Good morning, team! says the Google chat they made me install on my phone when I started at this job six months ago. Looking forward to a joyfully driven professional day!
On Twitter, the world is ending. A nuclear war is threatening, ice caps are melting, kids at school are shooting other kids at school. At work, I wear collared shirts and cardigans and black wool dress pants and clip a set of keys around my neck and no one makes much mention of the world outside.
Once a week, more sometimes, when I get a seat on the train and am tired enough not to acknowledge what I’m doing, I check Sasha’s mostly dormant Facebook—she has college photos and a handful from right after. A girl with whom she roomed her sophomore year, whom I knew vaguely, reposts the same handful of old photos every couple years; We were so young! this girl says, every time that it comes up, look at us. Twenty-year-old Sasha stares at me, over and over, too much how I remember: defiant, careless posture, perfect face, her too-big eyes.
I check her hardly active Twitter. Three years ago, she retweeted a New Yorker article on Miami Beach and climate change.
I check her sister’s and her mother’s Facebooks—sometimes she’s in their pictures—to be sure that she’s still there.
At work, two blocks north of the subway, in a big brick building, through two large, heavy doors, I walk past the scanners where the kids stand in line to have their bodies and their books checked. I tip my coffee to the security guards and the kids I know.
A handful of them call out my last name.
I take attendance on the live attendance tracker and talk to my two co–homeroom teachers, who are my only friends at work. They are black women, and I’m white; for a long time they didn’t trust me, until one day they decided they could trust me, and still sometimes it seems like they might not. We are all older than our other colleagues; one of my two co–homeroom teachers is the only other person in this building with a kid. They didn’t trust me because they shouldn’t trust me, because there’s so much I don’t know or understand about them, because sometimes I lie to them about my upbringing to make my life seem more like theirs.
I think they trust me mostly because we love the kids we teach.
We check the various apps and Google calendars where the deliverables for the day are laid out and we post the morning PowerPoint about the new lateness policy, about the new rules concerning the dress code: only black socks are permitted, shirts must be tucked in at all times and belts worn, shoes must be black and sneakers aren’t allowed.
I teach two classes in the morning, both Junior Literature and Language, and my job’s completely fine as long as I am with my students. We read Hamlet and they raise their hands. I’ve been given a curriculum, rote and predictable, test-prep focused, but I ignore it. We read and we have conversations. They do group work, stand up together and give presentations on chart paper. My students are all black and brown kids, underserved, reduced- or free-lunch charter-school kids. They are still daily—by the shoddy, half-assed education that they’re getting every day at this place, from grown-ups who mostly look like me—being underserved.
I catch a kid on his phone in my first class of the day and he smiles at me and looks five so I don’t reprimand him. Put it away, I say, trying to look angry. There is a system that we’re meant to use for discipline. Infractions: majors, minors. I have not installed this system on my phone. I have not, in the five months so far that I’ve been teaching at this institution—we spent one month before that training—given out one of these infractions.
My coteacher is twenty-four and does not know how to be a teacher. He also does not know how to interact with other humans or how to define the word “soliloquy.” He stands in the back of the room and tries to give kids infractions and I tell him not to or take them away later, logging on to the system on my computer and disappearing the detentions he’s doled out. He crosses his arms over his chest and tells kids to sit up or push their chairs in. Mr. D, they call him, instead of his full name, and he shakes his head. That’s not my name, he says. And the kids laugh and, halfhearted, say they’re sorry; a few minutes later, they call him Mr. D again.
Mr. D, they say, I have to pee this minute.
He clenches his fists.
But really, they say, it’s an emergency, Mr. D.
Not now, he says.
I pop my head up from the student paper that I’m reading, trying to tell whoever said this without talking that they should stop it, but also, if they don’t stop it, I will understand.
Go, I say, to the kid who still has to use the bathroom.
Mr. D stands quiet, his jaw tighter, eyes set on me, and no one speaks to him for the rest of class.
At lunch, my two co–homeroom teachers sit with me and we talk shit about our coworkers instead of
