Getting to know you

One of the many tough-urban-school tropes that my abbreviated experience in the NOLA education system did not abide by was class size. You think poor schools and you think classrooms crammed with 30 or 40 students, and this is indeed the experience of many teachers in the city. But my largest block was twenty kids, and the smallest of my three classes had as few as fourteen students on days when all of the perennially truant or frequently suspended children would be absent at once.

(Right now, writing from the perspective of April 2011, I sort of wish I had had a horribly overcrowded classroom. Of course, this would have made my day to day life even more miserable while I was teaching, but here and now, four months distant from my job and never to return, I would like to have as many tough-urban-school tropes as possible to my name so that when recounting my experiences I could appear (a) grizzled and world-weary, and (b) justified in no longer working as a teacher. Oh yeah, I had eighty, ninety, a hundred kids in a classroom. Sometimes they had to sit on each other’s shoulders or in the file cabinet drawers, and for the sake of space I’d just cram myself into the ductwork and teach with my head and torso jutting out from a heating vent.)

The flip side of having only three classes each day was that each one was 120 minutes long. This was a problem. Fourteen year olds don’t like to think about math for two hours at a time, believe it or not. And frankly, two hours is a long time for anybody to do anything. The American film industry’s entire $11 billion dollar raison d’être is to keep and capture people’s attention by any means necessary, and I’d say even Hollywood finds it difficult to maintain an average audience’s interest for more than two consecutive hours. To make matters worse, in my classroom I wasn't allowed to use helicopter crashes or full frontal nudity at all...although I did have some pretty fancy prealgebra tricks with the ol’ base ten blocks, if I do say so myself.

Sometimes when I’d describe my two-hour-block woes to math teachers at other schools, they’d stare off into the distance and say, “two hours…” and then fantasize about all extra classwork they would do with such a generous expanse of time. Perhaps this is the difference between a good teacher and a bad teacher. A good teacher looks at a two hour block schedule and sees a golden opportunity to begin making up for all the educational time these kids have lost during their years in the disastrous New Orleans school system. A bad teacher looks at a two hour block schedule and wants to throw up. To a bad teacher, it feels like an opportunity in about the same way that being trapped beneath the rubble of a collapsed building would be an opportunity to get a lot of reading done. (That may make you think, “if that’s the case, why would you want to keep teaching at all?” Well, perhaps you are on to something there. )

But no matter how defective your teaching might be (more on that later), there is certainly a side effect to spending ten hours every week shut in a room with the same 14 to 20 people: you get to know them. You get attached. This is for real. Which is why four months later, as miserable as the whole goddamn experience was, as much like it felt like I was burning alive on a near daily basis, as much as I wanted to get away from the job with all my heart, as much as I consistently failed as a teacher, as much animosity flared between me and some of those diabolical little motherfuckers, I truly honestly miss all of my students so much.

I really do.