe I was the recipient of such a large space to call my own and to turn into a paradise of inspiration and learning (not of confusion and rage). The bulletin boards were commodious and were soon to be displays of creative and adorable and intellectually-rigorous student assignments (not wall pads to bounce against when wrestling or fistfighting). The whiteboards would provide ample space for good natured, achievement-inspiring competition between teams of young scholars (not for writing in large letters DICK (next to a drawing of a dick)). The ceilings were high, all the better for hanging student-created cardboard models of polyhedra (rather than colorful blobs of goo squeezed from the dissembled interiors of some dumbass “stress ball” toy distributed to half the children in class by the well-meaning inspirational speaker who addressed the boys in eighth grade every Wednesday, blobs which would cling perfectly to ceiling tile and ever so slowly drip down in long, phlegmy stalactites that would preoccupy every student in the class with a lively discussion of when said formation would fall).

And here my troubles began.