Education's Bitch

So I says "Hey, Google Image Search, give me an education related image for my blog!" And Google Image Search was all, "LOLOL YAAAAAY!" And here we are.

In the spring of my senior year at Sprague High School, our band director enthusiastically introduced the upperclassmen to a pet project he called “Sprague Conservatory”, wherein middle schoolers from our part of the district would come to the band room two evenings a month and we, members of the Sprague Wind Ensemble, would teach them. A lot of people in the band reacted enthusiastically to this – mostly girls who would go on to major in music education. To them, teaching oboe lessons to five bored 7th graders whose parents had shoehorned them into missing Spongebob two times a month was nothing short of paradise. I, on the other hand, wanted nothing more than to graduate from high school and never see an adolescent again, much less a pubescent one. Oh, but there was nobody to teach the trumpet students – Truman, they said, you must come to your high school band’s aid!

I’d always known that I would hate teaching and would never want to do it. When I’d bring this up in conversation, people would chastise me, telling me that I would probably be a great teacher if I just gave it a shot. And, let me tell you, fuck that noise. Even if you’ve never had cancer, you know that you don’t want to have cancer. If you’ve never had your nose sliced open by a street thug, I doubt you’re really eager to go out and give it a shot. And if you’ve never been to El Paso, well, need I say more? Common sense is the voice in your head that tells you when you shouldn’t try new things, and it was telling me that if I wanted to try something new that month, well, maybe it should be a new restaurant downtown or a different kind of toothpaste. But no, my band director kept after me, and eventually I caved and agreed to become a temporary middle school music teacher.

I think it’s important to know your limits, which is easy for me because I’m good at maybe five things* tops and my limits include, among others, all sports, romance in all its forms, and drinking milk. What I figured, though, as I drove up to school on that first faithful evening, was that maybe I could conquer my limits. Maybe everything that I’d thought would happen could be avoided through sheer force of will – maybe, if I brought my absolute Truman Capps A-Game for an hour, I could become Mr. Holland meets the guy from Dead Poets Society, with a little Optimus Prime thrown in for good measure.

*I don’t want to give them all away, but one of them rhymes with “glassturbating.”

Oh, but the world’s greatest intentions can be cut down in an instant by a row of listless 13 year olds. Once I was alone in the room with the four of them staring at me, waiting for me to dispense some musical wisdom, I understood that I completely lacked any ability to educate or inspire, and would never be able to turn into a semi truck either. I had absolutely nothing to say to these kids. I really don’t know how to talk to people who are a lot younger than me in the first place, let alone how to teach them something, let alone music, which isn’t exactly my strongest suit.

So for an hour I stumbled around like the educational equivalent of a stripper on horse tranquilizers, trying to figure out a way to make them better trumpet players without saying anything offensive or having to give anyone a hug. By the end of the hour I was completely soaked in nervous sweat – and don’t get me wrong, that was a regular occurrence back then, but usually it only happened when I was talking to girls my own age. Trying to teach had successfully turned me into the quivering, unsettlingly moist shell of a human that until then only women had been able to create – and the middle schoolers had done it without even the possibility of nookie. Walking to my car*, I knew once and for all that if indeed it was possible to conquer my limits, education was not going to be one of them. I would forever be education’s bitch.

*The only thing, the only thing I miss about Sprague High School was walking to my car on late spring evenings after rehearsals. The air was fresh and warm, the sun was just starting to set over the stadium, cars were puttering back and forth as everyone else left, and if the wind blew, all the leaves on the trees rattled in a pleasant way. On those evenings, I could almost forget that I went to a school built on a solid foundation of crushed dreams and snakeskin boots.

Two days ago I sat down along with 29 other people in my discussion/lab section for one of my huge journalism classes. We all sat and waited in a dungeonesque room in the basement of the university library until exactly 1:00, when the graduate student (commonly known as a GTF, for graduate teaching fellow) in charge of our discussion moved from the edge of the classroom to the front of the classroom. Petit and no more than five years older than me, Kelly did not appear entirely comfortable with herself in front of the class. Taking a deep breath, she spoke to us in a high, slightly squeaky voice not unlike that of Kristin Chenoweth.

“Uh, hello.” She said. “I’m Kelly Saunders, and I’ll be the GTF for this discussion. Uh… I’m not very good at it, so… Go easy on me.” She paused, looked at the clock, and raised her eyebrows in quiet dismay that only 30 seconds had passed and she still had 49 and a half minutes to teach. “Uh… I also have Type 1 Diabetes, so if I pass out, you should call 911. But I don’t think I’ll pass out.” She looked at the clock again and appeared so sincerely disappointed that only 15 more seconds had passed that I honestly wanted to cry. “So… Do any of you have Diabetes?” She asked. The class, not fully sure what to make of the past 45 seconds of their lives, stared at her silently. She nervously clasped her hands and bobbed on the balls of her feet. “Well, it’s… Not fun.”

Class wore on and she uncomfortably worked her way through the lesson plan – I don’t want to employ the “stripper on horse tranquilizers” line here because I think it’s sort of a dick move to imply that a complete stranger is acting like a drug addled harpy, but she certainly was stumbling. Every thirty seconds or so, she’d look at the clock, and every two minutes she’d either apologize for being such a “horrible” GTF or tell us something about herself in an effort to eat up more class time. It was through one of these impromptu candid admissions that she explained how she wanted to go to grad school but couldn’t afford it, and so she applied to be a GTF so she could get a scholarship, despite the fact that, quote, “I always forget everything I’m doing in front of people.”

My heart went out to her, this poor young woman shoehorned into attempting to face one of her limits; a truly impossible battle. Every time she’d grimace at the clock or apologize for herself or crack a weak joke and then mutter, “So painful…” when nobody laughed, I couldn’t help but smile because she reminded me so much of myself. As we got further into the class and her apologies and self-deprecating statements became more common, I found myself wanting to get one of those big foam fingers and write “KELLY IS #1!!!” on it and then sit in the front row waving it around, or maybe make a giant sign that said “YOU’RE DOING OKAY, BUT TRY TO PROJECT A LITTLE MORE FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK MAYBE? JUST A THOUGHT!!”

So good luck to you, Kelly. At least one person in the class gets what you’re going through.

Truman Capps changed the name of his GTF, but if any of “Kelly’s” superiors are reading this and can figure out who she is, please don’t fire her – her heart is in the right place. And, once again for comedy’s sake, pantalones.