* * *
I teach two classes in the morning, both Junior Literature and Language, and my job’s completely fine as long as I am with my students. We read Hamlet and they raise their hands. I’ve been given a curriculum, rote and predictable, test-prep focused, but I ignore it. We read and we have conversations. They do group work, stand up together and give presentations on chart paper. My students are all black and brown kids, underserved, reduced- or free-lunch charter-school kids. They are still daily—by the shoddy, half-assed education that they’re getting every day at this place, from grown-ups who mostly look like me—being underserved.
* * *
I catch a kid on his phone in my first class of the day and he smiles at me and looks five so I don’t reprimand him. Put it away, I say, trying to look angry. There is a system that we’re meant to use for discipline. Infractions: majors, minors. I have not installed this system on my phone. I have not, in the five months so far that I’ve been teaching at this institution—we spent one month before that training—given out one of these infractions.
* * *
My coteacher is twenty-four and does not know how to be a teacher. He also does not know how to interact with other humans or how to define the word “soliloquy.” He stands in the back of the room and tries to give kids infractions and I tell him not to or take them away later, logging on to the system on my computer and disappearing the detentions he’s doled out. He crosses his arms over his chest and tells kids to sit up or push their chairs in. Mr. D, they call him, instead of his full name, and he shakes his head. That’s not my name, he says. And the kids laugh and, halfhearted, say they’re sorry; a few minutes later, they call him Mr. D again.
Mr. D, they say, I have to pee this minute.
He clenches his fists.
But really, they say, it’s an emergency, Mr. D.
Not now, he says.
I pop my head up from the student paper that I’m reading, trying to tell whoever said this without talking that they should stop it, but also, if they don’t stop it, I will understand.
Go, I say, to the kid who still has to use the bathroom.
Mr. D stands quiet, his jaw tighter, eyes set on me, and no one speaks to him for the rest of class.
* * *
At lunch, my two co–homeroom teachers sit with me and we talk shit about our coworkers instead of reminding the kids to clean up after themselves and not swear, like we’ve been asked to do. We talk about the twenty-four-year-olds, my coteacher and the others: twenty-three, or twenty-six, but all the same. The young ones, almost all white, anxious, energetic; their sentences sound like questions at the end. They seem scared of their own students; they don’t know how to teach and no one’s tried to help them. They’re held to standards they can’t meet—based on test scores and class averages—and they panic and dole out the material in the exact rote way that we’re meant not to. If and when their methods do not work, they blame the kids.
They’re not awful, these young white teachers. I talk about them because I’m manipulative and unfair, because I’ve learned the best way to bond with colleagues is to be galvanized against other colleagues, against bosses, and I’m desperate to ally myself with my two co–homeroom teachers instead. These twenty-four-year-olds: I’ve sat with some of them, in one of the classrooms we use as an office when no one’s using it for teaching; they’re so young, and if they were my students, they’d be some of my favorites. We’ve had coffee, sat together during training. They’re sweet and talk earnestly about social justice, but they’re my colleagues, not my students, and they can’t see and don’t seem to want to see all the ways their good intentions aren’t worth much.
Some days, I move to the tables with the kids from my class, kids I caught sleeping or who didn’t turn in their homework. You want to eat lunch with me, I say. And they shake their heads but smile. They tell jokes mostly, making fun of one another. Miz, they say, and then they say my last name, you know Jalen has a crush on Aminata; you know Razaq didn’t even read that shit you thought he talked about so well last class; you know Ananda posted a Snap about Nashya’s man and now they ain’t talking and Nashya’s going to go find her after school.
Man, huh? I say, and they laugh at me.
You got a man, Miz, they say, and I nod, smiling at them, and they laugh again.
* * *
After lunch there is a break and I download and print out all my pay stubs because I need them to finish filing for bankruptcy.
How’s it going? asks one of the math teachers as I use the printer in the teacher workroom. The math teacher is also twenty-four and wears a tie, a dark-blue jacket, and a crisp white shirt with the collar buttoned every day. He has bright-white teeth and perfect posture, too much facial hair. I check to make sure I have all of my pay stubs as he looks over my shoulder, and I turn my body so I know he knows I don’t want him to look.
Joyfully driven, I say.
We share the building with five other schools and the track team has nowhere to practice so they practice in the hallways during the last four periods of the day. I leave the teacher workroom and wait, pressed against the hall wall, as kids fly by over hurdles. A girl’s toe catches on the bottom of a hurdle and it bangs against the hard, dark floor and she falls, hands flat on the cold tile, and she doesn’t scream. I check in my bag for my pay stubs over and over. I check Twitter, check and recheck email, half read student work, and input grades. I’m not as good a teacher as I wish I were. I’m inconsistent, get distracted. I give fifty-seven comments on every three-page paper, and the next day I skim through to make sure everybody turned in their work, fix a few grammar or comprehension errors, and give almost everyone a B. No one reads my comments, and the work feels most productive when I’m one-on-one with students, checking in before and after class and making time for conferences. Most of the writing is difficult to track and the reading of it, hour after hour, wears on my brain.
* * *
Our older daughter’s school calls three hours before the workday’s over. They never remember that they’re supposed to call my husband, who is home during the week and takes care of them while I’m at work. Our daughter got a bead stuck in her nose. I must come pick her up and take her to a doctor who can get it out. I almost tell the nurse to call my husband, then instead I say I’ll be right there and message my boss that I have to leave. My co–homeroom teacher and I are the only people on the staff with kids and usually, when I say “kids” to any of my other coworkers, people’s eyes glaze over and they get antsy and uncomfortable and I get out of things.
* * *
I’m not yet on the subway platform when our daughter’s school calls back to say they got the bead out. The other nurse, who had been on her lunch break, held her hand over our daughter’s face, her thumb pressed hard against her unobstructed nostril, and blew into our daughter’s mouth until the bead popped out.
So we don’t need you, says the woman. She’s back in class, she says, all good.
But I’m already out, and my coat’s on and I keep walking. I skip the subway. When I was very young and single, without children, I used to walk the city for days. I head north then west and walk into the Guggenheim. There is a retrospective of stark lines and colors. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been in a museum on a weekday, and I walk very slowly up the corkscrewing path and am alone and quiet. I look a long time at each painting. It feels like what I imagine people feel like when they imagine whatever god they might believe in standing close to them.