Show Me a Hero

One of my teacher friends went to get her haircut this week and when they stylist asked her what she did and she responded that she taught, he thanked her for her service.  And we laughed about it at first and then said “that’s right”.  And let me be perfectly clear that I am not saying we are doing this like soldiers, or police or a first responder with bullets over our heads, but my God, we are fighting some serious shit this year.

Yesterday, before school even started, my people, my beautiful, filled with feelings, English-teaching people saved a life.  They saved a life before the 9am bell rang.   A student tried to go over the ledge on the third floor and they were able to stop this student.  They ran from their morning coffee and just talked to the student and held on, and called for help until a wonderfully strong and able-bodied man simply bear hugged the student and lifted this student back onto the ground.  While they were doing this, admin and counselors and the rest of us checked to keep other students away from the area.  Adrenaline pumped and everyone just filled in where we needed to be.  And after, our people, our first responders, were a mess.  They don’t teach you this stuff in college or teacher school.  It is not Teacher Ethics one day and how to be a hero the next.  And they were heroic, they were amazing.  They saved a life. I may have described it as fucking heroic shit, because, well, it was.

This is the second time this has happened here in the last month.  The first time was a shock.  The first time was very personal for me as I taught the student the year before.  I wept rivers of tears when I found out and stood with my people.  And they held onto me and checked in for days to see if I was okay.  I have since visited with that student and thought I was okay, but yesterday just reopened that I am not okay.  My people are not okay.  Our kids are not okay.  And we truly are on a front line every day.  We are helping kids fight depression and bullying and just the usual kids being shitty to each other.  We are feeding kids and fighting poverty.  We are listening to the talk about drugs and trying to get kids to make better choices.  We are helping them understand and combat racial divides. This is exhausting stuff friends. Remember, we are also still teaching them to capitalize their I’s, or stuff that doesn’t even look real to me in Math, or how their bodies work or how to take care of themselves and why people fought the wars they fought.  All in a day’s work.

I am exhausted.  My people are exhausted.  We are weary and eating every single carb in the world to numb the things we are holding onto inside.  But I sit here writing this on hall duty and I don’t care that I am on hall duty, because it gets me out of my room and out of my head and into the halls where the kids are.  And where one of my people sits playing guitar and trying to play away the things in his head and it is beautiful and both healing and haunting at the same time.

I am so very thankful that this is the last day before Thanksgiving break.  I am so very thankful that I will have a week with my husband and my kids who will get my undivided attention, instead of my leftover and much divided attention.  I am very thankful that my people, the people who hired me and inspire me and laugh both at  me and with me, these people who teach me to teach, these people who feed me bagels and knowledge, that these amazing people will also get a week like this.  These people are heroes and even heroes need some time off.

Curley's Wife

This is my second year teaching Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” and I am having a very different reaction to it than I did last year.  Last year, I thought it was great how the kids recognized the themes of having a dream and friendship.  This year, I am grossed out by the misogyny that runs through it.  Like really grossed out.  Maybe it is because I have just finished grading three out of four class sets of chapter questions and Curley’s wife has been referred to as a hoe, a tramp and a skank-ass bitch.  Ouch.  Doesn’t she tell us again and again in Chapter Four that she’s just lonely?  Just tired of sitting in that house?  Flirty and needy I can see, but skanky?

Just some good ole boys....

As I spend too much time thinking of this, I think of the fact that she doesn’t even have a name.  Students in my class kept asking me “Miss, what’s her name?” and I would reply that Steinbeck didn’t give her a name.  So they named her themselves: Lola and Cinnamon were in the running.  Why doesn’t she have a name?  Why are the only other women mentioned in the book prostitutes?  That Susy was a fun gal and kept a clean house we are told. Susy, who has no dialogue, is given a name and Curley’s wife is still just Curley’s wife. And yes, I am sure running a cat house and brokering women for their bodies would indeed make one a fun gal.  Aunt Clara shows up as a hallucination at the end, but when she does, she derides Lennie and tells him he’s not worth anything. 

Maybe it is all the stuff on the outside of the classroom that is piling up and forcing me to see this with new eyes.  All the celebrities and politicians being called out again and again for harassment, for abuse, for rape.  For being disgusting and abusive to women they had power over.  Maybe it is the #metoo that went around, because it was everyone and it was everywhere.  It was my friends, it was your friends, it was us.  Maybe this is why I see Curley’s wife with new eyes this year.  I see her as the young woman we have all been: trusting, naïve, and compromised. 

I did ask my classes to ponder what life was like for women if this book was reflective of society at the time.  They quickly answered that it wasn’t good, but they also quickly said that things are so much better now.  That we are all equal now.  And inwardly, I cringe because I know things they just haven’t experienced yet.  There is so much I want to say, so much I want to show them, so much I know that they don’t.  However, I am paid to teach English and not show them how the world is still so flawed.  But I also think that as a teacher, part of my job is to teach kids to be better humans.  We have had too many incidents at school the past few months for me to think that my job ends with vocabulary and essay writing.  So I let them lead the conversations they want to have and I will give them general things to talk about, but sometimes the weight of the things I don’t get to say gets really heavy.

One more week of this book and then we will tuck it away for another year.  George, Lennie and the gang will all be silent until next year’s juniors crack the spine.  However, I am not so sure I can close Curley’s wife up with them though, I think she has something she needs me to say.