No 'I' in 'Teacher'

To begin at the beginning, I will explain that Hanukah vacation interrupted the flow of my existential dilemmas. Seeing as I had already overcome, over the course of my raging 20s, the existential grief that wells up from those strange catacombs of personhood, which one must explore in order to fully come of age, I had apparently seen fit to move on to the existential nitpicking and mulling that has been the day's bread of our school.
However, as I have explained, Hanukah interfered with all that. It was not so much that I rested, per say, for had I done I most certainly would have found myself wandering through that same exasperating labyrinth of thought that characterizes my reflections upon the learning process. No, it was the put-putting of normal life that took over - there were chores to be done, a wedding to plan (such a regularized affair, nowadays), a grandmother to see, parents to visit - and aside from the painting of a small picture there was no depth to my holiday, no internal sight-seeing, even.
Upon returning, I found - not without a twinge of regret, oddly! - that much of my frustration with the school had disappeared. For this I blame S, to whose name I have rightfully tagged the nickname "light of my life", and who is the new English teacher for our non-readers.
I thought that it would make me happy to be rid of these kids who, seated in any given lesson, proceed to wreck it, leave it, or both: anything to refrain from facing the un-faceable English script on the board, and their stunted or absolute lack where others - their peers - wield huge, powerful phalluses.
Not that I am unhappy - elated even - to be able to teach in a classroom in which everyone at least knows how to put together a simple sentence in English. It's just that, well, I guess I miss those little assholes.
S received the task of teaching some kids their ABCs and others simple words and sounds. I told her of the heartbreaking jolt I received when O, who has been mentioned earlier in this blog, asked me in the year's beginning if I would be so kind as to teach him the alphabet. "No one has ever taught it to me before," he explained simply. To imagine all of the stern faces he must have faced, peering at him angrily after each school test or report, is to know true mental anguish.
So I am glad I found S, who somehow combines the compassion of a saint with the sternness of a British headmaster, and is perfect for teaching these children. They leave her classroom with a feeling of accomplishment, something that has not been bestowed upon many of them since they learned to talk. This has led to calm - actual calm!
But I am also jealous, an emotion that takes me by surprise even as I write the word. Jealous, because somehow I had developed a love for those faces I so often dreaded to look upon in my classroom. I had apparently come to cherish the brick walls behind their eyes. I don't know whether this feeling should be characterized as selfish and egotistical (only I can smash these brick walls!) or self-destructive (I must smash these brick walls no matter what!), but either way, every crack was a Trojan victory. Now these victories are S's, and I must reorganize my thoughts around my own.
For this, however, there must be an 'I' in the classroom, where there most certainly is none.
There is an 'I' at home, where my fiance waits on me hand and foot at the moment, his penance for dropping me on my back the day before yesterday. And as I remain here, rediscovering time and again the complexity of muscular power involved in each of our tiniest movements, I am utterly self-involved and totally incapable of focusing any mental energy whatsoever on the classroom, just as I will often come away from a lesson realizing that my finger is bleeding, or that I have not had a sip of the tea I made for myself prior to it. This has led me to see my self and the classroom as two separate but opposing features of a larger me, a yin-yang, if you will. It is rather odd to see oneself this way, as if encompassing a mass of people totally unconnected with me, souls with whom I am in contact just three hours a week. And I can see that I have gone too far - I have overstepped the boundaries of my self - and this cannot lead anywhere good.
Another example of the 'I' gone awry is our science teacher, M, who came to school with labor pains the other day. "I'm having contractions," she murmured, while having a brief cry over the lack of lesson plans, and just before rushing off to teach a class. The next evening she gave birth, two months early, to an infant now in intensive care.
So where does school end and 'I' begin? Or, to look at it another way, how do 'I' refrain from encompassing an entire school (for it is certainly the ego that knows no bounds getting us into such trouble)?
I know of no answers as yet, but for now it seems right to focus on my back muscles, which appear to know their responsibilities quite clearly. What they cannot do, they won't: A refreshing concept!

Farce

The art teacher walked into my classroom on Wednesday, just as I was preparing to go over the English homework with one of the (many) struggling students.
"It's happened," he said, with his irreverent smirk. "They've seen my stuff."
G is an artist who, in his words, "slaughters sacred cows and shatters taboos."
He especially has his work cut out for him in Israel, which, as the center of three different religions, is without a doubt the Mecca of all things sacred and taboo. One of his videos, the only one I had seen before all hell broke loose, features a snorting, cartoonish voice-over of Yitzhak Rabin's granddaughter speaking at his funeral. If you want to make an Israeli person cry, play them this speech. He told me people threw things at him when he showed the film at Tel Aviv's cinemateque.

