In Over My Head: Mrs. Robinson

                “Ms. Landon would be so shocked if she came back and saw this class.”

                The bland, observational tone used for this statement did nothing to prevent my impulse to burst into tears.  I had to look up to reply to the kid who felt it so necessary that I had this information. 

                “Go back to your group, Chris.”

                He shrugged.  The “group” consisted of four sophomores who were supposed to be analyzing the murder of Curley’s wife in Of Mice and Men, but who were instead openly texting and listlessly kicking one another under the desks.

                The bell rang and I tried to rally, but as they say, out of the mouths of babes and idiots comes the truth.  It had only been three weeks since Ms. Landon had gone on maternity leave, and I felt swallowed whole by the great apathy and derision of the American teenager. 

                My 8^th hour class was a little better.   The fact that they were a little rougher around the edges meant that they had a little less of that impenetrable hard gloss.  There were a few boys who got into yelling matches and scared me to death, but they also perked up noticeably when we started discussing the inevitability of death, and contributed to some actual discussions. 

                Interestingly, they were the group I’d been specifically warned about.  Ms. Landon had run through a roster with me before she left, and several teachers who passed by us in the lounge nodded knowingly. 

                “Dan Nowen,” she pronounced, “is a problem.”

                She had reported him to be drug tested multiple times, and each time was met with negative results.   He talked back and generally caused a ruckus.  At the time, I wasn’t all that worried.  The troubled kids were sometimes the easiest for me to wrangle.  Brooding and angry can sometimes be softened by kindness; jaded and entitled not so much.

                Dan Nowen was lanky and slouchy, with a cartoony, half-asleep smile.  He met my eyes squarely as he slid into his seat. 

                He lingered as he left the class on my first day.  “So you’re going to be here til the end of the year?”  His body angled into the classroom as if he was doing me a favor.

                I smiled back at him. “Yep.”

                His eyes slid from my eyes down to my chest and stayed there.  “Sweet.”  And then was out the door.

                I stood there for a few minutes.  The noise of the kids swarming the halls swelled and then ebbed away.  I should have said something.   And then the bell rang.

               

                The next unit I began asked the kids to take a scene from the book and pull out themes, motifs, characters, motivations, and other literary devices.  Then, they had to find a song they liked that connected in some way.  By assigning a few pages to each kid, we created a literary soundtrack. 

                I introduced the project to an unexpected burst of enthusiasm from the eighth hour class. 

                “This is actually pretty good,” pronounced one kid without irony. 

                “Well, I thought so,” I smiled.  “When I’ve done it before, it’s been lots of fun.”

                The long-limbed blonde girl who perpetually texted actually smiled back at me.  “This is way cooler than anything Ms. Landon ever did.”  

                I beamed inwardly.

                Dan raised his head from his desk and lazily murmured, “Bet you do a lot of things better than Ms. Landon.”  And then I thought he winked, but I wasn’t sure.

                The class erupted in tittering. 

                “Dan!” I stammered.

                “What?” he feigned innocence.  “What’s wrong?”

                “You can’t say things like that.”

                “I just said you do a lot of things better.  Like better assignments, better grading, better pencils, you know. ” His crooked smile widened.

                The class laughed louder.  I mentally clawed the air. 

                “Ok, well, you guys know that I want to treat you like adults.  Dan, you need to act like an adult.”

                He shrugged.  “I still don’t see what was so bad,” and widened his eyes in incredulity.  The class laughed even louder and I strained to raise my voice above them. 

                I resolved, then, to keep a tighter rein on my classes.  The effect was generally little to no change. I asked a few teachers what they did to keep order.

Mr. Benton pulled out his ham and cheese sandwich and unwrapped it noisily.  “You just gotta give ‘em the look,” he chewed seriously, looking over his little round glasses at me. 

Mrs. Walsh was a famous “cell phone Nazi” who could catch kids texting when no one else could; even the kids acknowledged it.   “Don’t ever be their friend,” she wagged her finger earnestly.  “If they hate you, you’re doing a good job.”

                I nodded vigorously.

                Next Wednesday, the class began presenting their song projects.  Things went well for the first half of the period, until Nicole Bromlin stopped in the middle of hers, distracted by something.  All eyes followed her to Dan, who was slowly making more and more of an exaggerated scene.

                His fingers  intertwined with each other, and his eyes were fixed on me with a smirk.  The other kids started laughing.

