I followed the teacher guides. I launched the prefabricated questions at my classes. I hit them with surprise quizzes and tests and destroyed them with the ponderous detailed examinations concocted by college professors who assemble high school textbooks.
My students resisted and cheated and disliked me and I disliked them for disliking me. I learned the cheating games. Oh, the casual glance at the papers of students around you. Oh, the discreet little Morse code cough for your girlfriend and her sweet smile when she catches the multiple choice answer. If she’s behind you splay your fingers on the back of your head, three splays of five fingers would be question fifteen, a forefinger scratching the right temple is answer A and other fingers represent other answers. The room is alive with coughs and body movements and when I catch the cheaters I hiss in their ears they’d better cut it out or their papers will be shredded into the wastebasket, their lives ruined. I am lord of the classroom, a man who would never cheat, oh no, not if they flashed the answers in green letters on the bright side of the full moon.
Every day I teach with my guts in a knot, lurking behind my desk at the front of the room playing the teacher game with the chalk, the eraser, the red pen, the teacher guides, the power of the quiz, the test, the exam, I’ll call your father, I’ll call your mother, I’ll report you to the governor, I’ll damage your average so badly, kid, you’ll be lucky to get into a community college in Mississippi, weapons of menace and control.
A senior, Jonathan, bangs his forehead on his desk and wails, Why? Why? Why do we have to suffer with this shit? We’ve been in school since kindergarten, thirteen years, and why do we have to know what color shoes Mrs. Dalloway was wearing at her goddam party and what are we supposed to make of Shakespeare troubling deaf heaven with his bootless cries and what the hell is a bootless cry anyway and when did heaven turn deaf?
Around the room rumbles of rebellion and I’m paralyzed. They’re saying Yeah, yeah to Jonathan, who halts his head banging to ask, Mr. McCourt, did you have this stuff in high school? and there’s another chorus of yeah yeah and I don’t know what to say. Should I tell them the truth, that I never set foot in a high school till I began teaching in one or should I feed them a lie about a rigorous secondary school education with the Christian Brothers in Limerick?
I’m saved, or doomed, by another student who calls out, Mr. McCourt, my cousin went to McKee on Staten Island and she said you told them you never went to high school and they said you were an okay teacher anyway because you told stories and talked and never bothered them with all these tests.
Smiles around the room. Teacher unmasked. Teacher never even went to high school and look what he’s doing to us, driving us crazy with tests and quizzes. I’m branded forever with the label, teacher who never went to high school.
So, Mr. McCourt, I thought you had to get a license to teach in the city.
You do.
Don’t you have to get a college degree?
You do.
Don’t you have to graduate high school?
You mean graduate from high school, from high school, from from from.
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Don’t you have to graduate from high school to get into college?
I suppose you do.
Tyro lawyer grills teacher, carries the day, and word spreads to my other classes. Wow, Mr. McCourt, you never went to high school and you’re teaching at Stuyvesant? Cool, man.
And into the trash basket I drop my teaching guides, my quizzes, tests, examinations, my teacher-knows-all mask.
I’m naked and starting over and I hardly know where to begin.
* * *
In the nineteen sixties and early seventies students wore buttons and headbands demanding equal rights for women, blacks, Native Americans and all oppressed minorities, an end to the war in Vietnam, the salvation of the rain forests and the planet in general. Blacks and curly-haired whites sprouted Afros, and the dashiki and the tie-dye shirt became the garb of the day. College students boycotted class, taught in, rioted everywhere, dodged the draft, fled to Canada or Scandinavia. High school students came to school fresh from images of war on television news, men blown to bits in rice paddies, helicopters hovering, tentative soldiers of the Viet Cong blasted out of their tunnels, their hands behind their heads, lucky for the moment they weren’t blasted back in again, images of anger back home, marches, demonstrations, hell no we won’t go, sit-ins, teach-ins, students falling before the guns of the National Guard, blacks recoiling from Bull Connor’s dogs, burn baby burn, black is beautiful, trust no one over thirty, I have a dream and, at the end of it all, your President is not a crook.
On streets and in subways I’d meet former students from McKee High School who would tell me of the boys who went to Vietnam, heroes when they left and now home in body bags. Bob Bogard called to tell me about the funeral of a boy who had been in both our classes but I didn’t go because I knew that on Staten Island there would be pride in this blood sacrifice. The boys from Staten Island would fill more body bags than Stuyvesant could ever imagine. Mechanics and plumbers had to fight while college students shook indignant fists, fornicated in the fields of Woodstock and sat in.
In my classroom I wore no buttons, took no sides. There was enough ranting all around us and, for me, picking my way through five classes was minefield enough.
Mr. McCourt, why can’t our classes be relevant?
Relevant to what?
Well, you know, look at the state of the world. Look at what’s happening.
There’s always something happening and we could sit in this classroom for four years clucking over headlines and going out of our minds.
Mr. McCourt, don’t you care about the babies burned with napalm in Vietnam?
I do, and I care about the babies in Korea and China, in Auschwitz and Armenia, and the babies impaled on the lances of Cromwell’s soldiers in Ireland. I told them what I’d learned from my part-time teaching at New York Technical College in Brooklyn, from my class of twenty-three women, most from the Islands, and from my five men. There was a fifty-five-year-old working for a college degree so that he could return to Puerto Rico and spend the rest of his life helping children. There was a young Greek studying English so that he could work toward a Ph.D. in the literature of Renaissance England. There were three young African-American men in the class and when one, Ray, complained he’d been bothered by the police on a subway platform because he was black the women from the Islands had no patience with him. They told him if he stayed home and studied he wouldn’t be getting into trouble and no kid of theirs would come home with a story like that. They’d break his head. Ray was quiet. You don’t talk back to women from the Islands.
Denise, now in her late twenties, was often late to class and I threatened her with failure till she wrote an autobiographical essay which I asked her to read to the class.
Oh no, she couldn’t do that. She’d be ashamed to let people know she had two children whose father had left her to return to Montserrat and never sends her a penny. No, she wouldn’t mind if I read the essay to the class if I didn’t tell who wrote it.
She had described a day in her life. She’d wake early to do her Jane Fonda video exercises while thanking Jesus for the gift of another day. She’d take a shower, get her children up, her eight-year-old, her six-year-old, and take them to school and after that she’d rush to her college classes. In the afternoon she’d go straight to her job at a bank in downtown Brooklyn and from there to her mother’s house. Her mother had already picked up the children from school and without her Denise didn’t know what she’d do especially when her mother had that terrible disease that makes your fingers curl up in knots and Denise didn’t know how to spell. After taking the children home, putting them to bed and getting their clothes ready for the next morning, Denise would pray by the side of her bed, look up at the cross, thank Jesus once more for another wonderful day and try to fall asleep with His suffering image in her dreams.