What I saw that spring day was a woman who had been holding it in until this moment. She opened the door, walked partway into the room and looked at me with a particularly defeated face. I was taken aback - this was unusual.
I asked her if she’d had a rough day. She nodded, set down her briefcase, and covered her face with her hands. This was a woman who rolled with the punches, who took setbacks in stride, who was, when it was called for, the calm eye in the center of a hurricane. She didn’t break easily. To see her with her hands over her face was the equivalent of a normal human being uttering a primal scream. Not good.
Judy was a Grade 12 teacher in the waning years of a remarkably successful career. One of her three classes that semester was delicately called Retention - a class dedicated solely to keeping potential dropouts in school. It was a Herculean task. She had maybe eighteen kids, ages 16-19. These were the misfits, the troublemakers, the lost souls, in and out of a school of 1800 teenagers. Her job was to provide them with 80 minutes of sanity a day. The last thing these kids needed was to drop out of school. It would simply compound all the other bad decisions in their past lives.
Judy, I should mention, is my wife. We’re both teachers. If you have trouble distinguishing us, just watch both of us teach. She’s the star. I’m the plumber.
The Retention class was a decent effort to rescue those who were drowning in their own seas of anguish. In theory, the teacher would help each youngster with their other courses, keeping them organized and on task so that they could eventually earn enough credits to graduate.
In theory, Communism works. In fact, Judy was on any given day counselor, referee, listener, simplifier, organizer, and shoulder to cry on. Above all she was calm and non-judgmental. No teacher wanted any of this group individually. It was a hard, hard sell to ask a teacher to take them all on as a group.
Judy raised her hand to volunteer. She is somebody who meets people where she finds them, being neither overly excited about the student loved by all nor remote and severe with that child who has wrecking-balled his way through school. She simply met students on their path and slowly carved out sublime relationships. Judy was calm, reliable, non-judgmental…and present. Most of these kids didn’t have someone in their lives who was both present and present willingly. Kids liked her, but did not eagerly shed their protective skins for her. They were not models of decorum.
Rarely did Judy work with a full class. Often one or more had court appointments, appearing before a judge on charges that were sometimes exuberant indiscretions, but often quite serious. It was not uncommon to lose a child to the jail system mid-semester. There were parole officers to meet with. There were pregnant students who had doctors’ appointments on given days. There were kids who slept in, or just took a day off to do something they felt more pressing.
And there were those who were there, but not there. Some stayed at the edge of the playing field and smoked, others finished an argument on the steps of her portable before coming in. A few were late because they were consummating a “deal”. Sometimes they were in the principal’s office, caught up in one act or another. Going to class was not a priority, but more of a grim realization that at the moment there were no other options. However as the year wore on, attendance in Judy’s class improved modestly on a day to day basis and she took pride in that. She was usually addressed as “Teacher”, as in “Teacher, I don’t have a pen” or “You’re pretty cool for an old lady, Teacher”. This despite the fact that they knew she was Mrs. O’Donnell. Judy rode with that.
They behaved for her better than they behaved for other teachers, which is to admit that they behaved only fairly badly for her. They were her favorite class. She knew she was personally needed. This can be rare in high school. Ambitious students are often looking beyond the teacher to the credit. They can make a teacher feel anywhere from irrelevant to an actual nuisance. The latter usually comes when the student deems a mark to be unjust.
And here she was, sitting beside me now, still in tears. Gradually the story that came close to breaking her emerged…
On that day, Judy had taken the ultimate risk. She had arranged a field trip for her Retention Class kids to Durham College. Her hope was that a half-day exposure to a college would help kids focus, help them realize how close they were to actual postsecondary education. A big step.
At the college, their tour and orientation was conducted by a Mrs. Smith. She began with a bright good morning and then zoomed into a rehearsed speech about the wonders of education in general and Durham College in particular. It didn’t go well. The kids found it fake.
These young men and women were not used to sitting still and listening. They had been not sitting still and listening for virtually as long as they’d been in school. It was a coping mechanism.
Some started talking, not silently, amongst each other. Others got up and wandered around. Some girls did their make-up. Occasionally someone would grab something and ask, “What’s this Miss?” A voice called out to ask if they were going to do something interesting. Ever.
Part of it was the natural reflex of testing a new teacher. They were pros at this. Part of it was force of habit. And being pestiferous made the time pass faster.