                I slammed the book down on my desk.  “Dan, what are you doing?”

                He paused for dramatic effect.

“Undressing you.”  His eyes were locked with mine.

There wasn’t any noise. 

I felt like you do when you’re on the toilet and you thought you locked the door but you didn’t and then the door bangs open and it’s someone you work with and sit next to and talk to about the weather, and there you are with your shirt bunched above your waist and your faded underwear around your ankles.  And by the time you know it’s happening, it’s already happened.

I clenched the back of my desk chair and physically shook myself.

                “I’m writing you up.”

                The bell rang.

I watched the other teachers come in and out of the English office in a sort of numbness.  I looked down at the pink write-up slip below my pen.  Little blanks for “Offense” and subsequent ones for “1^st, 2^nd, or 3^rd.”  How would I describe it?  “Used hands to make a rude gesture…” but his hands weren’t the part that was rude.   “Said out loud that he was undressing me.”  The instant I wrote it I pictured handing it to one of the deans.  I felt my face burning and crumpled the little slip of paper.            I tried to picture one of the other teachers writing a similar note and shuddered.  Pictured some kid making comments that graphic to one of the staid, balding men or the stocky, panty-hosed women…and then looked down at my own body ---  It was really my fault, after all. 

Never would have happened if I had managed properly in the first place.  And really, it wasn’t that big of a deal.  Maybe I’d just let this time go, and change my whole approach, change it so no kid would ever say anything like that to me.

               

                I read the write-ups of several of the songs that kids had presented that day.  I hadn’t paid much attention to Nicole Bromlin’s, in light of the interruption, and I pulled hers to the top of the pile.  She had one of the most climactic scenes in the story, when Lennie accidentally kills Curley’s wife.  It’s a heartbreaking scene, where we see Lennie unwittingly begin the chain of events that will lead to his own death, and it’s initiated by the unnamed Curley’s wife flirting with the slow-witted Lennie.  The entire class had a similar reaction to the self-absorbed woman who crushes the dreams of the main characters – she got what was coming to her.  But Nicole had a different view.

                “It’s never ok to kill,” wrote Nicole with an endearing seriousness, “and it doesn’t matter what the cause was.  Everyone blames Curley’s wife and thinks she got what she deserved, but it’s not her fault she’s a woman, and you can’t blame her for having soft hair that Lennie wanted to touch.  She has lots of faults, but Lennie would have just ended up killing someone else if not her.  The question is why he’s left alone if he really can’t tell when he’s going to kill something.  He’s already murdered several animals.  Someone should have been more careful.  He shouldn’t be on the loose if he’s that stupid.”

                I put down the paper, and pulled another pink write-up slip out of my bag.  “Made inappropriate comments regarding my body,” I wrote, and slid it into the dean’s mailbox.

                I received a note back from the pink write-up slip, informing me that Dan had received several days of lunch detention.   When he didn’t show up for class that Monday, I figured maybe he was mad and ditched my class.  When he wasn’t in class for two more days, I asked around, and found out that he was, in fact, suspended for five school days. 

                He had stolen a teacher’s credit card.  From there, he had taken it, not to buy large electronics to sell on Ebay, but to buy clothes and fast food at the mall just a few miles from the school.  He had spent $3000 on it in one day.  When asked to sign the credit card slips, he had neatly penned, “Mrs. Sander’s son.” 

                He really was that stupid.

In Over My Head: Tales from an Ex-Teacher

Thus begins a new series based on my experiences as a high school and middle school teacher.  As we move through these stories, it may seem that I am either 50 years old, or have worked at a ridiculous number of schools.  The latter is true.  

In Over My Head: Self-Destructing

My first real experience in a high school was student teaching.  My favorite class to teach was, by far, the senior level creative writing elective.  At this mammoth high school, there were awesome electives aplenty, and both serious writers and lazy slackers anxious to avoid another “real” class signed up in droves.

   
I felt that Bea was the most likely to actually make a career of writing.  She was habitually late, and wore her red hair short and disheveled above perfect crimson lipstick.  She was a hipster before that title existed.  When you looked at her, you mentally inserted one of those long cigarette holders in her hand, and her poetry was dark and turbulent and smelled faintly of sex.  When we shared work, the other kids listened spellbound to her every word.

