from Recovering Teacher

The only hope, or else despair,
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre--
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
--T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding”

The Christmas after I broke away from my career teaching English—at the public school from which I’d graduated sixteen years earlier—my husband gave me a license plate frame that read, in plain black letters on a silver frame, Recovering Teacher.

Although I appreciated his part-silly, part-celebratory gift, I put off attaching the frame for a month or so. Something in the phrase bothered me, sounded bitter or regretful, suggested a distance from teaching that wasn’t entirely accurate for me. In the months after screwing the frame in place, I noticed it preoccupied me as I drove. When a car pulled behind me at a stop, did the driver read the message, I wondered? What if I made a poor lane change, ground from one gear into another, or made a hasty left turn at a yellow light? Did the driver blame me more because of the frame, or did he blame me less?

One afternoon, a man called at me across the YMCA parking lot: “Recovering teacher?” I kept moving but looked over my shoulder. “That’s right,” I said.

I was headed to the gym not just for sweat, but for healing and distraction: I was missing someone who had recently died from “un-recovery,” a person I hadn’t seen in two years. Neil Webb had been my teacher and my colleague. He was used and eventually discarded by the educational system which exists in a culture permeated by the belief that all teachers should be heroic, obedient, and utterly dedicated to their jobs and students every day of their work-lives, often at the expense of their personal lives. But this “perfect teacher” fantasy does not make allowances for imperfection or dissatisfaction. And asking a teacher to perform in this way mistrusts or ignores the passions and ambivalences that draw some people to the profession in the first place.

I left the frame on for three years. It made me think about what it means to “recover” in other contexts: maybe we’re all recovering from something? I knew that “recovering teacher” might provoke retorts from the average person: But you get summers off! You have that pushy union! And you work with kids all day--what could be more inspiring? My license plate frame registered its own small protest against unrecognized and unacknowledged abuse. I know too well how the pretense duplicity of teacher worship can smother those of us who don’t fit, those who blatantly fail, and the ones who struggle too little or too hard. Some of us seek rituals to regenerate ourselves, not only to keep our careers but literally to stay alive; some fake the job to keep sane; some get worn down and stay anyway. Some literally suffocate.

Neil died alone in a downtown Riverside motel bungalow on an ordinary California Monday. He received no tearful public eulogies, no wooden plaque in the school office, no scholarship funds dedicated in his name. Banished too late from teaching to find the means, or support, to recover, Neil left only the stain of his grief and self-destructiveness for the colleagues and students who loved him, for those who felt a deep isolation in their inability to help him. When news of his death came, each of us huddled alone against the arms of a chair or sofa, whispering to one another on the phone: He’s gone? Mr. Webb? He’s really gone?

Read the rest of this piece, along with other human narratives in all genres, in the Spring/Summer issue of Memoir(and).

from Domestic Order Suite

When you see the girl assaulted in the parking lot, you must not come forward. The girl already knows this rule. The law says you teach in the place of parents, but people look at you and see: nailbiting, cardigan sweater, hair-in-a-bun. Didn’t you dislike the alleged perpetrator? Wasn’t he the one caught jamming nails and screws into your car tailpipe last spring? Didn’t you already report him for skulking around your classroom--something about casting “smug looks” at you? Besides, you should consider cause and effect. The school makes money for his attendance, so he will return to school after his five-day suspension. He will park his mother’s green BMW in the usual spot and float across the campus, through hallways--a wronged warrior returned home.

But forget such hypotheticals, because you won’t come forward because you have learned well from other cases. There was the teacher who jammed his body between the bodies of two kids--one with a knife, one without--saving the life of one student and getting sued by the other. You recall that the teacher’s back and shoulder damage was permanent? There was the time a student grabbed a small teacher around the neck and said I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you but then said he was only joking, so the teacher faced interrogation about why she had allowed him to touch her. There was the teacher who received a long letter from a student, a letter naming her as an object of hatred and saying how he would “dearly love” to act out his violent thoughts but instead he would just repeat them over and over. You’re going to teach a long time, the principal said. And you can’t let them get to you. (The principal had pinched the teacher’s ass at a party and when she didn’t laugh he froze up and frowned and poured himself another martini and went to sit beside his new wife on the porch.)

