From the Recesses – Great Kids

It is standard-issue humor amongst education professionals that the three reasons teaching is a great job are “June, July and August,” and throughout a 13 year career, I wouldn’t have disagreed. I’ll never understand the “two weeks vacation for your first five years” insanity of most professions in the States. Madness. Complete and utter madness. And Americans willingly do it, which proves that, as a nationality, we’re not very smart, or at least not terribly introspective about what’s actually important in this life.

As a teacher, I enjoyed every minute of my summer vacations, not to mention my winter and spring breaks and, since I worked in New York City, a Jewish holiday or two every few months, even for the goyim. Go Purim! But since we did have to spend some 9 months of the year in contact with the students, it helped if you enjoyed their company, too. And for the record, I really did.

I taught high school, so the kids ranged in age from 15 to 18, with the exception of a few outliers who couldn’t quite seem to graduate before their unemployment checks began rolling in. I loved teaching that age and could never get my mind around teaching the really little ones. All the drooling, the paste eating, the odd classroom vomiter, the crying, the cubby holes and the lice… Eggggghhhhh. Not in this lifetime, Bub. Even worse was the idea of taking on a middle school classroom. Not a chance; not even with reincarnation.

The late teens, however, is an age range when the hormone-to-humanity ratio starts to click back into a range of tolerability, but also before the reinforced fears of being judged by other people have hardened like concrete around their souls. I knew a number of colleagues who either didn’t give a damn about the students, or actively disliked them. They were the teachers who claimed that, “You can’t teach these kids anything,” which was total bullshit. If you paid attention to their lives, if you listened to their needs and didn’t give them grief about their diction or their previous life decisions, then they were generally cool with learning a few things. Some of them even worked at it. The elusive key was actually caring about their lives.

In my department there were a few teachers that really did love their kids, and we tended to gravitate towards one another. In fact, a few of us created a kind of bi-weekly ritual we called “Great Kids Nights.” Those nights, typically at a local dive bar in either Brooklyn or Manhattan, always picked us up. Matt and Brendan and I would get together and talk some shop, but as we’d managed to ferret out the downers of our department who would just rag on the kids no matter what, we’d end up trading stories about some of the funny or brilliant stuff that our kids came up with that week. The night got its unofficial name when we noticed that almost every story started with one of us asking the others, “Hey, do you know so-and-so? Great kid. Great kid.”

Those “Great Kids Nights” always put me in a better mood, and as it’s been a pretty rough month or so down here in Antigua, I could use a better mood right about now, so let me introduce you to Lady Macbeth Rios. I changed her last name in a pretty lame attempt to protect her privacy, but the Lady Macbeth part is completely true. She had a brother named Hamlet and another named Shakespeare. I don’t know why. Maybe the parents were admirers of the Bard. Maybe they were functionally illiterate and thought that the big ole book on the shelf was the Bible and they just pulled names at random. I can’t say, I never met them. You might say they were like ghosts.