        
On the one occasion she arrived early to class, she fixed her black-outlined eyes on me curiously.  I shuffled my papers behind the big desk that I was pretending I was ready to fill. 

“How old are you?”  She asked.

I hesitated a minute.  Every question these kids asked me was fraught with potential issues.  My age was high on the list – at a scant 4 years older than most of them, I lost most of my credibility when they realized it.  But Bea was different.

“22,” I replied.

               
Her expression changed just slightly.  “Wow.  My boyfriend is 21.  He doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.  Here you are; you have a career and everything.  You really have your life together.”

     
I laughed, just because I didn’t know what else to say.  “Well, thanks.”

 
“You’re welcome,” she replied, put her head down on the desk and closed her eyes.

               
Every week, the kids turned in journals of free writing they’d done for homework that week.  It just had to be completed; a minimum number of pages on whatever they wanted, but I gave them tons of suggestions so they’d have something to fall back on.

Bea handed hers to me as she left class that Friday.  She hesitated.  “I’m not sure if I want you to read all these.  There’s some that are kind of personal.”

The fact that she not only chose to write something “personal” in her school assigned journal, and the fact that she made this explicit to me, seemed a strange coincidence.

 
“Well, Bea,” I replied, “I have to collect your journal and read it to give you a grade.  You can keep it and turn it in to me on Monday if you want, but it’ll be late.”

Bea shrugged her shoulders.  “Whatever; you can have it.”

My heart raced a little.  What was to be revealed in these pages?  Bea was a smoldering stereotype of the tortured high school genius, so there had to be something very wrong with her.  Was she bringing me into her confidence?  I stood at the entrance to my first great Teacher Test, and I felt sure that I was up to the challenge of saving Bea from herself, Freedom Writers style. 

I didn’t have to wait long.  One particularly turbid poem swirled in a series of self-destruction metaphors, climaxing in a vivid description of vomiting, purging, losing yourself.  I read it three times.  Bulimia.  Boom.

It didn’t seem like Bea; she wore a casual sexiness like a silk scarf, and seemed more than
confident with the hips that swayed under her thrift store chic skirts.  But there was the vomit, literally and figuratively, puddled on the page.

I writhed for several days, trying to figure out how to navigate this.  I was obligated to report an abuse or neglect, but the rules were slightly more fuzzy about self-abuse. But I didn’t want to damage the trust that Bea had in me by giving her away.  I decided I’d talk with her first.  Maybe this would be the beginning of a new chapter – I’d guide her to health and wholeness.

I asked her to stay after class and wrote her a pass to get her next class late.  I pulled her into the office and sat her down, warmly patting her shoulder as I did so.

“Well, Bea,” I began with false brightness.  “I read your journal."

“Shit.”  Her shoulders slumped a little.  “But I feel like it’s creative, so I shouldn’t get in trouble for that.”

“No, it’s not the time for getting in trouble.  But you need help, Bea.”  I hoped my expression registered my care and concern.

She looked puzzled.  “I don’t think it’s that bad.  I mean, it’s pretty normal for most teenagers.  I’m ok.  Maybe you read it wrong.”

I sighed and put my hand on her arm.  “Bea, it’s never ok.  And it’s not normal.”

I opened the journal and turned sanctimoniously to the offending poem.  “I don’t know how I could read this wrong.  I mean, it’s about throwing up.  Eating disorders are never ok.”

Bea looked at the page and snorted.  “Bulimic?? You think I’m bulimic?”  She started laughing, without sarcasm or irony.  “I got drunk at a party and threw up.  I didn't know if that was ok to say, but I didn't mention alcohol.”

“Oh.” I visibly deflated. "Do you drink a lot?"

               
“I mean I have wine with my parents sometimes, but I hardly ever get drunk; it's gross.  My boyfriend made me go to this party and it was all his douchebag friends.  It was a really bad night, which is why I wrote about it, but the throwing up was just like a symptom of everything.  That's what the whole image is about.”

“Oh.”

She started laughing again.  “Bulimic.  That’s a first.”  She looked back at the page.  “Did you actually read the whole thing?”

“Yeah, yeah I did."

"I may have some personal shit to deal with, but my body is not an issue.  Is it ok if I go to my next class now?"

I hesitated.  "Yes, you can go."

