Assignment #5 - Final.

I don't remember what the actual description of the assignment was. However, having re-read the product I came up with, I feel justifiably (I think) proud of what I accomplished.

Crossing the Room

“Damien, we have to go to the office,” I say, craning my neck and trying my very hardest to look both calm and severe.

“But I don’t want to go to the office, Miss Farrell. They’ll make me go to the nurse. I don’t like her.”

“I know that, Damien, but we have to go. You need a bandage, and she’s the one who has them.”

It’s my first day of student-teaching, and my supervisor isn’t here. So I’m standing in the hallway outside my classroom, alone with a towering six-foot-five fifteen-year-old, who has just sliced open the back of his right hand from knuckle to wrist. A million things run through my mind: the threatening red drops of blood, startling against the once-white floor, leading from his desk out o the room; the room itself, full of special needs students who are almost certainly preparing for abrupt, total mayhem in the absence of any figure of authority; my own uncertainty of the route from my classroom to the school’s general office; my terror at having a student gouting blood within five minutes of the bell’s sounding. And overlaying it all is the prayer, “Please, God, don’t let him realize that he is head and shoulders taller than me, and if he decides to just walk away there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.”

***

The exams for this class are ridiculous. Everybody thinks so.

During the IPT (Introductory Practical Term) we all have to take a course on the Principals of Assessment. Essentially, this course teaches us how to develop exam questions specific to our respective disciplines. And so, after taking an exam in another course, a course which all prospective teachers are also required to take, many of us are understandably furious. The midterm for this other class (the name of which I can’t mention due to the professional code of conduct that binds all members of the Education faculty) essentially broke every single rule that we, those self-same prospective teachers, are required to learn and implement in our teaching practices.

Was the education system always this hypocritical?

***

“Would there be any problem with my beginning the Grade 10 poetry unit with a poem that isn’t in the anthology?”

“Well, that does rather depend on the poem.”

“I’d like to do ‘Did I Miss Anything?’ with them. It’s a great poem – funny, accessible language, and it opens up the opportunity to demonstrate the role of narrative voice in poetry. I think it would be a good place to start.”

“Well, it sounds to me like you’ve got it figured out. Bring me your lesson plan in the morning.”

I’m thrilled – I’ve been wanting to teach this poem for ages. I spend three hours preparing my lesson plan. I know just how it will play out. Getting a high school class interested in poetry is no easy task, but I know I can do it, especially with this poem. It is funny. And part of the reason it’s so funny is precisely because of the shifting voice Wayman built into it. It’s perfect.

The next day, I stroll confidently into class and begin handing out the poem. I read it aloud for my students, letting excitement paint my voice with all the colours the poem has to offer.

No one laughs.

Discomfited, I forge ahead, because there’s nothing else I can do. I give them a moment to think about what they’ve just heard, what they’re now reading from the pages in front of them. I ask my first question.

No one answers.

***

With the exception of my final practicum, the remainder of the courses I’m taking here are options. Meaning, essentially, that they have nothing to do with my professional development as a teacher. Meaning also that I am having an inordinately difficult time caring about them, except as credits towards the degree that will allow me to get back into the classroom – back to the other side of it, that is.

I used to love going to school for its own sake. I loved the atmosphere at the University, the constant hum underscoring every moment here – the hum of hundreds of ongoing lectures, seminars, arguments and conversations. I relished the challenge of combining my experiences with the myriad disciplines I have dabbled in to produce work of singular quality. But now, with my goal only a few months away, I find myself dreading coming in to class, unable to find an interest in courses that have nothing to do with my career. Even the so-called Education options, which style themselves as practical application courses, come off as a bit of a joke to those of us that have taught in actual classrooms. Looking around the room, I can see the split between the earnest faces of the second- and third-year students, those who have not taken either of their practical terms, and the thin, cracking veneer of interest the fourth-years try to maintain over the knowledge that they are getting nothing useful from this class. The theories forced upon us here have no place in the real world. I wonder, bitterly, if the professor has ever been in front of a high school class, and dutifully answer the next question with the words she wants, rather than the right ones.

***

“But why would you do that to yourself? Wouldn’t you rather work with kids who are still young enough to like school?”

This is the typical response I get from people who have just learned that I plan to teach high school There are countless things wrong with this assumption.

To begin with, all kids are still young enough to like school. I’m twenty-four and I still like school.

But completely aside from that, I would not take a contract as an elementary school teacher if one were offered to me tomorrow. In Edmonton. With a signing bonus.

I love teaching. And I love young children. I do not, however, relish the thought of teaching young children.

Last summer, I spent eight weeks working for the City of Edmonton Green Shack Program, a free drop-in day camp that runs at parks all across the city.

Never in my life have I been so consistently exhausted at the end of a mere seven-hour workday. Children, aged four through fourteen (even though the limit was supposed to be six through twelve) surrounded me all day, every day. They scraped their knees; they needed the bathroom; they wanted to play this game, no, that game, no, they wanted to do a craft; they argued constantly, about nothing, with me and with one another; they found bugs (and on one memorable and expensive occasion, shared them – even after using the pharmaceutical treatment, I washed my hair in vinegar the rest of the summer). Children of that age aren’t really people yet; they are still learning to be people; and I don’t think that I would be able to teach them that.

So instead, I teach high school, where at least the outline of the man or woman each of my students will become has begun to form. These are the students I can build relationships with as adult to near-adult, rather than surrogate parent to child.

***

I almost quit school last January.

At the beginning of my APT (Advanced Practical Term), I quailed at the realization of just how much work would be required of me. The APT is a nine-credit courseload over five and a half weeks. To make an approximate comparison of the work a nine-credit courseload entails, consider this: in order to take nine credits in the six-week spring and summer terms, students require background checks, GPA checks, special dispensations from the Deans of their faculties, and contracts signed in blood stating that they will under no circumstances work at a part-time job during the term.

I worked 20 hours a week as a front-desk receptionist all through my APT.

By the end of the first week, I was seriously considering dropping out of the program. I desperately wanted to become a teacher, but as I sat down with my syllabus and dayplanner, I realized two things: first, that my social life and I had parted ways until April, and second, that I was going to have to quit my job or limit myself to three hours of sleep a day. And quitting my job was not an option; I would be leaving town for the actual teaching component of the term, and would therefore need to support myself for the three months I would be away. I despaired.

Tuesday of the second week was the add/drop deadline for the course; I decided that I would come to class on Monday, and see. See if there was something in the course that could pull me through.

On Monday, our class underwent a metamorphosis. I was not the only one who had wrestled with the idea of dropping out over the weekend; we had lost two of our group. But the sobering realization that some of us were gone drew the rest of us together into what my professor called “a remarkably tightly-knit community.” Rillah, our guide and mentor through the APT, said that she had never seen a group achieve the closeness, the mutual support, the comfort with one another that we developed by the second week of the program. I decided that for the sake of the twenty-six friends I had found on the ninth floor, I would stay.

***

“Miss Farrell?”
“Yes, Shelby, what is it?”
“Are you coming back next year?”
“Well, I certainly hope so.”
“What grade will you teach?”
“I’m not sure, Shelby. It depends on what’s available.”
“Oh… Miss Farrell?”
“Yes, Shelby.”
“I want you to be my teacher for the rest of high school.”