And you remember yourself, how a person kept coming by your closed classroom door and kicking or punching it so hard that some student in a back desk said, Damn! And because they had no idea what was going on the kids laughed among themselves. It was kind of funny. Because you know too well the cloying sound your voice would make in protest. What would it take for them to hear something strong? Nothing--not the dog poisoned behind your rose bushes, not your windshield smashed with a crowbar, not your stabbed body, not your home charred to the ground. Your life is made of hearsay. What’s real is your hair falling out and turning brittle, your eyesight weakening. What’s real is the smell of blood, like wet hamburger, between your legs--and how you keep trying to hide it. How you can’t. You scramble for toilet paper and try not to bleed on yourself. This is no place, no time for hysteria.

Read the rest of this piece, along with other strange and arresting fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, in the Spring 2009 Issue of turnrow, published by University of Louisiana at Monroe.

It's Time for a Literary Podcast!

Thanks to an amazing collaboration between Ninth Letter and the theater arts department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, you can now hear a reading of Jo's lyric essay, "In/Out," from her collection Teaching at Point Blank.

The essay will headline on Ninth Letter's website during October, and then will become part of the journal's permanent archive.

To listen, click here.

from Calling

It begins with impressions from books, church, music lessons--together, a kind of seamless caul that holds and draws you towards adulthood. A desire gestates here, this place that feels practical, connected to the dailiness of May I? Can I? and Every Good Boy Does Fine. (Does he really? You never stop wondering.) Teaching becomes merely one container inside another container made of writing and reading, melodies and dissonance, pictures of saints and imaginary friends. The containers fit so close together you can barely tell which is inside and which is outside, they feel inseparable, inextricable, except for stupid moments of technicality when a voice intrudes: “Why not pick one (teaching) or the other (writing)?” Words and notes as landscape seem natural, if not always comfortable, a place to inhabit--the way another landscape of numbers, photographs, proofs or experiments seems natural to friends who choose surgery, the courtroom, interior design, plumbing, or selling cars.

A few first moments: Your parents give you a book with blank pages, bound as if it were already published. “A Nothing Book,” your father says. The smooth sheets have no lines, and so you begin to imagine a long story recalling other stories that have provided consolation. The martyr who laughed when men dragged her body across hot coals. The nun whose cheeks glistened onscreen as she wept and prayed. You are too young to know how white and lonely you are, or what this would mean if you could talk about it. You do recall, though, breaking into tears after swimming lessons, remembering tufts of brown hair which appeared in a girl’s armpit as she reached out one lithe, pale limb to draw a classmate from the blue water. It was rescue practice in case a person was drowning, sinking. Somehow it hurt that the girl didn’t worry what others might see, that she had not been embarrassed by herself. You still envy her, wondering where that quality comes from. So on the blank book, using a salmon-colored crayon, you scrawl a title on the cover, something like “The Poor Family.” Underneath, you draw what resembles a covered wagon and then cringe at how broken it looks, especially around the rickety wheels. You start writing then what you think you are allowed, permitted, a story someone else has already written-- Little House on the Prairie? A Christmas Carol?Nancy Drew’s Mystery on Lilac Lane? Already, this inner wrestling feels urgent.

As becomes habit, you drag fingertips across bookspines filling grey shelves along one living room wall, touch and wonder where these texts come from, how they are written and manufactured and make it to the grainy shelves. How other they feel, how alien you are, touching their seams. A soft sense of doom and resignation descends, as if you realize those books might suddenly plummet down, bury and smother you. As if there is conversation among these shelves you may not enter, you cannot enter. You overhear adults talking politics in a nearby room, voices loud and laughing, assured of their places, not worried about you under the avalanche of books, not worried about being swallowed up themselves. (You realize years later how this was a child’s perception, how their worries, while different in details, were much about smothering and being smothered). ...

Read the rest of this lyric essay, along with selections of poetry and fiction, in the latest issue of Ruminate Magazine: A Journal of Faith in Literature and Art.

from The Recesses of High School

I have seen my face in the black metal
felt the heat
breathed gray dust hanging
in the air.

This kid knows
what makes Saturday night special.
--Donna Hilbert, from “This Gun Is Real”

In the film Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), John Cusack's hitman character, Martin Blank, slips on a grim black suit and returns to the nightmare of his high school’s tenth-year reunion. Repeatedly, he identifies himself as a “professional killer,” and on each occasion he lets the phrase hang in the air, dark eyes watching for the moniker to register as something other than a snide joke. "You get dental with that?" one former classmate chirps. The father of his love interest merely tips his brandy glass and notes that it sounds like a growth industry.