She gathered her bag and books and headed to the door.  She threw a last glance over her shoulder at me, standing awkwardly a few feet behind her. "Well, have a good day, Bea.  Don't drink and drive," I finished lamely.  "Or, I guess, make sure you don't tell me about it."

She tilted her head sympathetically.  “Hey, don’t worry.  You’re a good student teacher, Ms. P.”

               

Long long ago there was a man named Jonah...

My favorite things about this: God, of course, has a slight British accent

The sister looks like she wants to die. It's gotta be rough when your 6 year old sister singlehandedly re-animates a book of the Bible and you have to use all your notecards for the persuasive speech on how lunch should be 15 minutes longer. At least her hair has a cheerful bow. But her little sister's is bigger. Can't win.

The story of Jonah from Corinth Baptist Church on Vimeo.

Bonus Disc: Extras and Special Features

When I decided I’d like to start writing again, I decided to consult the expertise of someone who actually makes a living writing.  Katie Brandt, http://katiescarlettbrandt.blogspot.com/, @katiehappens. 

Below, see some excerpts from my Gchat “How to Be a Writer” lessons.  Watch and learn.

She always sets out an action plan for me:

katie: ok so

  first you need to set up a twitter account

me: ughhhhh

I seek her advice, but am careful not to become a burden:

me: so it is hard to write more things

  do you have any helpful critiques for me?

katie: ok i'll do a read-through now and then write back to you tomorrow, k?

me: AHHH can't you just look at it fast right now?

did you like that last one?

katie: um right now i have to read my friend's masters thesis

  so cannot comment in depth

  but yes, i liked it

me: high praise

She is full of motivational words:

katie: you need to tweet more

  make yourself do 1/day at least

me: ughhh

katie: oh come on

  just jump in

  you have to completely

  no half assing

After the dreamy experience of not writing anything for at least six years, then banging out something pretty sweet in like 2 hours, and having it published on the internet  for (potentially) thousands of viewers, I kind of thought I could just sort of do this bitch, no prob.  

Turns out, the internet is a scary place – a place where fame is gained through dogged clicking and retweeting and repinning and commenting on your internet friends and acquaintances in a seemingly endless loop.  Everyone is welcome, sure, but nobody gets anywhere without clawing their way through Twitter feeds and checking Jezebel every hour.      

It’s a strange juxtaposition.  Writing is inherently an introverted pursuit, where you’re advised to silence all the inner critics and just be yourself.  Now, in the age where anyone can put stuff up to be viewed, you have to fight for attention if you want to be seen.  Writing requires a gregarious internet personality, a witty and jovial icon who whirls through the social media outlets laughing and joking and patting people on the back.  It’s pretty stressful.  I get it why they pay people to do this full time.  

Pretty sure I am not going to be able to quit my day job.  Ever.  For now, I will be an awkward little wall flower smiling and looking dumb and sometimes trying to dance around without anyone really noticing. 

It Happened To Me: I'm Publishing My Own Stuff

So, I wrote another piece similar to the first one, and I submitted it to that site.  Nothing yet.  But it's just sitting all written, so here it is.  This is the perk of living in an era where you can promote yourself without shame, any hour of the day.

It Happened to Me: I Married My Brother’s Best Friend

Is it lame to kiss someone who has personally witnessed your unfortunate adolescent bangs, your college chub, and all the losers you’ve ever crushed on?  Or is it in actuality the best idea you’ve ever had?

In high school, I had the requisite self-esteem issues, and rather than go slutty, I tried to make myself indispensable to boys through other means.  Throughout those years, I had a small caseload of moody, brooding idiots that I coaxed through their woefully average teenage sorrows, and who were not really interested in me as anything but a free therapist.

I hadn’t a perfectly clear idea of who I’d end up with, but I figured that because of my deep inner beauty and soulful eyes that I’d probably sacrifice myself on the altar of a Boy Who Had Problems.  For the better part of three years, I was busy managing the mood swings of a Cobain-ish dude who often vaguely threatened suicide and told me his actual girlfriend could never understand him like I did.  How can you pass that up?  Love was deep, complicated, and one-sided… I was Joey Potter and soon, any day now, Dawson would realize I had been there all along.  Because you’re not in love unless you’re miserable, naturally; and if you’re really in love, you’re also hopelessly ill-suited to one another.

Meanwhile, in another part my neighborhood, Jeff and my brother met the summer before 8^th grade.  I was two years older, and didn’t really pay attention.

