Occasionally people tell me that I should be a writer. I can’t, and shouldn’t, because I have very little of what Keats calls the “negative capability,” or the penchant for empathizing with someone (real or fictional) to such an extent that one can emulate the subject being studied. With that said, I wanted to approach this MTC reflection from a slightly different angle. I am going to do as best I can to reflect on my MTC experience in my father’s voice and through his eyes, and then pen a response to him.
The things that my father says have a certain legitimacy; and while his view may not comprehend the entirety of the experience, it is valid in its own way. For anyone who has completed the program, this perspective should resonate; for anyone attempting to complete the program, this viewpoint should at least be acknowledged.
Father
I want to say first that I am exceptionally proud of my son and what he has done. I can’t claim to understand why he has done what he has, but I am still proud of him for it. He has put a lot of hard work into these last two years and I am happy—and he is happy—that this work is starting to pay off. He told me that one of his goals was for a student to earn a medal on the National Latin Exam before he left Simmons. Austin had a student—two, actually—accomplish that this year.
When he and I were talking about the exam results, I asked him, “If that’s your goal, and you accomplished it, do you need to stay on for a third year?” I don’t know if he gave me an answer or not, but it wasn’t sufficient. He has fulfilled his obligations and served his time these two years. He knows that I feel like he doesn’t have the support he deserves and I remind him: “It seems like no one at that school has your back. They’re happy for the publicity you bring, but that publicity wasn’t their idea and some of them may resent you for it. If it comes to it, son, you could be thrown under the bus without a second thought.”
And I worry about the environment in which he works: a girl was sexually assaulted in the haunted house my son’s Drama class put on and the principal, to put it kindly, did not follow the proper procedure for their punishment. That’s what I see: my son kills himself to put together a haunted house, two bad seeds molest someone and the principal doesn’t back my son up. Why stay there longer? How does this benefit my son?
I am proud of him for how he handled the sexual assault. He took it as high as it could go and did everything in his power to address the situation. But I would prefer for my son to be able to demonstrate his judgment without a sexual assault being involved in any way.
I am happy my boy is in Mississippi. It means I get to see him more than when he was in North Carolina. I am happy that he is doing great things. I wish that when I talked to him, he was happier and less tired and didn't have to teach 4 preps. And I don’t want to see him in the Delta as a teacher forever. He has bigger things to do before I retire. He’d better! I’m not going to be supported by a teacher’s salary when I’m 90.
Son
Dad, you know that I can’t respond to any of your observations. I cannot consistently depend on anyone’s support; I’ve seen things here I’d never hoped to see; I’ve been treated in ways that civilized people aren’t and don’t expect to be. But still I’m here. And I’m still here because of the students. If this were some other job like cotton inspector, I’d quit in 10 seconds flat and be in Houston before the sun set. But whereas you have coworkers who surround you, I have still-unformed young people around me whose eyes can communicate hate and boredom and amusement but most of all the “Yes! Please! I always knew there was more than I’d been shown!” yearning.
You know I felt the same way when I was 14. I still feel the same way today. But I had Mr. McDermott and Mr. Mac. And I had you: who else gave me his 25-year-old copies of Dune, The Foundation trilogy, and a beaten-up Lord of the Rings? Who else took me to a Barnes and Noble to buy Jethro Tull’s greatest hits because we’d heard “Bungle in the Jungle” one too many times on a road trip back to Houston from Andy’s hunting camp in Mississippi?
I had the opportunity to attend UNC and study Classics and literature with the finest minds in the country. I know what the world holds; or if I don’t know what it is, I at least know where to look to find it. But what about the curious mind with only corn fields and a weak internet connection to look to? The internet has everything, yes, but unless you have someone to guide you the internet will only reinforce your worst habits and circumscribe your world even further. Without someone to say, “Look at how large the world can be! Look at all these men who felt like you! You are not alone,” what becomes of that curious child’s mind?
That’s why I’m here, Dad. That’s why I put up with all of the disrespect and the low blows. As a teacher, I will support my administration, but that’s not why I’m here. I am not here to provide the school district a docile employee. I am here to show to whoever-that-student-is a collection of like-minded men across the expanse of time, conversing about things that matter.