I cringe while laughing at these punchlines, at their prescient awareness of easy American denials in the face of local violence. It’s no shock that when twenty-four-hour cable coverage of the 1999 Columbine horrorshow over-exposed Americans to the then-deadliest school rampage on public record, other sites of similar violence had long slipped from memory. But the names of cities and towns make a very real roster, like clues on some kind of rigged U.S. geography test: Olean (1974), Las Vegas (1982), Manchester (1983), Goddard (1985), Lewiston (1986), Virginia Beach (1988), Olivehurst and Great Barrington (1992), Grayson (1993), Blackville and Lynnville (1995), Moses Lake (1996), Bethel, Pearl, Paducah and Stamps (1997), Westside, Edinboro and Springfield (1998), Notus (1999). Then, following the Columbine shootings in Littleton: Conyers, Philadelphia, Deming and Fort Gibson (1999), Flint and Lake Worth (2000), Santee, Williamsport and El Cajon (2001), Red Lake and Jacksboro (2005), Cazenovia (2006), Tacoma and Virginia Tech (2007)--the last, on a university campus, with results even deadlier than Columbine.

And now Dekalb and Oxnard (2008).

It doesn’t matter that rampage shootings are statistically rare. From 1974 to 2006, the U.S. averaged one per year. Figures don’t generally include outsider-initiated attacks by gang members or other individuals*, assaults involving weapons other than guns, nonfatal shootings**, sexual assaults or mere threats. Stats also don’t include incidents buried from national coverage by city or school district P.R. machines, and tragedies on college campuses (until recently) were considered separate cases. At my Southern California high school alma mater--a “good” school with a green lawn where I also spent half a career as a teacher--one young man chose a carpeted classroom to commit suicide by gunshot in the early eighties. Our tragedy didn’t merit a place in the national chronology, yet I doubt we hold some unique local skill in masking our worst secrets. Like most anonymous places, we cling to the notion that we must be an oasis.

It Can’t Happen Here, we think. Not in this school, during the happiest days of our lives. Not in the garden of young adulthood.

Yet autumn rhythms indicate a different kind of awareness, revealing how closely school days link to the macabre in popular American imagination. In one recent Staples promotion, a wrinkly Alice Cooper chides his Goth-looking daughter in the checkout line. Marketers make sure the rush for pencils, paper and lunchboxes coincides with the placement of Halloween costumes, masks and orange-black candies on drugstore shelves.

Our Columbine-Virginia Tech nightmares are a slight variation, because the victimizers don’t cover their faces with hockey masks. We may recognize the skinny-shouldered boy with braces, the small harmless blonde with acne scars. In jester’s caps or flak jackets they may actually google their eyes, mug and wave for security cameras or their own videotapes as they brandish weapons. (Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter at Virginia Tech, actually mailed his ranting video rationale to NBC between the two shootings on the campus.) Viewers see young men who have transformed hurt, despair, or isolation into active rage--at themselves, at the culture which ignores them except as a kind of marketing ploy, a sales pitch repeating they can have everything, if only they pay, borrow or steal the right price.

There’s something else, too: a kind of national catharsis each time, as if the shootings enact some collective dread of school we are not allowed to articulate without clichés, along with a hatred of the in-crowd, resentment against bad teachers and unfair grades, mandatory attendance laws, the ever-tightening straightjacket of standardization. Do we at once pity and fear the shooters as persecuted outsiders--the way we may fancy our younger selves as sad and misunderstood, with nothing to lose or gain inside the too-small universe of school? Do the shootings play out a trigger-happy fantasy we love to pretend we deplore?

Perhaps we cloak ourselves differently, hide inside what’s most obvious and therefore feels most righteous: I had problems, I hated school but I never killed anyone.

When I was still teaching high school, I dreaded that attitude most--its latent dismissal and hostility burrowing deep inside the fissures of compulsory education. Where does damage go when it goes underground? We deserved better. We know we owe kids more. And we’d just as soon suppress any reminders.

Read the rest of this and other stimulating nonfiction in the latest issue of River Teeth (9.2), now available from University of Nebraska Press.