The kids - every single student in the school, according to my homeroom - had apparently poked and rummaged through the Web until they lit upon a virtual gold nugget: A promo video, just four minutes long, of every provocative film G had ever made. There was gay porn (specifically close-up shots of rimming). There was G rubbing "shit" (actually chocolate) all over his face with a toilet brush. There was Hitler. For dessert, there were goldfish slowly choking to death in a bowl of gelatin.
Talk about taboo.

Additionally, and, I'm sure, as an example of Murphy's inestimable grandeur, it was two days before the school's first exhibition. All, literally all, of the parents would, in about 40 hours, be walking in the door to gaze at the splendors of Project-Based-Learning, at the wonders their children had accomplished with poster-board, art supplies, and (mostly) Wikipedia.
The meeting that followed was tense. It was decided that G would make himself conspicuously scarce the next day, while the staff attempted to mute the parental outcry with a particularly ingratiating email. To the children, meanwhile, we would explain that art exists in the world of make-believe and not within the realm of the real. Case in point: Not poo, but rather chocolate!
The next morning, after allowing for a deluge of disgusted faces, melodramatic squirming, and gasps so emphatic they would put Vivien Leigh to shame, I asked: "What if G were an actor? And what if you saw him, on screen, killing someone because he was playing the part of a murderer? Would you think any worse of him then?"
This gave them pause, and then, with the swiftness of emotional pivoting so idiosyncratic to seventh graders, they immediately changed their minds. Well, most of them.
"Make believe!" they cried with relief, trying to persuade those few who refused to budge. "It's like the blood in movies. That blood's not real, right? Well, neither is the poo! And the fish! The fish are plastic!" (Later G told me the fish were real, and probably suffered a horrifying death of mute strangulation as the gelatin hardened its gooey death-grip on them. But one of the kids has an aquarium at home, so I did not correct their mistake.)
I found myself warming to these kids, elated at the discovery that they could, when properly prodded, support art for art's sake. And Oscar Wilde was skeptical!
But the school had not yet reached the climax of its aptitude for make-believe - far from it. This achievement was to be realized on Friday, at the exhibition.
Now most of the students at our school are not what you would call over-achievers. Most of them would like very much to accomplish the academic bare minimum and then immediately immerse themselves for the remainder of the day in YouTube and some game called "Dead Island" (also "Sponge Bob", which I used to believe one ceased to be interested in after kindergarten).
Thus, until one day before the exhibition, many of our kids found themselves unfortunately without a project to display before their blissfully unaware parental units.
Luckily, there's Wikipedia, the articles of which I'm quite sure remained unread even as they were being marked, copied, pasted, and placed on (rather expensive) poster-board.
Their teachers, at least, received the gift of a day that revolved around "learning". 'Finally, they show some interest!' the teachers exclaimed. Thursday was a whirlwind of what was later termed "pedagogical activity" and "enlistment to the learning process". Mostly, what I saw was lamination, cutting, and pasting. But, well.
On Friday the show of learning reached its peak, as parents emitted a plethora of "oohs" and "aahs", and visitors from the Center of Democratic Studies revelled in an orgy of presentations (by over-exited kids and teachers alike), portraits hung haphazardly on string, and picture frames bought last-minute at Ikea. Rave reviews of a "pedagogical heaven" followed suit, upsetting my gag reflex.
Like chocolate on a toilet brush, the exhibition elicited the precise response we had set out to garner. But like the fake blood on a prop-knife, it was manufactured for show, a far cry from the life-giving blood of learning.
With a smile frozen on my face, I filmed the effulgent responses of the parents. They, too, were a part of the act, while behind the scenes flitted, like a phantom of the opera, the knowledge that their offspring could not care less about anything other than Facebook and soccer. Maybe, just maybe, he is starting to blossom, they must have told themselves. Maybe the "system" (of which grade school was representative) had just been oppressing his wonderful talents!
'We have sparked the fire of false hope, and it will burn us alive,' I told myself bluntly. Though it was the type of mute, suffocating realization that no plastic fish has ever felt, I take consolation in the fact that it was not make believe.

Savasana and Death

Originally written on Sunday, November 25, 2012

An interesting epiphany came to me as I lay in the Savasana pose in yoga class. It occurred to me as a solution to the conundrum I faced all this week and the previous weekend, a time of war in Israel.

Last Thursday, precisely one week ago, the city of Tel Aviv came under rocket fire for the first time since the Gulf War, in 1991. Since I had not been living in Israel at the time, Thursday constituted my first encounter with the blaring siren, the sudden awe, the chills of the spine that accompany warfare. As a suitable coincidence, the siren caught me just as I was walking out the door to yoga class.

By Saturday I was a quaking, crying, jolted mess. My nerves were shattered upon the point of awakening, and for the entire day I could not bear to be left alone. When by some chance I was left to fend for myself for half an hour, I spent it whimpering in the bathroom, my soul feeling very much akin to the four white walls that moved to close in upon it: suffocating, and terribly, terribly blank.

