Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Thursday, February 16, 1995

Two days ago, I had the opportunity to guest-teach in a colleague's Creative Writing class. She called upon my "expertise"--or at least experience--in Drama and film to discuss the writing of plays and screenplays. I was thrilled to be asked and it was a thrill to do it.

To be before students who made the choice to be there, rocking and rolling through a lesson while I held them transfixed, asking questions, taking notes, learning...It was a heady experience, exhausting but wildly intense. Even though it took a few minutes to get used to that feeling again, and it took about an hour to wind down afterward, I realized that I missed It. While I have had moments here and there in English 9 (standard, non-college-bound freshman), a few more in last year's English 3 Honors class, and an occasional burst of the high in Drama classes over the past three years, a few moments that have come close to that sense of freedom, it's been a long time since I felt an entire period like that.

And it was for those Drama classes that I had returned to the school of my own high school experience, after teaching English for five years at the cross-town rival school, the school my father attended (quit, actually, after the tenth grade...to join the army. Another story, another time). And it was at this other high school where I began my teaching career--my first year under the tutelage of three teachers: my own former yearbook advisor (the chain-smoking assistant principal of the school), another former English teacher from the old high school (who had subsequently transferred schools and pulled political strings to have me, whom he must have considered a kind of protégé, placed at "his" school), and an aging English and History teacher (who was to be teaching some of the same courses as I in my first year).

In that first year, in my first week, I had half of an overcrowded English 2--college-bound sophomores--pulled from me, every other student down the roll sheet (on the roll, to make it easier on teachers' eyes, the names on the sheet are printed on alternating tan and green lines...they took my green students). With the intention of easing my student load and balancing sections of the course, they ripped apart any positive class dynamic I had going as well as my self-confidence as a first-year teacher.

Welcome to teaching.

Later in the year, one of the students who remained in that class committed suicide. By the end of the year, the long-term relationship I was in had broken up, ending a short engagement.

And yet I wouldn't have traded that year for anything. The first year is supposed to be grueling. This was. And every day was a wild ride. It was my first year teaching, my first year teaching these courses (sophomore English to both college-bound and remedial students); it was a year of experimentation, of testing new ideas. Armed with what I had endured in education courses at UCLA (mostly worthless) and what I had learned from my master-teachers at Millikan Junior High in the Valley and Venice High School (which was everything to me), I winged it through my first year.

Not that it was easy. It wasn’t. It was exhausting. Working from seven, when I arrived at school, through lunch at nearly one, past the end of school at two-fifty to the end of my day, around four, wiped me out. I would return home, where I lived with my parents for that first year. Fed, rested, and bolstered by their respect for education and love of learning, I was revitalized every night after every exhausting day. And I loved it.

And it seemed the powers that were loved me, too. During the spring of my first year, I was being groomed to take over the English 2 Honors course from another teacher on staff. This was, as far as I knew, without precedent. The teacher whom I was replacing was receiving mixed reviews from teachers, administrators, parents, and students alike; I had heard the reviews. Being a first-year teacher, I could never even think of asking that I be given a shot at that class. But with all three mentors in my corner, I received the course. Honors it would be (though without my first mentor, who had just been named principal of my--our—once-and-future school).

And I took it as just that, an Honor. It was an honor to teach the course, and it was, in my mind, an honor to be in such a class. I created a new curriculum, working with my two teaching mentors, who also happened to be the Honors English teachers for the junior and senior classes. It was a tough curriculum, based on English and European literature, with heavy doses of vocabulary and Cultural Literacy, as gleaned from E.D Hirsch’s tome. We covered it all, from Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales through two doses of Shakespeare (the CoreLit[erature] selection, Julius Caesar, and another tragedy, different every year), up through the Romantics, which became the basis for our Promethean unit (Frankenstein, Prometheus Unbound, and Byron’s poem, plus another personal work of the student’s choice), into the World War One poets (coupled with All Quiet on the Western Front), and finally 1984 (though this last work changed from year to year).

The students didn’t know what to make of me. Here I was, just seven or eight years older than they, wearing a tie (because I hated being asked for a hall pass when I didn’t), fresh out of college, a place where they desperately wanted to be. Some questioned, some argued, some complained, but they all did. As hard as they worked, I worked even harder. Home around four to my new apartment, I would instantly crash on the couch for at least two hours; after a dinner (usually chips and salsa), I would grade papers and design lessons until past midnight (I played hard, too, dating and engaging and then marrying another young lady; again, another story). I worked like a man possessed. But my reputation was made. I had arrived. But not satisfied.

By the next year, I had sold students on a semester-long Shakespeare class, to be taught back to back with a Modern Literature class. It would never fly, counselors and teachers said; today’s kids don’t want Shakespeare. Thirty-nine signed up. And we put on student-directed and -acted scenes from the plays our first year (and for every year after until the second year after I left the campus). We created our own Xeroxed Modern Lit text with the profits from our "A Night with the Bard" sellout. This success, too, was heady. It was wonderful.

But nothing gold can last.