PLVS VLTRA

Early in the 1994 film adaptation of Jurassic Park, we are shown what appears to be a basketball court in an inexcusable state of overgrowth: a large, fenced-in rectangle of assorted prehistoric foliage with a fairly conspicuous lack of dinosaurs. We can hear, however, high-pitched screeching noises and dull collisions, and the fence rattles. The park game warden, Robert Muldoon - a pithy, unsmiling Australian with an affinity for honestly-pretty-short khaki shorts - explains that the pen holds velociraptors (the dinosaur supervillains of the film) but that they are kept below ground level due to safety concerns. The park attorney, a short, unlikable man in a double-breasted suit, balks at the suggestion that the raptors could possibly be that dangerous. That same lawyer is later eaten by a dinosaur while sitting on the toilet.

They are that dangerous, Muldoon explains, squinting, and the noises are the sounds of the raptors testing the electric fence. They hurl themselves against every square inch in a systematic test for weakness – they never attack the same spot twice. The combined force of his grimace and the exposed length of ashen man-thigh convey the deadly weight of the situation.

As I watched the movie recently, I realized that in a lot of important respects, velociraptors aren’t so different from another species no less feared for its intelligence and diabolical cunning: the North American High Schooler.

For the past four months, I have been a high school English teacher - first at Williamsburg Preparatory High School in Brooklyn, and currently at Hartford Public High School in Connecticut. I’m a corps member of Teach For America, a program which places (mostly) recent college graduates as teachers in America’s neediest schools. Nearly one hundred percent of the students at my current school qualify for free lunch. That economic disadvantage means my most advanced students - students who, had they been born into more fortunate circumstances, would easily be performing at a college level - are currently near the level of academic development appropriate for a ninth grader. The overwhelming majority of my students perform on a fifth or sixth grade level.

Teach For America’s mission is to close the achievement gap between rich and poor, a gap nowhere more apparent than here in Hartford - America’s second-poorest city, located in its second-richest state. TFA enlists young people from around the country, people who will keep up the fight for the rest of their lives by remaining in the classroom or seeking to effect change on a national level. Needless to say, having seen the many faces of the achievement gap filling up the rows in my classroom, I, too, am determined to do everything within my power to chisel away at the gap.

The real trouble with that, though, is that at the moment, I kind of suck at teaching.

And by “kind of suck,” I mean I suck heroically. I suck for every second of every minute of every day. I suck prolifically, defiantly – the magnitude of my suck is majestic. My suckitude is a robust and broad-shouldered thing, an elemental suck without age or time, a brutish, lumbering golem of suck.

But let’s go back to dinosaurs. For the past four months, I have been the electric fence.

I graduated from Furman in May and some six weeks later I found myself standing in front of forty bemused New York City high schoolers. With my heart racing and my mouth dry, I clung to my clipboard - the sole indicator of my counterfeit authority - like a childhood blanket. “Wait,” one student asked, “do I get credit for this class? Is this real school?”

I wasn’t quite sure how to answer. Real? Well, we’re in a school, so, y’know, that’s something. And I printed out some worksheets and things. Does that count? – I’ve got a clipboard! 

That initial month in Brooklyn was grueling. Hartford is a little more comfortable, if only because my shortcomings have become more routinized and I’ve gotten to know my kids pretty well. Yet even the students who like me - those who regard me with an air of warm and empathetic pity - still test me. The process is unrelenting. Did I omit a detail from a worksheet? “Mr. C, this doesn’t make any sense! I quit!” Did I reprimand one child for saying “damn” in my classroom while failing to hear another detonate an F-bomb (often rather spectacularly) some eight feet away? “Mr. C, that’s not fair! You’re picking favorites!” Did I misplace an overhead transparency? Ooh boy - grounds for a whole-class verbal gang-up. No inch untested.

They don’t do it out of spite. This is a key realization, one that I - along with the rest of my fellow new teachers - make and re-make on a regular basis. Most of my kids, due to their circumstances outside of school, crave structure - they crave structure because structure makes them feel comfortable. Though little else in their world might be stable or secure, school provides them with routine, expectations, regularity – in short, safety. So they test the fence to make sure the fence is there. They test it before class, during class, after class, in detention, in the hallways, in the lunchroom, on the way to the buses and probably on the buses too.

