Doing Time in the Public School System

Part of me wants very badly to move to northern California and work on a farm that grows medicinal marijuana. A friend of mine recently returned from such a job with enough money to support his free-wheeling lifestyle for one year. Even though I've never smoked a day in my life, I find something endearing about my friend's stories of the fully certified Rastafarian doctor who believes that almost every ill from an odd rash to mild depression can be helped with a little bit of legally prescribed ganja. Just thinking about the possibility makes me feel a little more easy-going myself.

Looking back, I have always absorbed the mood of what's around me. When listening to a good band jam, my dancing soul floats with the music. When I met and fell in love with my husband, my happiness with him multiplied because of his happiness with me. When the shop where he had invested years worth of savings and a decade of dreams exploded into flames last summer, I felt an onslaught of mixed emotions-his disappointed heartache, my in-laws' indignation, and my parents' angry confusion and fear about what the future would bring. I felt so overwhelmed by that incident that I ventured the closest I've ever come to seeking therapy and drove an hour away to visit a metaphysical counselor in the city. I researched different healing centers and appropriately found one called The Phoenix. There, a hunched woman with white hair and tired eyes ushered me into her candlelit office and assured me that I was building my life on a foundation of love that would always support me. When we began our conference, a heavy rain kneaded the dirt outside her window into rich Georgia clay. The storm abated as our meeting progressed, and I exited The Phoenix feeling better, somehow.

Right now, teaching language arts at a rural middle school floods my system with a new blend of pain and wonder. Products of what my husband has deemed “The Jerry Springer Generation,” my students are the most reactionary people that I have ever met. If one of them speaks out of turn, at least one other must comment. This comment is met by a snide remark from a third student. The cycle continues, and my illusions of control unravel into a cacophony of grunts, shouts, and whoops. Conversation eventually collapses, and the students are on their feet gyrating to the rap music that plays on repeat inside their minds. When the students tire, they turn to me in panic. Suddenly, they all need to ask ten questions a piece, even though the answers are all written plainly on the board.

At the faculty and parent-teacher meetings that follow my painful days, wonder sets in: How is it that so many students are still functioning at 3rd grade level in middle school? When did the image of what I do in class become more important than what I actually do to promote student learning? How is one person supposed to meet the individual needs of each student and at the same time make sure that everyone remains seated, silent, and focused on mastering state-mandated standards? What could anyone do to make students care about education when the kids know they can receive no grade lower than a 50 and that the county will hold them back only once during their academic careers?

Finally, how is it that my 7th graders, who barely remember their own phone numbers and struggle to express complete thoughts, could be having unprotected sex and deciding whether to have children or abortions? Are they as flippant toward life as they are toward my classroom? Or, do they cop an attitude with me because they are too overwhelmed and broken down to behave any other way? If the latter possibility is true, how do I fulfill my responsibility to them without forgoing my more important responsibilities to my stepchild, my baby, my husband, and myself?

When I visited The Phoenix, I received the simple message to trust the love upon which my personal foundation rests. In my opinion, America's public school systems are built on neither love nor trust. Rather, they are the product of an on-going conflict between good intentions, impractical ideologies, and various attempts at controlling a populous. I neither hate nor embrace them. Instead, I struggle to accept them without making their problems my own. For an overly empathetic person like me, accepting something without being overcome by it will be a first-time achievement.

Inside my classroom, glass jugs of lemonade, copies of independent magazines, and photographs of me and my family cover my desk. During my fifth period class, I instruct a fiery, red-headed girl who asserts her continued status in the popular clique, at least in part, by regularly disrupting my class. I have long suspected that she hated me for being the only teacher to discipline her, but today she pointed with genuine interest to the label on my lemonade and asked me what “organic” meant. Her question sparked a brief discussion about sustainable agriculture, and a usually disagreeable young man whose eyes glaze over the moment I ask him anything about grammar looked livelier than I've ever seen him when he discovered that many crops are treated with pesticides before we eat them. Watching his expression transition, from one of shock at the thought of eating pesticide-laden food to one of awe at the realization that there is an alternative, made me smile brightly at him in spite of his previous insolence.

On other days, students look curiously at my magazines and peer inquisitively at my photographs of waterfalls, crater lakes, coastlines, and forests. Many shots are purely scenic, but my students know that I took them all myself. In others, I am present-kayaking in the Gulf of Mexico, hiking with my dog through the Tennessee hills, preparing to camp in the back of the old Volvo that my husband and I took on our honeymoon. In another shot, my husband and I, decked out in riding leathers, stand in front of his motorcycle. It is the first picture we took together. Still sporting a full beard and dreadlocks, he looks much different than the clean-shaven, short-haired man pictured with me on my wedding day. My students see both of these posted side-by-side. They also see my husband and I hugging and playing happily with my stepson. Together, these photographs send powerful messages to my students-Adventure is a good thing; nature is valuable; mature love is possible; and blended families can work.

I am coming to cope with my job by looking at it as a term of public service. I must pay tribute to “the grid,” or standardized society, before I can prosperously liberate myself from it. One day soon, on the California farm or someplace like it, I will decorate my space with photographs of my Georgia classroom and the students with whom I shared it. When my new friends and colleagues ask me about my former life as a public school teacher, I would like to tell them: I took the job so I could earn my freedom. I taught my students that, if they so desired it, they could follow me.