Work: Strong Language

To walk down a crowded high school corridor is to visit a Babel of bad words.  The cacophony of curses that bounces off the cinder block walls during the morning locker rush shows more creativity and attention to word craft than any student-penned sonnet I've read in 10 years.

I should be offended, but the truth is I love bad words.

This wouldn't be a problem if I were a stand up comedian or long-haul trucker, but I am a high school teacher and so while I spend my days awash in profanity I am strictly forbidden from indulging myself. 

Earlier in my career the requisite restraint actually bled over into the rest of my life.  When Big E was born, I spent the final eight of my twenty-four hours of unmedicated labor at the birth center, and though by the end I was chanting over and again to the midwife, "I'm dying; you're killing me," I never once used a swear word in the birthing room.

Three years deeper into my career, I gave birth to Little E, again unmedicated.  This time, though, I did let the s-word slip just once as I tried to express to the labor nurse the intensity of one particularly effective contraction.

And now?  Well, I may indulge a little too frequently.  My husband, as if trying to reduce the profanity footprint of our household has gone all Ned Flanders on me.  Last spring, he injured his ankle playing soccer and told me that it "hurt like holy heck."  I took this to be about a two on a pain scale of one to ten and was only mildly sympathetic.  I felt bad when an x-ray a few weeks later showed that he'd chipped the bone but consoled myself by noting that I'd have been a better nurse if he'd communicated more effectively.  Free-floating bone fragments are more properly categorized as hurting "like goddamn f*@k." At minimum.

I try hard not to reveal my trashmouth side to the girls.   Yet when I was still sleep-deprived and hormonal from Little E's arrival, I must have let one slip because one day in a fit of pique Big E, then just over three, turned to me, glared and announced coldly, "You're a f*@king."  I gasped in horror and watched a deep satisfaction well up within her as she enjoyed my shock.

I mention all of this because I am starting The Catcher in the Rye with my two sophomore classes and thus nearing the day that comes in every school year in which literature compels me to unleash a string of profanity on my students, and by that I mean the infamous Chapter 25 and its five f-bombs. 

Where normally I dance euphemistically around swear words and adult content in class, in this case the wording is essential to the novel and the narrator's voice and because I love this book and want my students to as well, I often read it aloud to them. And so each year I find myself welling up with a little satisfaction of my own as I watch my students' shock at seeing their mild-mannered English teacher use such language without turning to dust.

Over the years, reactions have varied.  Some students blush.  Some want to analyze those particular pages in great depth so as to prolong the swearing.  Last year, when I read the chapter during a particularly frustrating time in my career, my sympathetic students responded with encouraging nods and a smattering of applause.

This year, though, I considered not reading it.  With my new part-time schedule, the frustration and anxiety that I used to feel about balancing everything has pretty much dried out and my new relaxed, satisfied outlook on work and life in general makes the thought of saying the f-word to a roomful of 16-year-olds feel irresponsible and a bit tawdry.

But, then I thought some more.  Life is short and swearing is fun.  So, why the f*@k not?

Work: Flight Plans

The secret of success is making your vocation your vacation.

Mark Twain said this.  I was introduced to it on an MCAS practice test that I gave my students in my first year of teaching in an urban high school.  I stood in my windowless classroom full of teens, some struggling with poverty others with adjusting to the climate and language of a new country, trying to convince them of the relevance of not only Twain's aphorism but also of this test that would decide their academic fate. I wondered where this experience fell on the range of vacations.  Was this Hawaii or was I in Beirut?

 I alternately, and at times simultaneously, loved and hated what I was doing that year, but I always knew that it was no vacation.  Ten years later, work is no longer the wild ride that it once was.  I have grown more comfortable with my abilities and sharpened my instincts in the classroom.  I had children of my own and recalibrated my priorities.  My students have rewarded me much more often than they've punished me  And still, it is a vocation and never a vacation.

There are things that I love about my job: the students, the chance to read The Catcher in the Rye  on endless loop, the fact that it helps to pay the mortgage.  There are other things that I don't like as much.  The mounds of grading come to mind, along with the general lack of official recognition of my efforts, which when coupled with my duties at home sometimes feel Herculean.  There is also the fact that I am an introvert who cringes at conflict, and I am working in a position that calls daily for hundreds of personal interactions, each fraught with potential for discord and misunderstanding.  I sometimes feel rubbed raw.

Maybe nothing can be a vacation once it is tied to a paycheck.  When I read The Catcher in the Rye, I tell my students to pretend that I am not giving it to them, that they just pulled it off the shelf on their own.  I know that obligation saps enjoyment.

And yet, especially lately, I believe there's more. I just don't know what it is. So I sit here in the terminal, hands folded in my lap, patiently awaiting my vacation flight.  Unfortunately, I am forgetting that I am not only tour director but the pilot, as well.   If I don't get out of my seat, the plane will never pull up to the gate.

I am thinking about drafting some flight plans.

Dream: Glass Cases

I am a much better curator of memories than I am a liver of moments.

I have been reminded of this a lot over the past few weeks.  I cross state lines to cheer on my college football team and even referenced the school in my daughters' middle names, and yet on the day I graduated I was so happy to leave that I swore I would never go back.  The other night I felt myself tearing up nostalgically at the movie Dumbo as Mrs. Jumbo lovingly inspected her new baby, but I spent Big E's babyhood reduced to a jiggling heap of frustration and anxiety.  This morning at school a group of exchange students from France arrived and I sentimentally recounted to my students my own sophomore year trip to Paris; it wasn't until I was in the parking lot that I remembered how my host family had sent me up to a cold, lonely bedroom to wait for hours before dinner.

Coincidentally, it was during those chilled Gallic hours that I first read (and then re-read) The Catcher in the Rye whose protagonist Holden fixates on the glass-cased dioramas at The American Museum of Natural History.  Fearful of change, he appreciates their static nature.  This is close to the opposite of my need for glass cases, for it is only after things have changed that I can look back fondly at the diorama of days gone by. 

It is not that I never gaze appreciatively on a sweet moment, it is just that my eye is drawn more often to the less dazzling details: the children are whining, the house is a mess, I have a backpack full of grading to do.  Later, in my mental exhibition, I will polish and position it all to its best advantage.  I will see only the golden sunny vacation, the fun-filled playdate, the weekend of lounging with the family. 

Really, that is what I am doing with this blog and probably why I have been enjoying it so much.  I can take an experience, say venting work frustrations on my husband or pouting on a family skating trip and imbue it with sage like observations.  I am no longer a shrew or a party-pooper, I am wise and reflective.  I am Doogie Howser, M.D., without the genius IQ and the bedside manner.

Here is where I should claim some plan to change this aspect of me.  But I don't really think I can do that; it's too deeply ingrained.  I will, however, try not to share my dark vision with those around me.  Beyond that, all I can do is appreciate the gift of an optimist's memory.  It is, after all, the memories that endure.