As the full weight of being responsible for the future success of 90 young lives has slowly made itself apparent, my inner adolescent, stalked into a corner, is making his desperate last stand. Muttering profanities and swigging messily from a bottle of cheap booze, he too hurls himself against the fence. AT LEAST THE WEEKENDS, he screams. YOU’RE A BORE - A BORE! YOU’RE OLD! YOU PROMISED YOU’D NEVER BE LIKE THIS! He lets out a frustrated screech not dissimilar to the raptors’ (whose noises in the film, if I recall correctly, were a combination of something like industrial machinery and the sounds of dolphin intercourse.) YOU CAN WAKE UP EARLY AND DO IT THEN! Robert Muldoon sneers and adjusts his microscopic shorts.

So what is “the fence,” you might rightly ask? I’ve sort of made it my central metaphor, and, as an English major – a product of Furman’s finest department – I should really have an answer to that question. But I don’t – not yet. What strength will guide my students to (hopefully) make a year and a half’s worth of academic growth in ninth grade? What boundary will ensure that my inner adult emerges victorious from my all-too-frequent crises of self? I don’t know and I might not know for a while. In the meantime, I only have faith – faith that, given time and the continued support of my truly extraordinary friends and colleagues, the answer will make itself apparent. And for now, faith will do.

____________________________________________________

Note: this was originally written for Furman’s English department alumni newsletter, but it will almost certainly not be published due to being unacceptable in nearly every conceivable way. I figured I’d post it here since I haven’t updated in ages.

Well, I’m back in the warm and welcoming arms (and the warm and welcoming 400 thread count sheets) of the Meriden Comfort Inn, back where it all began some five weeks ago. Though it was fairly pleasant yesterday, the weather has since quickly corrected itself and returned to the nasty grey perma-drizzle of Induction, thus confirming my suspicion that the sun does not, in fact, ever shine on Meriden, Connecticut, the place that God forgot.

It was deeply odd walking back through the lobby doors again. I don’t want to be so dramatic as to claim I was a different person last time I was here, so I’ll instead say that the last time I was here I was merely different. This is 1) broader and more easily defensible, 2) true, and 3) the sort of dimly nuanced and generally unfulfilling observation that I would characteristically make at such an opportunity for reflection.

The truth is the memories are already becoming an enormous coffee-stained blur. One thing I can say, though, was that Institute was genuinely fun. I mean, yeah, it’s hard and all that, but it’s a situation not unlike going to war - because your circumstances are so extreme, you form equally extreme bonds with the people around you, and you form them quickly. I’ll miss a number of people very much, not least among them my kids - even the ones who occasionally sent me home dead-eyed on the bus after a day of havoc and gleeful recalcitrance. I really wish I had some way of knowing what would happen to all of them. They’re good kids, each one, and I wish I could have done more for them.

I’ve had a number of discussions with other corps members about TFA’s belief that every child, no matter how seemingly apathetic or defiant, wants to succeed in school. That particular position was by turns the most comforting and challenging thing to remember in the classroom. On a good day it seemed totally self-evident as I watched even my most difficult kids plugging into the lesson, engaging in vigorous debate or writing feverishly as some idea finally revealed its full, staggering depth. On a bad day, that statement seemed like a taunt - every child? That can’t be right. Even Rex? Surely when they say every, they really mean most. Yet on neither day was it any less true.

Friday was the last day of Institute, and we closed out the summer with a final gathering of the K561 staff in the school’s cafeteria. It was a truly odd feeling to be completely finished and to know I’d likely never be back in the school - I feel a little guilty, too, because for most of the last week of institute, I feel like I wasn’t all there - at least when I wasn’t teaching. I was conserving my energy and enthusiasm for my time with my kids, and the rest of the time I was on auto-pilot.

I want to share two final anecdotes from class, one funny and one important.

On the last day of class, Emily and I decided to take the last three or four minutes to answer questions about ourselves. One student asked if I was going back to Atlanta eventually and I told him I didn’t know. When they asked how old we were, Emily and I both responded that we were 22, fully expecting outrage and shock - instead, most of the kids just said something like “that sounds right” or “I thought you were, like, 23 or 24 maybe.”

