I did not, I said.
Now she shows me this clip and then another, a different woman, a different type of wig. She explains to me the names and types of textures: 4A, 4B, 4C. She shows me another video of different types of braids.
My hair is short and, while we watch the video, I keep reaching up to touch it, embarrassed, maybe, by the ease of it. How I only ran my fingers through it, still wet from my shower after my run, as I left the house this day.
Kids walk past us and my co–homeroom teacher whispers to me. Her hair is natural, she says, nodding toward one girl and then another, her hair’s a weave, a wig; worst of all, she tells me, her face close to mine and her whisper getting quieter, nodding toward a girl carrying a tray of double mozzarella sticks, this girl, against any thinking person’s working knowledge of the fact that this is basically giving in to white supremacy, has somehow been allowed to get her hair relaxed.
My co–homeroom teachers, more and more, share things like this with me, but also, they have a text chain with the three other black teachers at school, of which I am not—I know better than to ever ask to be—a part. I’m quiet more than I’m used to. I let them talk and try very hard to stay still and to listen and, every time they tell me things, I feel like I’ve lived a whole life without knowing anything and I’m so grateful that they trust me at least enough for this.
I keep separate from them also. They don’t know about my leaving. They don’t know about my night class. They don’t know that we pay extra rent to live in a neighborhood we can’t afford so that our kids can go to a school that’s said to be better than the one my co–homeroom teacher’s kid will go to when he turns four next year.
* * *
I stay through the end of the day and help students with the paper I’ve assigned, which all of them are not quite comprehending. I’ve asked them to use one character in Hamlet to explore the gradations either of sanity or of culpability throughout. They’re too set on the desire to state one thing or the other—Ophelia’s absolutely insane, they want to argue; Hamlet’s absolutely just defending his father’s honor, they tell me. But what about, I say, pointing to a different moment, and they keep getting tripped up. They’ve never written anything longer than two pages, never been taught to cite sources. Their syntax twists and slips in this strange performance of an idea of academic prose that has been delivered to them by their teachers before. It obfuscates whatever it is they might be trying to say, and I sit with them and ask, one by one, But what do you want to say? and they tell me, and I say, So why don’t you write that?
I can’t parse what of this is them being kids and what is having not been taught. In grad school, I taught comp, and there was plenty that my students couldn’t think or do. But there is something fundamental at this school that I can’t make sense of. What’s taken for granted about these kids is different than what was taken for granted about us when I was at my cloistered, white, and wealthy public school. Too many of the teachers, nearly all of the administrators, think our kids can’t think or do things that at my school we were told we had no choice but to think and do. Discipline stands in the place of any opportunity for exploration. Teachers try sometimes to teach the way we’re told they want us to be teaching, progressive, emphasizing inquiry and exploration, but then no one seems to trust the kids can learn if information isn’t delivered to them in small, concisely bullet-pointed worksheets and PowerPoints, so teachers summarize and truncate the information, covering themselves, too afraid of all the ways our performances are judged wholly on the scores kids get on tests.
The kids have learned to expect that this is the only way to learn. When I ask questions but don’t give answers in advance, I see not only how scared they are, because no one here has taught them how to trust their ability to think, I see how desperate for it they are, how exciting and surprising and specific their brains are.
When we sit together after school I keep a store of Doritos and Kit Kats and Reese’s cups from the teacher workroom on my desk, and as their theses start to clear up and their sentences begin to build more seamlessly together, we take breaks to eat and they make fun of my cardigans and my dress pants; they look at me long, head tilting toward one side, eyebrows cocked, and ask if I’ve ever thought of growing out my hair.
* * *
I skip my run the next morning because my back and legs and neck are sore, and I try to do a yoga video in the small room off our kitchen but I get bored. The woman talks as if I am her child and she just wants me to feel better. I mute her and lie back on the mat with my eyes closed until the children both wake up and come out and crawl overtop of me and the two-year-old reaches her hand up my shirt and asks to nurse.
* * *
I’m at a work meeting. We are discussing whether the new policy barring head wraps is professional or racist and what type of orthopedic shoes should be allowed with doctor’s notes. The few times I’ve spoken up in meetings like this I’ve later been asked quietly by my boss not to any longer, so I sit in back and read the news on my phone.
I text with a friend from college, Leah, who is finally pregnant after three rounds of IVF and has just found out she’s having twins.
I get an email that says a Chilean writer, name linked to her Wikipedia page in parentheses, would like to sit in on my Thursday night class at the university. The Chilean writer read your syllabus and responded intensely to it, says the email. I’m sitting in the back with my two co–homeroom teachers and they both look at me as our boss talks. I send the Chilean writer the title and the author of the book we’re reading, as I’m requested to do, and turn my phone back over on my desk.
* * *
I teach one more class after our meeting and we have a debate about whether the ghost in Hamlet is real. I offer lunch on me as extra incentive for whoever wins. I give them ten minutes to plan their opening arguments. After that they craft rebuttals. After rebuttals come the cross-examinations and I egg both sides on, pointing out the holes in their opponents’ theses, pointing out how their opponents’ examples might be twisted to serve their arguments as well. We all get loud.
The twenty-four-year-old stands quietly in back. I think maybe he’s transcribing in his head the case he’ll make when he goes to our boss to get me fired. I think if I get fired I won’t mind. And then one of my students stands close to me, pointing to a moment in the text she thinks will help her team, and I think I will go over to the twenty-four-year-old and threaten to harm him bodily if he takes this job from me.
* * *
While the kids prep their closing arguments, I check my email. I’m so honored, the Chilean writer writes back to me, I can’t wait.
* * *
Third-floor hall duty. I’m reading: Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero. All my life I have been searching for something that would fill me with pride, make me feel superior to everyone else, including kings, princes, and rulers, says Firdaus, as she sits in a cell, sentenced to death.
I get a message about a girl, a tenth grader, who walks out of class because of anxiety. She has a disorder, we were told at a staff meeting—amplified flight reflex. If she feels anxious, she walks out of class, sometimes out of school, and she walks often. Regularly, on the Google chat, we get messages saying that she’s gone.