Half-Hour Lunch

Snacks wait at ends of hallways inside black-grilled dispensers: stimulations of craving what becomes most wanted. You pray machines won’t devour coins or bills. Curse when money disappears, when a wrapper gets stuck on its way down, hangs shiny mockery in full view. There’s sadness in eating at school. Sadness in not eating, in cues to eat, hungry-or-not, now-or-never. The industrial bell signals lunch break, nutrition break, passing period. This is the suburbs. It’s the inner city. It’s the inner city inside the suburbs.

Food gets hidden away before and after those bells, hoarded, slipped into backpacks, sweatshirts, purses. Sneaked in. Like drugs or weapons. Student points a chicken strip or quesadilla instead of an index finger, a blade or gun, instead of voicing interesting complaints or reaching for a napkin. Learns to compensate. To stuff it. Teachers who themselves can’t stop moving begin class with bagel in hand, a giant mug of coffee or Big Gulp of Sprite. “Put that food away,” they tell the kids. “When you’ve got this job, then you can eat in class, too.”

School food breeds strange violence, conditions and repeats binge-purge rhythms. I have no time to eat. I want to eat all the time.

Still, the newspapers wonder: Where do bullies come from?

Salivating and fidgeting hide the sadness. The bell rules, its gentle brutality internalized like a biological fact--interrupting and pre-interrupting all day. Anything in its path: girl bending to sip from water fountain, boy copying geometry theorems, men screwing parts in a broken copy machine, girl frantic for toilet paper to wrap her first maxi-pad, teacher explaining a paragraph. So with food, with lunchtime. The bell conflates hunger and movement, makes them indistinguishable. Ring as the child takes first bite of sandwich. As he comes finally to the front of the lunch counter, ready for his turn. No student escapes this lesson. No teacher escapes, absorbing exactly how the half-hour lunch is truly ten, maybe fifteen, minutes. Less if there’s a make-up quiz to proctor, a parent meeting, advice for a student or two (or three, or ten), any small personal emergency. Cravings turn subliminal for everyone on campus. Salivate. Fidget. Frustration tightens eyelids, tired ankles, a sore bladder, or else spills blatantly open--haste, haste--on a binder of notes. Wiped up.

One solution is constant eating. Another, not eating at all.

Read the rest of this essay, along with other amazing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in the Summer 2008 issue of Babel Fruit online, the new literary hotspot where social justice meets the arts.

Smokers, I Love You

After graduating from university and taking my first job teaching English, I actually made a serious effort to become a smoker. I loved how the package’s glossy cellophane felt in my palm, the tidy hinge of the flip top, the creased silver foil revealing that sweetish smell of tobacco and paper.

I’d buy a pack of long, slender menthols and sit with girlfriends at the card table in my kitchen and gossip away Friday nights. True to cliché, I smoked and scratched comments on student writing assignments with my mugs of coffee. Before it was illegal in California bars, I lit up with dates over pitchers of beer, football games, buffalo wings.

But I didn’t exactly inhale.

Like many wannabe smokers, including (according to my mom) my dead grandma, I sipped rather than dragged on the paper white stems. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t conjure the habit, or the pleasures, I craved from smoking. Nowadays, I confess to love watching the people who’ve been successful.

I know, I know: in our current climate, that’s practically endorsing terrorism. But don’t get me wrong. I don’t wish nicotine addiction on anyone. Like lots of kids in the seventies, I walked through the American Lung Association van and gaped at the pair of tar-mottled smoker’s lungs. In the eighties, at my SoCal high school, there was a “smoker’s quad” on the blacktop for years--the pre zero-tolerance trend of the time, “making it safe” for kids to do whatever they wanted. (That seemed clearly silly.) Ever since my parents tossed out their Kents and Mores, I’ve been sensitive to the ick-smell cloying hotel rooms, rental cars, elevators. And yes, I know that Big Tobacco lied.

Despite it all, I can separate obvious risks and virtual certainties (lung cancer, emphysema, coughing fetuses, stinky wallpaper and upholstery) from the sensuality of the act in the moment. Just now, somewhere: woman strikes a match and lights her Marlboro, winces the first breath, punctuates a smoky exhale with a single, thoughtless flick of ash.

I married a smoker who looked quite sexy with a cancer stick. Taking that initial drag, he always seemed both attune to the moment and blissfully unaware of himself. He has now (thankfully) kicked the habit. But I never wished, as did one worried relative, that he’d been a racist instead.