I cannot say that this job—these past two years—has made me happy, because “happy” isn’t a deep enough emotion to describe how I feel. In my experience I have seen students scrape the bottom of humanity’s barrel and I’ve felt myself work to the very limits of my energy reserves. But those feelings are offset—not replaced, not expunged, but offset—when I watched X.C. discover that he really was among the most accomplished Latin students in the country or saw S.N. and J.S.—two girls who’d previously eschewed responsibility for gossiping—rehearse “A Raisin in the Sun” for hours on end and then say, “What do we do next? I’m not tired.” To see these students take pride in the admittedly admirable things they are doing and have done is a dividend beyond calculation paid on the pains of this endeavor. I stay for these students’ actions; I stay for these students’ opportunities; I stay for these students.
This is my Mississippi Teacher Corps Experience. I felt this way when I entered two years ago. Two years later, I can go back to that same well without cynicism and without doubt. I have found my experience trying, overwhelming, and counter to everything I’ve known. I have seen my efforts thwarted. I have seen myself fail my better instincts and resort to lower impulses. I’ve felt myself hate; I’ve heard myself gossip and undercut others. I’ve rooted for failure.
But those failings don’t define my experience. They are indelibly a part of it, but they are not its summation. My father’s criticisms are valid, but limited. After all that has happened (both good and bad), I can still return to the note I sounded when I joined MTC and echo, redouble, and surpass it. I have been able to do what I set out to do. I will continue to do it. I have not been beaten down. Not yet.
As regard the specifics, I don’t know what advice I can give you or what I can tell you to be prepared for. I feel that my experience in Teacher Corps has been a singular one, from which it is hard for an outside observer (or myself even) to draw any lessons. We annually recruit fewer teachers for the Delta schools; we annually place fewer teachers in rural districts; and rarely do such a lack of oversight and sheer managerial incompetence coincide to produce the latitude in which I had to operate (operate, that is, in a rural Delta district).
What advice I can give is relatively simple to say but nearly impossible to carry out: Find a way to forgive your students on a daily basis. The biggest mistake I made during my second year was to turn my classes into a perpetual power struggle: to prepare to battle a select group of malcontents; to beat them and to assert my dominance. This view—and this behavior—by a teacher is necessary, to a degree: if you cannot wrap your head around the hierarchy of power in the classroom then you will never accomplish anything as a teacher. But at the same time, this maintenance of dominance is both intoxicating and exhausting. It’s easy to take too far, and it wears on you both as a teacher and as a human being.
I have forgotten until recently that some of the chief virtues of Western Civilization are humility, forgiveness, and patience. Until I embraced a (limited) humility, I was not able to view my worst students as human beings. Until I embraced forgiveness, I was able to do naught but disdain my worst students. Until I embraced patience, I was not able to stretch my humility and forgiveness beyond a day’s length.
None of this absolves a student from either his own personal responsibilities or the ones he accrues in your classroom. But—in my experience at least—until I embraced these virtues, I established responsibilities as stumbling blocks for my students to trip over and not as checkpoints on the way to adulthood.
I guess my advice is to find a way to approach each day anew, as trite as that sounds. Understand a student’s past weaknesses and failures, hope for him to succeed today, dispose of your anger or hatred when you leave the building.
I recently asked my students to evaluate their experiences in my class this year. I did not require them to put their names on their papers; I wanted an unfiltered response. And an unfiltered response I received. The students were much more honest than I'd planned for them to be. While I had many critics, none of my student critics saw the same complaints that I did with the courses. There were no complaints of: "I wish Mr. Walker had challenged us more; far too often he taught only to the middle half of the class. I wish that he had shown me more of the diverse intellectual world," although this sort of complaint should have predominated. The English I critiques were decidedly mixed; the Learning Strategies were mainly positive; the Drama were universally laudatory (I didn't ask my Latin students to complete a critique). Of course, these results are exactly the opposite of what they should be: I still have no idea what I am doing as a Drama teacher and it's only the students' extraordinarily low expectations that have allowed the class to be considered a success.
What was once words and plans is now a garden. With weeds.
Karl already beat me to it, but I'll go ahead and put the full story up on my blog.
1.5 pounds venison sausage
