It Might Have Been 24 Years Ago Today

Recently I was talking to one of my former students who is currently enduring her first year of teaching. She was regaling me with the usual tales of first-year teachers: 95% madness mixed with a couple doses of sheer bliss. When I made the statement, which I truly believe, that although the first year of teaching may be the worst, it is also, in some ways, the best, she nearly fainted. "Why?" she managed to ramble in about fourteen syllables. I really couldn't explain; there's just something really exciting about it that can't be replicated or explained, I guess.

But I remember...

I know it was second semester, maybe around this time of year. I was teaching seniors at an all-boys high school, and I'm sure at least half of my students looked, maybe even acted, older than I was. It was a composition class and the boys were writing argumentative essays. As I was also expected to make the boys give a speech (yes, you can use audio/visual aids), I combined the two. We came up with a list of debatable (in both senses, as you'll see) topics and split them down the middle: one student would write and give a speech about the pro side, another student the con side. Abortion, drinking age, death penalty--we covered them all. Including the pros and cons of censorsing pornography. Naturally, you can see where this is heading; unfortunately, a certain naive 22-year-old first-year teacher didn't.

So they've written their essays and we're spending a couple days listening to speeches. Nothing major, a quick five-minute speech. I think it was a Friday. Spring break had to be looming. For about the tenth time in the year I thought I was completely burned out. In my mind, I was coasting. I didn't really have to teach--just sit in one of the desks at the back of the room, listen to the speeches, fill out the speech evaluation form rather leniently, and stumble into another life-saving weekend.

Then it was Marvin's turn. After all these years I remember Marvin. One of the happiest, most smiling kids ever. Not a great student, but a true pleasure. It always amazed me how giving out grades is one of the truest examples of the fact that everything is indeed relative. You call the kids up to your desk individually and show them their grade. One kid practically hugs you in supreme relief when he sees B-, another kid acts as if the recipe for chocolate just disappeared for all time when he sees an A- (true story, that first year, I had a kid kneeling at my desk, hands folded in supplication, begging, yes, begging me to change his grade from an A- to an A). You got the feeling that Marvin was happy as along as the grade wasn't an F. His C+ or whatever was cause for rapture.

Anyway, Marvin had been assigned to write and speak in favor of censoring all pornography. I ho-hummed in the back of the room, wrote Marvin's name on the half-page evaluation form, looked at the clock and calculated to the minute how soon I'd be napping. Marvin sets up behind the podium I had managed to secure for the speeches, opens his folder, and with the most infectious, Marvin-patented smile of all time, and in his happy-go-lucky "Hey Dude" voice begins his speech with this grabber: "Would you like to see your loved ones in pictures like these?" At which point he starts slapping already-masking-taped full color glossy photos of the most graphic, raunchy concupiscent dalliances this side of Larry Flynt's darkroom. His fifteen male classmates erupt in howls of laughter as Marvin works his way across the blackboard (did I mention this is a Catholic boys school, where there's always the possibility that the priest/president of the school is showing some big would-be donor through the halls?) slapping up the smut. I was never a sprinter, but I think I reached my all-time speed clambering out of the desk, hopping over bookbags and stretched out legs, to get to the blackboard where I followed in Marvin's filthy footsteps ripping down the smut from the left side of the blackboard as he was still pasting more of it up toward the right. It's all a blur, but I think I ripped up as I ripped off the pictures, praying--more fervently, I must admit, than the usual Hail Mary I commenced class with--that Fr. President would not choose to invite his guest to "drop in on the boys" just then. Oh for videotape.

When I reached the end of the blackboard, with a mountain of shredded porn in my hands, Marvin was there waiting for me, with that glorious, angelic devilish grin of his. What could I do? It was Marvin. After the laughter finally subsided, and Marvin was given his scraps back to dispose of anywhere but in my classroom, he gave the rest of his speech, of which I can't recall a single thing. I'm sure I docked him a couple points on the "made appropriate use of audio/visuals" section on the evaluation sheet.

I'm sure I told the story to every subsequent class that ever had to make a presentation, with the stern warning that any use of inappropriate material would warrant a no-questions-asked trip to the principal's office.

That's as close of an explanation as to why the first year of teaching is both the worst and the best that I can provide.