I couldn’t help but be struck by the fact that, given the chance to ask Emily and I anything they wanted, all of the kids’ questions were innocently curious - they were really more interested in finding out who the hell we were and why we were teaching them than trying to make a scene.

I don’t remember who asked the last question, but it caused a bit of a hush to fall over the classroom - “how much do you two get paid?”

Emily and I turned briefly and smiled at each other, and Emily answered “nothing.”

“Nothing? What do you mean, nothing?”

“Nothing,” I said, “we’re doing this for free.”

“FREE? FREE? YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR FREE? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?” yelled one otherwise quiet kid.

Emerald, a look of amused surprise on her face, said “Hell, I wouldn’t put up with me for four weeks without getting paid.”

The best, though, was Rex. Utterly astonished, mouth hanging open, he stammered “Free? I, mister…I really didn’t…I’m so sorry! If you woulda told me you were doing this for free, I wouldn’t have…damn, I didn’t know!”

…

As refreshing as it was to know that Rex was doing it on purpose the entire time and knew better, nothing else touches the moment I had with another student, Grace. Grace was part of the group that I called “the Superstars” - the kids who could easily derail an entire lesson if they coordinated their efforts. She seemed to struggle with the classwork at times, but it was hard to really gauge her level of understanding - she was receptive to one-on-one talks and seemed genuinely appreciative of extra help, but she would never let down her shield of defiance when other students were around. She didn’t always complete her work and I was a little worried about how she would perform on the final test.

When the day of the test came, I circulated around the classroom as the kids worked, making sure no one was asleep or quitting early. Grace seemed to be writing a fair amount and, oddly, didn’t stop when I walked by - typically walking by Grace’s desk was enough to make her put down her pen and give you that sardonic can-I-help-you? look.

As I graded tests later that day, I came across Grace’s about halfway through the stack. I quickly flipped through the pages and saw that she’d completed all of the questions and written the required essay - that was a good sign.

With each question I graded I became more excited and more nervous - soon, she’d gotten the first twelve questions right. Then she’d gotten the first thirteen right - fourteen! C’mon, Grace, c’mon, you’ve got this, I thought, you’ve got this!

With 22 of 23 short answer questions correct she had easily become the highest score so far. I eagerly turned to her essay and immediately saw clear organization, transition words between paragraphs (and we learned those the day the naked lady showed up!), direct quotation, paraphrase, supporting evidence - it was there, it was all there! I quickly tallied up the points and found Grace had scored a 96 on the final test. I decided to call Grace’s mom that night to share the good news, but then realized Grace was still in school - she was in Ms. P’s class upstairs.

I jogged up the stairs, took a visitor’s pass and went into Ms. P’s class to sit in the back (thanks, Claire!) When the bell rang a minute or two later, I followed Grace out the door. She’d already caught up with a group of her friends, and I called her name a few times. Eventually one of her friends noticed - “Grace, he’s calling you” - and Grace turned around, looking deeply inconvenienced.

“Grace, c’mere for a sec,” I said, and she trudged over to meet me in a corner of the hallway. “Tell me what you think you got on the final test.”

“Mister, I don’t know. It’s the end of the class, the day is over, I just want to go home. I don’t want to think about that any more.”

“Grace, you got a 96. You killed it, Grace, you tore it up - you’re the highest score in the class. I wanted to congratulate you.”

Grace absolutely melted. She clasped her hands over her beaming face, jumped into the air -

“Really?,” she said, “I did? A 96?”

“Yeah, Grace. A 96. You knocked it out of the park, and it was all you. You did an incredible job.”

She smiled for another few seconds and then looked at her shoes, suddenly shy.

“Well,” she mumbled sheepishly - but still smiling - “I guess I just had good teachers.”

Oof.

Well, I just wrapped my last teaching day at institute.

I’ll try to write a more comprehensive wrap-up post sometime soon, but I thought I’d share two things for now.

First - institute has introduced me to a strange new world of adult pleasures. That’s not half as raunchy as it sounds, either. The tiny, boring minutiae of existence are now intensely gratifying after a hard day at school. Shining my shoes, laundry, organizing my room, ironing - all that stuff actually brings me a feeling of deep satisfaction. I think this means one of two things: either I have taken an unexpected baby step toward adulthood or I have developed a real, honest-to-God mental illness. I would probably say the latter is more likely.

