Lesson? What are they talking about? What lesson? All I can remember is the usual high school whine about why we have to read this and why we have to read that, and my irritation, my unspoken response, is that you have to read it, goddammit, because it’s part of the curriculum and because I’m telling you read it, I’m the teacher, and if you don’t cut the whining and complaining you’ll get an English grade on your report card that will make zero look like a gift from the gods because I’m standing here listening to you and looking at you, the privileged, the chosen, the pampered, with nothing to do but go to school, hang out, do a little studying, go to college, get into a money-making racket, grow into your fat forties, still whining, still complaining, when there are millions around the world who’d offer fingers and toes to be in your seats, nicely clothed, well fed, with the world by the balls.
That’s what I’d like to say and never will because I might be accused of using inappropriate language and that would give me a Joe Curran fit. No. I can’t talk like that because I have to find my way in this place, a far cry from McKee Vocational and Technical High School.
In the spring of 1972 the English Department chairman, Roger Goodman, offers me a permanent position at Stuyvesant High School. I’ll have my own five classes and a building assignment where, once more, I’ll keep order in the students’ cafeteria and make sure no one drops ice cream wrappers or bits of hot dog on the floor though boys and girls are allowed to sit together here and romance kills appetites.
I’ll have a small homeroom, the first nine girls, seniors and ready to graduate. The girls are kind. They bring me things, coffee, bagels, newspapers. They’re critical. They say I should do something about my hair, let the sideburns grow, this is 1972 and I should get with it, be cool, and do something about my clothes. They say I dress like an old man, and even though I have a few gray hairs I don’t have to look so old. They tell me I look uptight and one of them kneads my neck and shoulders. Relax, she says, relax, we’re harmless, and they laugh the way women laugh when they share a secret and you think it’s about you.
I’ll have five classes a day five days a week where I have to memorize the names of one hundred and seventy-five students along with the names of a full homeroom class next year, another thirty-five, and I’ll have to be particularly careful with the Chinese and Korean students with their sarcastic, That’s okay if you don’t know our names, Mr. McCourt, we all look the same. Or they might laugh, Yeah, and all you white people look the same.
I know all this from my days as a substitute teacher but now I watch my students, my very own, stream into my room this first day of February 1972, feast of St. Brigid, and I’m praying to you, Brigid, because these are kids I’ll be seeing five days a week for five months and I don’t know if I’m up to it. The times they are a-changin’ and you can see these Stuyvesant kids are worlds and years away from the ones I first met at McKee. We’ve had wars and assassinations since then, the two Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers. Boys at McKee wore short hair or pompadours greased back to a duck’s ass. Girls had blouses and skirts and their hair was permed to the stiffness of a helmet. Stuyvesant boys wear hair so long people on the streets sneer, You can hardly tell them from the girls, ha ha. They wear tie-dye shirts, jeans and sandals so that no one will ever guess they come from comfortable families all over New York. Stuyvesant girls let hair and breasts hang loose and drive the boys mad with desire and cut their jeans at the knees for that cool poverty effect because like you know they’ve had it with all that middle-class crap.
Oh, yeah, they’re cooler than the McKee kids because they’ve got it made. In eight months they’ll be at colleges and universities all over the country, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Williams, Harvard, lords and ladies of the earth, and here in my classroom they sit where they like, chatting, ignoring me, giving me their backs, one more teacher obstructing their way to graduation and the real world. Some stare as if to say, Who is this guy? They slump and slouch and gaze out the window or over my head. Now I have to get their attention and that’s what I say, Excuse me, may I have your attention? A few stop talking and look at me. Others look offended at the interruption and turn away again.
My three senior classes groan with the burden of the textbook they have to carry every day, an anthology of English literature. The juniors complain over the weight of their anthology of American literature. The books are sumptuous, richly illustrated, designed to challenge, motivate, illuminate, entertain, and they’re expensive. I tell my students that carrying textbooks strengthens their upper bodies and hope the contents seep up to their minds.
They glare at me. Who is this guy?
There are teaching guides so detailed and comprehensive I need never think for myself. They are packed with enough quizzes, tests, examinations to keep my students in a constant state of nervous tension. There are hundreds of multiple choice questions, true or false questions, fill in the blank spaces, match column A with column B, peremptory questions ordering the student to explain why Hamlet was mean to his mother, what Keats meant by negative capability, what Melville was getting at in his chapter on the whiteness of the whale.
I’m ready, boys and girls, to march through the chapters from Haw-thorne to Hemingway, from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. Tonight you are to read the pages assigned. Tomorrow we’ll discuss. There may be a quiz. Then again there may not be a quiz. Just don’t gamble on it. Only the teacher knows for sure. On Tuesday there will be a test. Three Tuesdays from now there will be an exam, a big exam, and yes, it will count. Your whole report card grade hinges on this exam. You also have tests on physics and calculus? Sorry for your troubles. This is English, the queen of the curriculum.
And you don’t know it, boys and girls, but I am armed with my teaching guides on American and English literature. I have them safe here in my bag, all the questions that will have you scratching your little heads, gnawing your pencils, dreading report card day, and, I suppose, hating me because I’m the one who can thwart your high Ivy League ambitions. I’m the one who skulked around the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel cleaning up for your fathers and mothers.
This is Stuyvesant and isn’t this the best high school in the city, some say the best in the country? You asked for it. You could have gone to your neighborhood high schools where you’d be kings and queens, numero uno, top of your class. Here you’re just one of the crowd, scrambling for grades to bolster the precious average that will slip you into the Ivy League. It’s your great god, isn’t it, the average? Down in the Stuyvesant basement they should construct a sanctum with an altar. They should mount on that altar a great red blinking neon 9, blink blink blink, the sacred initial digit you’re desperate for on every grade, and you should pray and worship there. Oh, God, send me As and nineties.
Mr. McCourt, how come you only gave me a ninety-three on my report card?
I was kind.
But I did all the work, handed in the papers you assigned.
You were late with two papers. Two points off for each one.
But, Mr. McCourt, why two points?
That’s it. That’s your grade.
Aw, Mr. McCourt, how come you’re so mean?
It’s all I have left.