It took all of the strength I could muster to step outside of the house and mount my bike on Sunday morning, for the drive to school. I knew that this structure we inhabited for the better part of each day was nowhere near being prepared for war. We lacked a proper bomb shelter, and our students were sure to be confused as to which building they were supposed to take cover in while they scattered over the grounds for break.

At 10:35, just as I was seating myself to devour the grapefruit I had peeled, ready to take full advantage of the short morning break we are allotted (15 minutes in all): it came. Within three seconds of the siren’s blare, students began rushing into the teachers’ lounge, where stairs lay to an underground shelter (I was informed of its existence that very morning). They barged headlong into the room, some yelling obscenities, others laughing hysterically, all of them running much too fast to safely descend the staircase at hand. Immediately I answered the call of duty, relentlessly repeating, “No running, no running, no running,” in a monotone that calmed me more than it did them.

From within the bumbling, fumbling crowd emerged one of my favorite students – a girl so shy she is often painful to behold when embarrassed – her face streaming with tears. She was breathing hard when I grabbed her, her wide body expanding and contracting wildly within my supporting embrace. “Shhh, shhhh, shhh,” I whispered into her ear. “Everything’s okay, don’t worry, everything will be okay.” Meanwhile, as my right hand continued to smooth her hair and rub her quivering back, my left hand was up, in the straight-laced position of a traffic cop, warning students not to run. As I whispered to her, I looked meaningfully at them, my eyes willing them to slow their bestial stampede.

When the alarm had died down, the girl sat beside me at the teachers’ table, still shaking, her jaw working unstoppably, unable to speak. I slowly, calmly, and perfunctorily devoured my as yet uneaten grapefruit, my mind a total blank.

It was only later, when I returned home and the siren blared once again, that I remembered I had forgotten to feel fear during this moment of wartime insanity at the school. Certainly, having handled that alarm with such finesse, I could not feasibly return to my own state of shaky nervousness. That part of me was gone – it had unceremoniously detached itself from my being and blown swiftly away, like a spore from a scattering groundsel.

Well, and?

Just this: As I assumed the Savasana – or corpse position – in which one lays as if dead – palms up, mouth slightly ajar, tongue resting softly against teeth – I thought of the position’s very dissimilarity with death.

And I was reminded of my poetry instructor’s explanation of a simile, which she demonstrated upon Madonna’s hit tune: Like a Virgin. Like, she explained, means that the subject is precisely not the thing he is likened to, otherwise, why the comparison? Madonna (in this case very much lacking in virginity) is likened to the chaste state in order to illustrate the chaste feeling she receives when with a particular bloke. But apart from this sense of virginity, nothing of its essence survives between her shapely legs.

Take, then, the Savasana: A state that simulates corpse-hood, but is, in effect, rather the opposite. One lays in Savasana, generally with one’s heart racing from physical strain, in order to focus all consciousness inward, on the self, which becomes one with the body. 

Death, very contradictorily, implies a scattering of the self, a singular end to its oneness. At what strange variance, therefore, is it with the Savasana, in which one is made to feel very much alive, to center in on the vessels pumping blood, to take note of the thumping of the heart, which resounds in the ears, and to massage the muscles with the breath. Therefore the corpse pose, as its name suggests, is really and actually no more than a pose.

Contrarily, let us examine the act of teaching. The teacher standing, back arched, eyes sharp and probing, examines her students with the utmost attentiveness. She deliberates on their every move, sounds them out to predict trouble, warns them to stow cell phones away. Those two girls should not sit together, she thinks, and that one, he doesn’t seem to have taken his Ritalin this morning. Finally, she wonders whether her throat can handle any shouting this morning. She doesn’t have to wonder long, for within moments she is shouting: “Quiet!” and her throat feels fine (that’s the adrenalin – she will pay for it after the lesson).

Throughout the hour she must make sure everyone works (or they will never learn) so she travels round the room in sporadic jumps – explaining, warning, encouraging, marveling, criticizing – every word she says is weighed with special care, and she dislodges from her aching throat only those that she feels will enlighten one person – one world – even for a moment. Her brain aches from the strain of caring so deeply about all these worlds that have been implanted in her universe. 

Her soul? Her self? These are nowhere to be found. 

All is engulfed by these other souls placed under her charge, these yawning, ravaging voids gathered before her to learn, to learn her teachings – each world a hungry, consuming, vacuum of consciousness.

There is no me, there is no self. There is only a merging with a universe of other worlds.

This is why teaching is death.

Each day I die for six hours or more. If I’m lucky, I can resurrect myself at the day’s end. If I am lucky, I retain the strength to gather up the scattered pieces of the puzzle as the sun sinks into its cold, orange death – as it is simultaneously reborn somewhere else in the world.

If not – well – I don’t really know.

You see, there is no remembrance in death.