The other thing I want to share is the feedback I got from my end-of-course student surveys. The final two questions on the survey were “What was Mr. C’s biggest strength as a teacher?” and “What could Mr. C improve on?” (Note that my kids actually use my whole last name - I don’t do the Mr.-initial thing. I was told not to write it out because they’d Google me.)
Listed below are all of the responses I received.

What was Mr. C’s biggest strength as a teacher?

“Getting over on us”

“He made everything easy”

“He’s a loud speaker”

“Reading”

“I don’t know”

“Everything”

“One on one conversations”

“He helps us understand the lesson.”

“Being calm”

“Keeping my attention”

“I Really dont like you”

“Good at everything”

“Why you asking me that.”

“Sarcastic, funny.”

“Dont no”

“Explaining things”

What could Mr. C improve on?

“Speaking”

“He can write more on the board instead of just explaining it out loud”

“Giving people slack”

“I don’t know”

“Nothing”

“There was alot of writing.”

“Be more fun.”

“The way he teaches”

“Speaking a little louder and try better at keeping control”

“Don’t let power go to your head.”

“Nothing.”

“Ask Ms L.” (my collaborative partner.)

“Don’t know”

“Dont no”

“Talking”

Last Thursday, I experienced what was easily the single most ludicrous event of my entire life. While I know that a good number of people at the New York City institute have already heard this story, I will attempt to retell it here one final time in the hope of preserving a single, definitive account of the event.

Let me do some brief set-up. The scene is last Thursday, July 16th, 2009, in my classroom in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It’s about 9:40 am, and I’m in the first half of my lesson. The students have been really tense throughout all of Emily’s lesson - she’s presented her content really well, but the entire room is in a funk. There seems to be a little resentment simmering among the kids. They’re completing their work reluctantly if at all.

Hoping to exorcise the demons from the room, I start my lesson by declaring that I want the kids to write for five minutes - about anything. I just want them to write about whatever happens to be occupying them, and I tell them that they can dispose of the paper afterward or hand it in to me or send it to a pen pal or whatever, I don’t care. I just want them to write for five minutes.

So what I’m attempting to do at this point is reel the class out a bit. We’d had them in tight - they’d been following highly structured (but necessary) activities, so I allowed them a little free time to placate the desire for independence and control that seems fairly typical of the North American High Schooler.

It works pretty well. The kids seem notably calmer, and I begin to proceed with my lesson - transition words. Not riveting material, but certainly important, and I plan on covering it pretty quickly so the kids can move on to the drafts of their final essays.

And then it happens.

What I want you to do, reader, just briefly, is to imagine the opening notes of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”

Whrruuuuuuuuuuunng~~~~!

WHRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING~~~~!

WHRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING!!!!

For some reason, my students begin raising their sleep-sodden heads from their desks one by one with a degree of enthusiasm that suggests some stimulus other than transition words.

I glance around the room. My instruction trails off as I attempt to detect the object that has so suddenly commanded my students’ rapt attention. A giggle or two. I squint, looking for a note being passed or a cell phone.

Fortunately, my confusion is quickly resolved when a student yells “THAT LADY NAKED!”

As a herd of my fuzz-stached 15 year-old boys stampede across the room, I glance out the window to my right ever so briefly and instantaneously determine yes, indeed, that lady naked. There is a 20-something blonde hipster sitting, fully nude, in her window some twenty feet away from my classroom windows. I’m not talking about accidentally passing in front of the window, she’s sitting in it. Like, motionless. And I’m not talking topless, this is full-on, 100%, National Geographic naked.

“SHE NAKED! SHE NAKED! LOOK, THAT LADY NAKED!”

“OH SH*T! LEMME SEE LEMME SEE LEMME SEE!”

“EWWW SHE NEED TO PUT SOME CLOTHES ON! LOOK AT THAT, SHE’S JUST CHILLIN’!”

“WAVE AT HER! WAVE AT HER!”

…

There have been previous situations where I’ve lost control of my class, and it’s generally a nerve-wracking and profoundly draining experience. Now, I had no reasonable expectation of getting my kids’ attention back, and for a moment I allowed myself to revel in the utter absurdity of the situation. Out of all my institute training, there have been no Naked Lady In A Window sessions. I look to the back of my classroom where two other corps members are observing my lesson and both of them are agape, hands clasped over their mouths.

