Pressing On

A day in the life of a first-year teacher, on the reservation.

It was the day of finality. It was a holy square amount of days that had passed since the Ides.

The number of rejects enrolled in this basement-minded class was a repidigit, a number that had double the digits but was really a multiple of ten more than its solitary counterpart. The actual attendance number for this mentally-draining, stress-inducing slush course was a whole number one-half less than the mean between naught and the first repidigit.

That was the mean attendance over the last quarter of study anyway. Not ironically, the sum of mean attendance and the number enrolled is the holy square. The holy number is one less than the mean attendance, and is of sacred importance to the cultural ancestors of this redundant section of adolescence. The holy square is also of sacred importance, and it is found by multiplying the holy number by itself.

That may sound culturally insensitive, but I speak in code when I attempt to protect the innocent.

Yet by that time in life and because of the current times we live in, innocence has really gone by the wayside.

Like a song by a minstrel quartet that hailed from a Virginia city called Charlottesville, I dread the return trip from the coffee pot in the front office. That mixture of hormones and emotions could blow up worse than dividing the mean number of attendees by the Mayan contribution to our number system.

My best friend during the day, my coffee cup, would see itself filled and emptied half the holy number of times. It goes like this: filled at 12:41pm, emptied by 12:43pm, refilled at 12:45pm, and re-emptied by 12:47pm.

After I’ve filled for a third time, the shakes of dread where replaced by mental disassociation, and some slight euphoria. It’s that feeling you get when you ingest some sizable amount of a controlled substance.

Even with those feelings, it only sustains me for the long trudge down the main corridor toward that little hole-in-the-wall I call my classroom. As I wandered from the point of sweet safety to the point of eternal damnation, the shrillness of the machine-gun signal bell would jolt me back to my earthen existence.

My daily roster of thoughts would attempt to release the calming fluids inside me, but it was almost always too little solace.

Remember these maxims every time…

• You chose this career, it didn’t choose you.
• This is a duty to achieve empowerment for the greater good.
• This is the way to teach the future generations about logical thought.
• It was never about the money, it was about the belief.
• It was about building up bridges, not burning them down.
• It was about passing on your love for this subject.

Maybe you’re here just because you are, and nothing more.

Yet, so shall you think, and so shall you be.

After ten minutes of wasted time due to tardiness, forgotten supplies, and unnecessary socializing, the shifting crowd would settle in from lunch.

I would see the same sullen faces stare at me blankly like I was the variable, the unknown in a linear equation. The same faces I perceived to be dull or even slower in the mind at the outset of the school year. The same faces I later found out had all sorts of emotional baggage when they entered my numerical domain.

They would challenge me Charlottesville-style with this question: What is the emotional variable must you solve for today?

Every day, it would be reworded.

• What is making me tick today?
• What is going to set me off?
• What fact or facts must you find out for yourself so you can make this young learner attempt to learn?
• Are you going to give up yet?

As always, I had my list of answers.

• If it wasn’t sullenness, it was boredom.
• If it wasn’t boredom, it was famine.
• If it wasn’t famine, it was thirst.
• If it wasn’t thirst, it was mental vagueness.
• If it wasn’t mental vagueness, it was peer pressure.
• If it wasn’t peer pressure, it was substance abuse.
• If it wasn’t substance abuse, it was outright contempt.

And I would never find that Holy Grail that all professional educators look for.

How do you challenge a student to learn?

I could understand the inner workings of a spreadsheet program. I could master the Mathematica and Maple programs after only a few hours of study and tinkering. I could comprehend the complexities of the Gamma Distribution. I could recite verbatim the divergences and similarities between an isomorphism and homomorphism. I could derive Tartaglia and Cardan’s cubic equation formula from scratch. I could even do the same for Ferrari’s quartic equation formula.

From complex numbers to proofs on hierarchies of infinities, I could simply comprehend all this lower level and upper level subject matter.

But, I still don’t understand how to get a student to learn successfully.

How do you challenge the younger ones to learn from you?

There’s no straightforward answer, and that’s my solace.

This group, this number of learners one-half less than the mean between the Mayan contribution and the first repidigit, will learn totally, learn mostly, learn tacitly or not learn at all.