The teacher kept a forced smile on her face as long as possible and waded rather distractedly through her presentation. She answered questions she hadn’t asked for curtly. Her smile faded and her face gradually paled. She clearly had not expected such a restless audience. Judy went from kid to kid, admonishing them on the fly. At some point her class knew they had won the day. You could hear it in raucous, forced laughter. The hour became something between circus and debacle.
Suddenly Mrs. Smith fell silent. It’s doubtful whether any kids noticed. Then she managed to turn a bad situation into a catastrophe. In a loud, piercing voice she called out, “Mrs. O’Donnell, can you not keep your own class in line?”
A deadly hush ensued, that moment of silence before a snake strikes. Then there was an incredulous response from one of the students, “What the fuck did you just say…Miss?”
The silence resumed, as the other kids mulled over the directness of the question. It quickly became clear that they judged this to be a reasonable question that demanded an answer. After a long pause, Mrs. Smith tried to regain some badly lost ground. “I asked your teacher if she could help me get you to behave and listen. This is a very
important - “.
“You fucking told our teacher that she couldn’t teach.”
“What right do you have to say shit like that?”
There was, within a minute or two a full range of indignant responses. The kids clearly felt that this stranger had crossed a line, the kind of line you don’t cross in the world they lived in.
“Who says you’re the boss? You don’t know shit about this school”.
“You’re fucking ugly, that’s what you are”.
They were standing by now, and seemed on the verge of physically closing in on her. It was a curiously co-ordinated intimidation ploy.
Then Judy found her voice. “Class, sit down while I thank the teacher. Then it’s time for us to leave”.
They got out of the building with no assaults, arrests or black marks. By the time they got to the bus, the incident was gone from their collective mind and they were busy in groups resuming conversations that mattered. Judy was appalled. She was a teacher of 36 years standing. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for this day.
Back at the school, it was dismissal time. On the way out, one of the biggest, toughest kids noticed what must have been a look of utter defeat on Judy’s face. He patted her sagging shoulder and said by way of explanation, “Teacher, you know we don’t take that shit. But thanks for the trip anyway.”
When I put the story together after hearing all its constituent pieces - it came out wrenchingly, bit by bit, and not sequential - I was a bit surprised, but not shocked. I reflected that if I’d been there and Judy not, then the wrong teacher would have been present.
I understood exactly how Judy felt. She is, in the best of ways, a proud person. Like any teacher, she judges her performance on a field trip solely on the criterion of how well her class behaved in public. They had, in her view, behaved abominably. They had humiliated her. Worse, they had exposed her as incompetent to another authority. They had disgraced the school. It was all her fault. There was no way to repair the damage. She had no idea of where to go from this point and dreaded telling the Administration next day what had happened. She asked me what to do (that was a first).
What had happened was blindingly obvious to me. I told her, “Nothing. Pick up tomorrow like today never happened. It’s over. You can tell the Principal but you don’t have to.”
“That’s no help. I have no class control. All year I’ve been working with these kids and - “.
I interrupted. “Judy, you don’t understand it now, I know. But those kids just gave you one of the biggest compliments you’ll ever get in teaching. They stood up for you when you were attacked. If they didn’t love you as a mom more than a teacher, they would have sat still and let you fight your own battle. But they rose to the occasion instantly. You are one of them. You’ve done thousands of things, big and small, for them this term. They probably didn’t even say Thanks most of the time and that might have irked you. Today…today they thanked you. She implied you were being a useless teacher who couldn’t discipline them. They know you’re not useless. They know it was the Durham teacher’s job to keep hold on them. So in their strange way, they put their arms around you and gave you a hug. Some of them are probably waiting for you to thank them.”
It took a long time for that conversation to end. I don’t think Judy was convinced - she still thought she was at fault. The next day, she went and told the Vice-Principal, by chance a friend of ours. When she was finished, she asked him, “Are you coming in to talk to them? I think that’s all that’s needed.”
“No.”
“I don’t want anyone suspended. It’s hard enough to get them to class. And it’s really on me. I should have got to them faster before it escalated.”
“Who said anything about suspensions? I’m not suspending anyone. Maybe I will drop in today and tell them I heard about yesterday. And my final word to them will be - you did the right thing, in the wrong way. But I’m thanking you anyway. We don’t want Mrs. O’Donnell to be unhappy.”
And so the Durham College saga ended. From time to time Judy wonders where each of those wandering souls are today. Their odds were poor, but who knows? A teacher has to be an optimist.