But soon, he became, as they say, a fixture in our house.  I remember telling my mom how much I liked when he came over; “Jeff is the nicest of the friends.”  He smiled all the time, and asked me questions about school, and he had an easy confidence that often resulted in an informal shoulder squeeze or a not-awkward side hug.  He also smelled really good, like clean t-shirts and sporty deodorant.

As the oldest girl in a tiny house, I had my own room, but only for a fraction of the time – it was often used by the other kids for various purposes, and I often had to move my piles of granny panties and beige Target bras so that my brother and Jeff could set up their amps and play guitar with the door closed.     

Jeff was over when I came home with my first speeding ticket and launched into a hailstorm of tears and curses.  I laughed long and hard at the muscle shirt he wore the summer he trained for football and got really buff, and loudly weighed in with the rest of my family of the merits and faults of his latest girlfriend.  I usually thought they were stupid and not good enough for him, and always liked it better when they weren’t whining and clinging around. 

A few years later, I was an angsty college sophomore, and Jeff was finishing his senior year of high school.  I had determined that transferring schools was the answer to all my problems, and I came home for spring break depressed and despondent.  As a last ditch effort to get through the semester, I tried to convince my brother and some of our friends to come visit me.  “It will be fun!” I promised lamely.  To no one’s surprise, there were no volunteers.  Except for Jeff.  Who told me, that yes, he’d love to come visit.  By himself.   

Coincidentally, my roommate was out of town.  As no one but you, dear readers, could have predicted, we spent a suddenly…ahem…romantic weekend together. 

WHAT.

We didn’t spend a lot of time analyzing – I chalked it up to my loneliness and he blamed it on the fact that he was on a college campus for the first time.  With a nervous “Hey, it’s ok; we’re adults!” we parted company swearing up and down like Monica and Chandler that this can NEVER be spoken of again. 

But he called me later that week. 

I came home that next weekend, heavily incognito, and we found to our surprise that the supposedly “stupid” weekend didn’t seem so stupid.  We were two people who enjoyed each other’s company, and now, apparently, were physically attracted to each other.  Why were we so desperate to squash this?

There were, of course, some very real problems.  He was my brother’s best friend.   Aside from the vaguely incestuous overtones, there also was the weirdness of me being a college sophomore and him being barely out of high school. What is adorable in the sitcoms is very often agonizing in real life.  It was not solved by the end of the half hour. 

My brother was pissed.  Not annoyed, not bothered, but actually pretty angry.  I think he felt a little like he was thrust into the middle of some icky combination of my desperation and Jeff’s opportunity-seizing.  Not something you herald with a “Yay! Congrats, guys!  So glad you discovered you enjoy swapping saliva.”

 I could definitely feel where he was coming from.  Dating someone who is so close to being related to you smacks of eating a half-eaten Poptart even though it’s the blueberry kind, just because it’s in arm’s reach.  Had I put on sweatpants and parked myself on the couch of love with a bag of off-brand Cheetos?

In order to quell the voices in my head, I got very analytical.  There were reasons why I liked him so much.  When he told me he’d call, he’d call.  He looked at life with cheerful optimism.  He worked hard and had goals for the future.  I knew he was genuine because he’d been around for four years, and was still the same guy.  We shared the same faith and agreed on what we wanted out of life. 

Approaching things this way made me feel a bit pathetic.   What did it say about me that the guy I might end up with grew up on my street?  How anti-progressive of me.  What’s next, promoting arranged marriage?  What will Other People think?

But Other People don’t really get a say.  We launched this new relationship with the certainty that either it would end awkwardly after a few weeks, or this could really be it.  We’d give it a shot.  And over the next four years, it literally just got better and better.

At our wedding, the combination of such a deep shared history and the fact that we dated long distance for four years made the emotions so raw that I really didn’t know if I could say all those words out loud.  Our moms almost didn’t make it through the ceremony, and the pastor who married us said he’d never seen so much crying in a church outside of a funeral.  

Undying romance is always enhanced by abandoned trains.

                It is very true that all couples have different stories, and not all of them are easy.  Yeah, love can be complicated, but I think sometimes girls don’t get told the whole truth.  You can be Romeo and Juliet, and more power to you, but if you get exhausted from hanging from the balcony, you can look for an alternative.  Sometimes you can even fall in love with a person you actually like very much… someone who is standing next to you on the ground.