Seeing little other alternative, I let the circus continue for about a minute before trying to raise my voice above the din of frenzied adolescence. “ALRIGHT - ALRIGHT, I KNOW THIS IS - I know this is completely ridiculous. I know it’s Thursday and your weekend starts tomorrow and I know there’s a naked woman in the window. Yeah yeah yeah. But I really need everyone’s attention back - we’ve got too much left to get done. I know that naked lady is tremendously exciting, but that doesn’t compare to transition words, right?”

Oh, the uproar.

“Come on,” I said, “I know most of you have cable TV. It’s not so exciting. C’mon now, eyes back up here.”

Remarkably, a fair number of my students managed to get back on task after a few minutes, despite the fact that the woman remained completely naked, chain-smoking in her window for the next half hour. One or two kids, though, were utterly transfixed, and thrust their heads under the hastily-closed windowshades when they reckoned I wasn’t looking.

I confronted one kid, Andre, who is really bright and persuasive and also a perpetual disruption in class.

“Andre,” I said, “I know this is completely ridiculous, right? I know. It’s not like I’m going to pretend a naked lady sitting in her window is normal by any stretch of the imagination. But you really have to get to work. I don’t want to assign this stuff for homework and I know you know how to do it. Lemme see a little self-control.”

Andre looked at me with utter, piercing sincerity.

“Mr. C, - dawg, that’s a naked white lady. How often you think I get to see that?”

I just - I - wha - I mean, you - what? Pshffrrgfffhhhttttt…what? What?

How did this become my life?

And am I allowed to laugh at that?

I’ve been putting off this blog post for a while because I feel like I could write a dozen pages for every day I’ve spent in the classroom. Trying to condense everything I’ve experienced into a few paragraphs, the process of selecting the events I deem to have been the most important - it’s pretty intimidating. So I’m not going to think too much about it (as best I can), and I’ll just give a brief overview of the past two weeks.

To begin with, I don’t have “the students” or “the kids” anymore. Those were my standard verbal references for the first couple of days, but now - somehow - they’re “my kids.” I’m not sure what else I can say about that. It’s an immense thing to think through.

The first week was pretty rough. We started off with about 40 kids in the class, and as the week progressed, we were pushing 50. This is 1) strictly illegal and 2) taxing in every conceivable way. Hackneyed though it may be, that old saying “get knocked down seven times, get up eight” kept running through my head - but not necessarily in a positive way. I wasn’t just getting knocked down, I was getting TKO’d, sweat, blood and teeth afly. I mean, each day really did feel like a physical assault. The students knew I wasn’t entirely confident in my abilities, and they responded accordingly. I hadn’t yet gotten any rudimentary feel for lesson planning, and there were times when my own anxiety set my kids off like sharks after blood. Each day I would wake up enthusiastic, get absolutely railroaded during my instructional time, and then gradually work up a modicum of confidence again before I went to bed - only to be similarly wrecked the next day. It was rough. It was really rough.

I have never considered quitting - given the person I am and the significance this undertaking has developed, it’s simply not an option - but last week, I worried about the person I might become after two years of that kind of punishing, incomprehensible failure.

The problem, though, as I came to realize - with not-insignificant guidance from my fantastic advisor Mahaliel, was that I wasn’t being myself. I was trying to be some sort of archetypal teacher, the proto-teacher I’d mentally developed from my own years in school. But I wasn’t modeling my behavior after my favorite teachers. Rather, I was the bland sum-total of every person who’d ever stood in front of a white board and passed out assignments. As a result, I sucked. I really did. I sucked, and I wasn’t myself.

After that realization, I went into this week with a completely different mindset - though I was even more tired from hours spent planning better lessons, I started each day listening to happier music and getting into an enthusiastic and determined mindset. Before, my mindset had been “okay - just make it through. You’re tougher than these kids.” The truth is, though, I’m not tougher than these kids. If it comes down to sheer tough, I lose. These kids have seen things that are absolutely, unfathomably foreign to me. But I came to realize that these kids don’t necessarily need me to be tough - they need me to care. I need to be tough about some things, sure - I need to keep on them until they reach their full capacity for achievement, and then I need to push them even harder. But they don’t need a badass who’s interested in maintaining a perfect, silent class and firing off consequences for every minor infraction. That’s not me, and they knew it - whenever I felt my authority slipping away, I would crack down harder and make my voice that much louder. But a lot of these kids have seen mean before. They’ve seen loud. It’s not impressive. What seems to work - judging from this week - is me being a real human being. Not surrending control of my class - keeping that line firm and inflexible - but not being a capital-T teacher all the time.

