"Some people become part of this culture..."

Polyester pants, plastic shoes and a rainstorm. That's what I remember of my first months of teaching. I could barely keep myself covered and I had no money at all. It took six weeks for me to get a paycheck, so I worked as a telemarketer at night, selling magazine subscriptions. If I missed dinner in the Ladies Christian Union Residence which I was lucky to be living in, I split a quarter pound of cream cheese with my best friend and we each bought a bagel. Whenever I'm broke, I'm ravenous, so I devoured the bagel and usually added up nickels and dimes for junk food. My friend's mother used to send her soups, and I must've eaten two a day.

Bryant Avenue in the early 1990's was lined with abandoned buildings and houses. My students loved to talk about the bodies in each of them, as if they were ghost stories and we were at some maccabre camping trip. We might as well have been, as very little studying was going on. A teenaged seventh grader told me he wanted to dissect me. Another kid sprayed me in the eye with cologne. I smelled awful almost every day because I was depressed and my clothes were either too tight or too worn. It was a substitute teaching job and I was grateful when it was over. I was offered a job teaching prisoners at Rikers Island and that sounded like heaven.

Before I left, one of the guidance counselors looked at me with contempt and said, "Some people become part of this culture instead of changing it." I was friendly with the students and I wanted to know everything about them. I wanted a way in to work with them, but I also wanted a way in to somehow understand this carnival of violence that hovered on the edges of my world. The Residence I lived in was in the heart of Greenwhich Village on a tree lined street with several landmark brownstones. Just across from me, however, was the house in which a little girl had been killed by her parents. My students' world was the tangible evidence of that darkness, that corruption -- that same absence of love and compassion. The counselor was right. I did want to be part of it. I'd taken a German friend to visit the street in which I taught and she said, loudly, "Is that an abandoned building?" But, I wasn't interested in voyeurism. I wanted to travel to the subculture of my students the way some people want to move away from home. Among at-risk adolescents, I have always blended in -- my oddnesses and fears make sense in the fun house mirror that defines their world. No one expects you to be sane or respectable -- they share my suspicions of the mainstream world, even if they do not share my distaste for fashion.

Teaching at Rikers Island was a fast track to that end. The students themselves gave me quick shorthand lessons in the rules of their neighborhoods and in how they'd come to prison -- which was itself a set of keys into the disintegration of our schools and our city. But, I disintegrated with it.

Teaching requires a certain amount of clinical distance. A colleague of mine takes on the persona of Mr. Rogers on amphetamines. I don't think he ever looks the students in the eye. He takes his lessons off of the internet -- there are lots of good lessons to be had, so this is no crime. While his ego is mammoth, he is not personally invested in anything he does. At the moment, I envy him. He has picked several short tasks which are meaningful, a few short stories and a novel, which work well. Like a physical therapist who doesn't make small talk, he takes the students through these exercises, works of literature, etc. The work is engaging and simple. Useful, if not always ambitious. He will survive the loss of the school and move on. He was never really here.

So many schools I interview with now talk about commitments to the community, but I wonder how necessary that really is -- indeed, one school talked to me as much about the methods they use to teach (which was to hand teachers a set of lessons they were to follow rigidly). Maybe we are missionaries. The gospels we teach are there own places.

I began working as a teacher because of the opportunity to engage with language. I've never taught the lessons I imagined in which we would splice and re-splice interpretations of poems, plays, novels. A lot of the time has been spent listening to stories and helping my students to write them. That's another way to understand words, I suppose.

For this moment, however, I know that I have lost a lot of the pure energy that is required just to maintain oneself in the classroom. Like that haggard substitute, I feel surrounded by my school and not an active part of it. I let a lot of opportunities to teach fall by the wayside because I couldn't fight the despair of the school itself. In becoming part of the culture, I've lost a lot of the ability to resist it and to change it.