The Lounge Lizards

Tuesday, March 14, 1995

When I first started teaching, lo those nine years ago, I was warned by my mentor Frankie Hunter, to pick and choose my acquaintances carefully. Don't fall in with the wrong crowd, she warned, and though I initially felt like a high schooler all over again, I quickly learned what she meant.

On every campus, there are the idealists, the pragmatists, and the cynics. There are the revolutionaries and the bitchers. Hang out with one particular group and you are seen as a member, but more importantly you begin to take on their traits. We may all claim individualistic freedom and initiative, but the argument of nature vs. nurture goes back at least to Shakespeare and we still don't know if its our genetic make-up or environment that shapes us. At PeeVee, I had my mentors and my fellow rookies, and I basically kept to them.

I am, by nature (or is this nurture?), a creature of habit. I am also physically lazy (definitely nature). My room at PeeVee was number 105 on the far west end of campus. The faculty cafeteria was clear on the other, east, end. In my first year, I was simply too lazy to make the walk at noon. I ate lunch in my room, which also facilitated my coaching of the Academic Decathlon team (this was when and where we met). I always seemed to be in a rush, so I never had time to hang out in the staff lounge too much. I didn't much like the atmosphere in there.

Physically, the place smelled. Cigarette smoke had soaked itself into the walls, and you couldn't make it through the room without tangibly feeling it. And since I don't smoke, but I had to pick up my mail and messages from the room, this made my desire to stay in the room non-existent.

Emotionally, the room smelled, too. Of something burning. Bitterness. There were teachers who would spend their entire prep period there, some ate their lunches in there, many spent more time than was necessary to pick up their mail there before and after school. And they were NOT there simply to pick up mail or to run off dittos (the lounge still had the one working ditto-master machine on campus; the Xerox machine was elsewhere, in a smoke-free environment). They were there to talk. About students. About their jobs. About their classes. About other teachers. Other schools. Politics, and how it related to our field. The administration, site and district (located just across the street from PeeVee [which of course made Pleasant Valley teachers feel watched, put upon, yet simultaneously ignored...yet another ugly step-sister complex]). They were there to bitch.

At first, I saw these teachers, mostly the elder statesmen of the staff, as the burn-outs, the soon-to-be-retirees. I didn't want to associate with them...I didn't what their bitterness to scald me. But my perception that they were burn-outs really wasn't the case. Or if it was, it was only one part of the puzzle.

As I said earlier, there are idealists, pragmatists, and cynics. Notice I didn't say burn-outs...burn-outs come from all three categories, as well as from the revolutionaries and the bitchers. The idealists, usually young (but like liberals they can age rather obnoxiously), are the ones who see teaching as a calling, something divine. Many rarely marry, carrying on a nearly monklike existence, or they marry other teachers and their lives continue to revolve around the holy crusade of defeating ignorance. I used to see myself as a part of this contingency.

Then there are the pragmatists. These are the grunts, the foot-soldiers in the war on ignorance. These are the teachers who slug it out, day to day, year to year, planning during the summer, getting to school two weeks before the school year begins, staying late almost every night, and always seeing the world around them as a possible teaching tool. Many have a love-hate relationship with the profession. They love the teaching, they just hate all the baggage that comes with it--the hassles with administrations, the system, some of the kids. I think I am a pragmatist now, now that I no longer live for teaching.

The cynics are a different animal, actually many different animals, there being various species of the cynic. One is the natural cynic, who sees teaching as a quasi-government job, one in which s/he can do as little as possible and still pick up a pay-check. These people should be shot (or forced out of the profession). Luckily, there aren’t too many of them. Then there are the burn-out cynics, usually idealists who, after years of watching society shit on and disrespect the profession, have suddenly turned their backs on their former faith like heretics and now simply live for the past and bemoan the present situation (unlike the aging idealist, the burn-out cynic believes nothing can be done, and lives and teaches in a kind of siege mentality). These should leave the profession. And then there are what I like to call the devolutionary cynics, those who began their careers as either idealists or pragmatists and who have moved slowly from idealist to pragmatist to cynic. They still, for the most part, love teaching, and the creeping hate has moved in on them so slowly that they have a hard time realizing that something is wrong with them and their job. They don't realize that they may need to leave the profession.

And I wonder if I'm devolving into this kind of cynic.

Lately, I find myself spending more and more time in the staff lounge. I try to rationalize it. It’s more pleasant now that it’s smoke-free. I'm growing older. Before, when I was in my mid-twenties, I could relate to the students more than to the staff. I had them in my room constantly. We liked the same music (mostly), we saw the same movies. We had a connection. But now, I'm growing older. Our connection is growing weaker and weaker. And when as before I could relate to only a few of my teaching colleagues (some of whom I had had as teachers of my own, other were old enough to be), now I am reaching a point when I am just a little younger than the average teacher on the Chumash campus. Now I relate to my colleagues as well as or better than I do with the kids. Thus, I’m in the lounge more than I used to.

I’m there before school, and now I actually sit down to read my mail. I’ll have a conversation with someone before heading off to class just before the warning bell rings. I go there between periods one and two, so that I can void my bladder, my only opportunity to do so between seven-eighteen and twelve-twenty, when lunch begins. I go by at lunch, and then I might even lean against the couch and talk. I check my mail after school, maybe make a parent phone call from there, and chat with a peer, before heading to the library to talk to Mary, Liz the library clerk, or Kathy the textbook lady.

I rationalize this by saying that I’m merely trying to be social (something I’ve never cared for in the past), that I’m just trying to stay "in the loop" so that information doesn’t pass me by, that I’m only trying to have some kind of connection with some adult on campus.

Sometimes I don’t know what is happening or what has happened to me.

I used to be a revolutionary... I still would like to see reform. Only I see myself bitching more than I used to. The only problem is that we all know there’s nothing more stupid or unnecessary than a revolutionary cynic. And there’s nothing more dangerous than a cynical revolutionary.