That’s not to say I’ve got everything figured out. I certainly don’t, and I’ve got a long way to go. But last week, I actually said at one point - no lie - “I need silence in this room!” This week, when one of my triumvirate of attention-seekers goes off in class, I address their outburst quickly, quietly and efficiently, and then I go crouch by their desk and talk to them. What’s up? You seem like you’ve got a lot of spare energy today. Are you bored? Does this interest you? Could I get you a different story, maybe, that might be a little more challenging? What are you interested in?

Our advisors tell us all the time that student-teacher relationships are critical, and it sounded like every other dry piece of advice we’ve received - something that sounded nice on paper, but didn’t translate into my class. Only now am I beginning to see how absolutely crucial those relationships are. When I can pull Javier (not his real name) out in the hall and tell him that I, too, got bored with my reading assignments in high school and offer to make him copies of one of my favorite short stories - that’s the difference between Javier presenting a major behavioral issue and Javier developing his very real intellectual curiosity. When I pass Esteban on the street after school and he comes up to shake my hand and says “Hey, Mr. C!” I know that I’m doing something - no matter how tiny - better than I did last week.

I still don’t know if my mind has completely wrapped itself around how profoundly different my life is now. I think I subconsciously hold the full realization at bay. I’m still forced to confront it in glimpses, though - like this Thursday when I had one of my problem students out in the hall, pacing, frantic, explaining how much he hates school, as one of my very best students threw up into a trashcan nearby due to morning sickness.

It’s moments like those when I can’t help but think, you - you, the kid I have known and have been all my life - aren’t a kid anymore. You’re a real adult facing very, very adult challenges, and if you’re anything less than that same adult you are now posturing to be, you - and your kids - will fail. It’s an honor, it’s a challenge, it’s a thousand different things that I am not prepared to confront yet will anyhow, trusting my previously untapped reserves of inner strength and my deep care for my kids to see me through.

This has been a long entry and my thoughts are off in all directions, so I’ll close out with some statistics.

The average score on my class’s pre-assessment was a 27. Two weeks later, the average score on the mid-assessment was a 66.

It’s not perfect by any means, but they’re getting there. I’m getting there.

Here’s a brief institute anecdote.

So the sleep to work ratio is unreal. The vast majority of us stay up til at least midnight, and many people stay up significantly later than that. This wouldn’t be a problem if we didn’t have to wake up at five in the morning. Point is, we don’t sleep much, ever. We get on buses to our schools at six in the morning, we arrive at our schools at seven, we teach and attend sessions until four in the afternoon, we get back to St. John’s at five, eat until six, go to a night session from seven ’til eight thirty and then generally lesson plan until we go to bed. Rinse. Repeat.

I’m mentioning this for two reasons. First, because I wanted to get the oh-my-God-we-never-sleep thing out of the way early. It’s the big institute cliche to talk about how grueling the schedule is. Yes, it’s unrelenting. The surprising thing is that, despite being unrelenting, it’s really not so awful. Between activity, camaraderie and the obscene amounts of caffeine we get through, and we’re all accustomed to running on little sleep at this point.

The second reason I mention our sleep schedule is that it plays a major role in the anecdote I intended to start about two paragraphs ago. Last night I went to bed around 1:30 am - not great or awful by institute standards. I set my phone alarm for 5:30 am and fell asleep almost immediately. A few hours later I notice my phone alarm going off - I’m not sure how long it’s been going, but I glance at the clock and see that it’s half past the hour. Oh, expletive, I think, I missed the bus - I glance across the room and see my roommate has missed the bus too. I spring out of bed, still muttering obscenities, and dash to brush my teeth (while in the bathroom I attempt to simultaneously wash my hair. This is not a combination of activities that is possible for human beings.) I’m freaking out - I still had a little printing left to do, I don’t have my clothes put together, I don’t have the money for a cab. I finish brushing my teeth and run out into the common room of the dorm suite, shampoo lather still unwashed from the back of my head, and everyone else is gone. Of course. I wasn’t sure what else I was expecting.