I grew up loving movies like Casablanca and Now, Voyager, where cigarettes appear with trench coats and letters of transit and moonlight and national anthems as a kind of aesthetic resistance to fascism and sour provincialism. This may seem ridiculous and passé now. But the few smokers (or former smokers) who remain in my life appear more intimately aware of weaknesses and frailties--not just other people’s, but their own. They relish meals, tell lively stories, risk repeating politically incorrect jokes.

A dear friend’s husband quietly excuses himself from the dinner table for his now occasional, lonely indulgence. He’s not exactly happy about this ritual anymore, half-resigned to the game of “cutting down,” quietly seeking the best patch, gum, or anti-depressant to help bridge the gap between will and weakness.

Perhaps it’s this character, and not the cigs, I’ve always admired. (Think Johnny Cusack's Rob Gordon--between drags of smoke and sips of beer--confessing sins into the camera at a green-colored bar in High Fidelity.)

Our well-meaning zeal against smoking seems lamely in denial against what smokers know too painfully well: that ashes and dust are inevitable for all of us, sooner or later, and that meanwhile there’s a lot of failure and struggle in between.

So that’s why, where righteous hygiene substitutes for kindness, I’ll sit with the smokers any time. Contrary to popular myth, they’re rarely the ones blowing smoke directly in my face.

Sorry, Ladies: Satire Is the New Sunshine

Environmental Rhetoric

Said and Heard

Those who can, do.

Must be nice to finish at 3:00 every day.

At least you have summers off.

But that’s your job.

You could have just moved him to another seat.

No, I never received your note.

She tells me she never has homework.

Why don’t you use workbooks/worksheets?

What did you do to make him angry?

Your D-plus will ruin his chances to play ball.

He didn’t know he was cheating.

Do you have any kids of your own?

I know she turned the assignment in on time.

Your grading is so subjective.

This work is too complicated.

I’m sorry, but why are you calling again?

I don’t have time to help her with everything.

My child always tells the truth.

She didn’t know she was failing.

He behaves that way because he’s not being challenged.

But what should I do with her at home?

He’s only seventeen.

What was her grade two days ago? yesterday? this morning?

You aren’t meeting all our needs.

Just because you don't see a wheelchair doesn't mean she isn't really in one.

I used to teach, so I know for a fact that you should____________.

I know for a fact that everyone else in the class is failing.

I know for a fact that you’ve given an ‘A’ to ____________.

I pay your salary.

You haven’t heard the last from me.

I went to U.C.L.A.

Because of you, she won’t get into a university.

Because you made him upset, he didn’t do the assignment.

I’m friends with school board members.

We thought you’d be different from all the others.

(Less often or never)

How are you?

It won’t happen again.

Thank-you.

What a challenging/creative/thoughtful assignment.

May I visit your classroom again?

We’re so glad to see him working hard.

It must have taken a great deal of thought to plan this exercise.

I’ll be calling your boss to tell him how much I appreciate you.

We’re pleased that you’re not using a workbook/worksheets.

Yes, she lied and we're terribly embarrassed.

Yes, we’ve had this problem before at home.

Our daughter/our son isn’t the center of the universe.

How do you stay so passionate about this subject?

His character matters more to us than his test scores.

You must be exhausted.

I have two children--how do you handle one hundred-sixty of them every day?

Or: I have two children--how do you handle thirty-six for five hours straight?

You’d make a terrific parent. (Or: Your kids are lucky.)

I’m still thinking about what you said.

What else can we do to make it better?

Please hold your ground with her.

But what makes this paper really deserve an ‘A’?

I’ll keep to the point—I know your time is spread very thin.

If she worked further on this, would you be willing to look at it again?

We’re concerned about her new circle of friends.

We’re trying to teach him that what’s fair isn’t always easy.

When is the next round of auditions so she can try again?

She didn’t deserve it yet. That’s okay.

We want him to actually learn--not think he can “buy his way” everywhere.

I’ll bring friends to the board meeting to support you.

You’ll have a written apology in the morning.

We certainly understand why you’d be concerned.

We appreciate your taking the time at lunch/after school/this evening.

I’ll talk to some of the other parents on your behalf.

Heavens no, you’re not crazy.

We really appreciate your call.

I want my son to be a teacher.