And on this day, this holy square number of days after the Ides, I press on like a denizen from Philippi during the time of St. Paul of Tarsus. I press on praying for that spark of imagination, that charge of learning.

I press on with my lecture on the basics of metric measurement.

I press on despite the stares of apathy and derision.

I press on despite that the retention rate with these kids may be next to nil.

I press on just because. I press on because I must press on.

Like a loyal, stubborn, ornery hound dog, I absorb the abuse and internalize it as “going with the flow.”

My mentor informed me, “Don’t sweat the small stuff, because it’s all small stuff.”

And from this group of youngsters, the spark of learning fires like a spark plug during engine turnover.

And it comes not from the depressed young lady who looks eternally weary, probably contemplating suicide from lack of love on the home front.

And it comes not from the senior male who sits in the back left corner, who knows that getting by in the world takes minimal effort.

And it comes not from the other senior male who sits in the back left corner, who thinks not in metric units, but in units of gorillas and John F. Kennedy headshot coins.

And it comes not from the junior male who sits at the front of the class, who’s only here because his father is well-connected in the educational establishment and this slush class will keep him on the honor roll.

It came from a wholly unexpected source, a source that made the day’s class hexagonal instead of pentagonal.

This young man, this legally-aged freshman whom some fear as being a copy of Kip Kinkel or of Dylan Klebold, was given this charge to learn. And he charges with it, answering questions when I call on him and calling me over when he’s mystified with terms like millimeter and centimeter. He takes his time and finishes the homework I assigned before the class period is concluded by the sound of the machine-gun bell.

Before the next bit of shrillness, he cracks a smirk at me and says “Thank you.”

And he walks on toward his next class.

And I feel better about my choice of profession.

Six initially came in: five left the same way as before, one left a better person.

The next day rolls around and I stare at the coffee pot exactly at 12:41pm. My reflection casts a spell. It mimics the raising of my eyebrows. Was that episode a dream? Did it really happen?

And then reality sets in: it did happen, you dramatic knucklehead.

“Don’t sweat the small stuff, because it’s all small stuff,” my mentor’s voice echoed in the infinite vastness of my mind.

The secretary switches on the radio and the boys from Charlottesville come on with their wonderful sound and lyric, and like the way I mark the end of my solved problems, the dual slash marks called the meaning, the moral comes to me.

The good things in your chosen profession will always remind you that you made the right decision.

On this day though, would the joke be on me?

I don’t know, but whatever the result, I choose to accept it as it is. I choose to think positively about the outcome.

If think that way, you will be that way. And pressing on soothes me so much.

Reviews

[TLK]

THIS HAS NOT BEEN REVIEWED.
TO THE TLK-MOBILE.

/feet, running.

Not being a Native American, I enjoyed the references to the holy / sacred number, which I searched and found was four before the coffee cup filling gave it away. I'm interested that numerology is so pervasive. I guess in modern times one example would be 11:11 wishing. And, of course, triskaidekaphobia.

Being a teacher, this piece sent shivers. "who’s only here because..." sums up one student. I'm afraid that all students have elements of only being there because. In a world where education and learning are expected, they are therefore taken for granted.
Many people in the UK look to countries full of poverty and commend them for having so many eager schoolchildren. Well, in a place where learning is truly a route out of squalor, it will be appealing. In the UK, learning doesn't make all that much of a difference and, from what I've heard, there are many problems with college education in America too (especially law degrees). In a place where people can expect to be comparatively rich regardless, why concern yourself about learning? I mean, no-one learns for the sake of it, do they? We have too many screens to look at, to divide our attention, and to split our experiences down so small that they are blissfully irrelevant. Relevance is the enemy, because it requires understanding, and understanding requires the self-sacrifice of effort.
Also, I note, just because those countries I have mentioned have extremely motivated schoolchildren, a lack of resources means many cannot cope (materially and/or educationally). And what is left for them when they give up?

Finally, I find that the choice of title is very compelling.

[Kenneth The Poet]

Thank you. I am a teacher too (that's my main job, register jockey is not) and I wrote this when I was a first year teacher. I have taught on two Native American reservations and I find myself at home there oddly enough. The four is a number sacred to that culture which is why I used it so much. It's about the frustration I experienced there, but written in a fictionalized, idealized what if manner.