I go back to my room to wake up my roommate and begin wondering how we both slept in accidentally - maybe the power outlet in the room? That doesn’t make sense, though, I realize, because my cell phone wasn’t plugged in, so the outlets shouldn’t have affected it. I decide to look at my room clock to see whether or not it’s still got power.

My room clock still has power. It still has power and it reads a dim “3:40 AM.”

At this point I feel really stupid. Just hugely, terrifically stupid. My phone alarm did go off, though, so I check to see what was wrong with my phone. Turns out my alarm didn’t go off. It was my text message notifier.

I had gotten an automated text message from Soulja Boy. At 3:30 in the morning. It read as follows:

“Get my brand new SBTE Romplr iPhone app n rmx Swag On, Crank That and Hey You, *Fab new MS tools!”

Mr. Tellem, you are a fab new MS tool. Fair warning to those of you considering making a phone call to six seven eight triple-nine eight two one two - you might get kissed through the phone in the wee, wee hours.

Week two, day one - that most anticipated of days. The first day in the classroom.

I’ll refrain from editorializing for now - my feelings and perceptions are all over the place, and I’ll put up a genuine update in a few days once I’ve had a chance to sit and collect my thoughts. I will, however, list a few quick facts about my first day as a teacher.

* The class was, at its fullest, made up of 42 students. I think we leveled off at 38. It seemed to be mostly composed of freshmen, but we had a few upperclassmen too. The difference, as best I could tell, is that freshmen are dour, uncooperative and defiant, while upperclassmen just seem tired. We spent a good portion of the lesson shuttling extra chairs and desks to our room and a number of our students came in later than halfway through the lesson (which was a diagnostic pre-assessment).

* About half of the students live in Queens, and the other half live in Brooklyn. I had them compare and contrast the two, and we arrived at three definitive conclusions.

1: Queens has more trees than Brooklyn.

2: Brooklyn has more subway routes than Queens.

3: Brooklyn has more crack cocaine than Queens.

This latter detail was volunteered as “Brooklyn has more rocks,” to which I eagerly responded, “There! That’s great. That’s a concrete detail - there are fewer rocks in Queens.” Roughly fourteen seconds later I realized that the student was not, in fact, referring to pebbles, cobblestones or boulders.

* The students’ abilities vary widely, but the students who presented behavior problems today largely performed at better-than-average levels on the pre-assessment. Hm.

As a concluding point, I noticed one such student - clearly very bright, very independent and very bored - sitting with the pre-assessment on his desk, not making an effort to complete any questions. I tried to prompt him as best I could, explaining my motivations, recommending the short story included in the pre-assessment, trying to make the prospect of having a go at the test sound more appealing than just sitting, and suddenly the kid, previously silent, turns to me and says, “just give up, okay?”

Oh no no, my man. I don’t think that’s gonna be happening.

was stupid-fun. Granted, it’s not over - it’s only Saturday night - but I would imagine tomorrow will be spent getting ready for my first-ever day teaching real live students on Monday (scary).

So after an abortive attempt at having fun in Manhattan last night, I went back again today with a crew of CT corps people to see the free Jenny Lewis and Conor Oberst show in Battery Park. It was a good time, though I have to admit I was a little disappointed it was Jenny Lewis and Conor Oberst rather than Rilo Kiley and Bright Eyes. When playing solo, the two seem to indulge their mutual tendency towards Woodstocky, feelin’-it jamminess, which gets old awfully fast if you’re not significantly intoxicated (which I wasn’t).

That said, it was still a great time. I know it’s sort of cliched to say that Jenny Lewis is sexy, but uh - Jenny Lewis is really, really sexy. Unbelievably talented, fun songs, great stage presence. Monsieur Oberst was wearing what appeared to be a large black sunhat and was apparently suffering under the delusion that he was, in fact, Neil Young. It’s been strange to see his evolution - the last time I saw him was 2005. Back then he had angular bangs, a tight black hoodie and an alcohol problem and sang songs that flirted with folksiness while remaining essentially emo in character. Nowadays all that’s gone (except maybe the alcohol problem) and he sings songs about, and I quote, “makin’ love in the back of a Cadillac” and “seein’ Dixie.” If that passes for authenticity these days, consider me unimpressed. I’ve seen Dixie. It’s regular.

I met up with Seth there, and it was fantastic seeing him again - I’ve been grappling with the fact that I reject 98.9% of the time I spent at Furman, so seeing him - one of the people from Furman I’ve always liked without any qualifications - now that I’ve sort of rebooted my existence, that was great. He came to a restaurant with me and the rest of the TFA crew, and we got a few pitchers of beer and had a good time - the incredible thing was that when the waiter figured out we were TFA, he gave us two of the pitchers for free, because “You guys are actually going out there and goddamned doing something to make a difference.” That was a pretty cool feeling.

We wandered around for a little while until we noticed the Jersey City fireworks starting - we watched those for a while and they were really pretty (did anyone else see the cutting-edge smiley face fireworks this year?) until the much, much more impressive NYC fireworks started over the Hudson nearby. I have a lot of moments up here where I realize I’m really doing something new and radically different, that my circumstances have changed in a huge way, but seeing Fourth of July fireworks in New York was a particularly strong example. It was really a gorgeous night for being outside, and the fireworks display was a perfect addition. Just damn.

We went back to Queens, hit another bar there and talked some rubbish before coming back. I suppose I felt compelled to make a blog post about it all not because it’s particularly interesting - granted, the show and the fireworks and the free beer were all interesting enough for me - but mostly because today just felt really significant. Things are different now, they’re way different, and I really like that.

I have now been officially hired as a ninth grade English teacher at Hartford Public Schools’ Freshman Academy.

Well, the second day of institute has come to an end. To recap - on Sunday we traveled from Meriden, CT to New York City and we’re now staying in dorms at St. John’s University in Queens. The first day of institute, I have to admit, was hell - I got something like two hours of sleep and had contracted some sort of general feel-bad-and-cough-a-lot illness that’s currently bouncing around campus. I also didn’t eat breakfast, forgot my iPod and didn’t have any coffee to drink. I felt like reheated death. Fortunately today was worlds better - got much more sleep and in doing so slept off most of whatever bug I’d had, got breakfast, got coffee, and had motivational music ready for the morning bus trip (”Let’s Work” by Prince. I seem to have developed a minor fixation - apologies to Phil Collins).

Today was also far better because I had some idea about what to expect - beyond being in crap condition yesterday, the whirlwind of sessions and activities was deeply disorienting. I felt way more on top of things today, and we got started on our lesson plans. I’m really eager to have students next Monday - I think I’ll do pretty well. Of course, that could very possibly be new-teacher naivete, but even so I’m excited to face my first crashing failure if that’s the case.

Another big reason I’m feeling so positive about institute is the group of people I’m working with - my corps member advisor Mahaliel is incredibly helpful and a really cool guy. As much as I believe in the TFA mission I tend to be wary of the occasionally-excessive jargon, and he speaks to us with remarkable honesty and candor. My collaborative partner, Emily, is also fantastic - the two of us are a teaching team and will trade off lessons in the classroom throughout the summer. She’s got some teaching experience and is generally way, way better than me, but fortunately she puts up with my amateur cluelessness and I’m certainly very thankful for that.

While I am feeling pretty optimistic, I don’t mean to imply that institute isn’t hard, because it is. It’s really hard. We put in 14-hour days, we’re up early in the morning and awake late at night, we have little to no free time and the food sucks. It’ll only get harder once we have real live unpredictable students to add to the equation. The difficulty is what makes it so exhilarating, though - it’s a great feeling to look yourself in the mirror and realize you’re easily capable of far more than you’d ever guessed. I know that sounds like a motivational poster, but hey.

Perhaps the most significant development, though, it that it looks like I’ve got a job - I’m going through the hiring process to become an English teacher at Hartford Public Schools’ 9th Grade Academy starting this fall. I can’t say how excited I am about that. Kids will be standing on desks in no time.

Definitely looking forward to the weekend - it’ll mean a welcome opportunity to sleep in and do some laundry, July 4th, and hopefully seeing some friends from around the city.