Dear Readers:
Here is an email from me about the boredom & the horror & the glory. It is the 46th one. It comes with wishes for a wonderful holiday for all of you.
After two and a half years, I still, almost every day, think about how strange it is that I work in the high school I went to. I would never, ever, never in a million years have imagined I would be doing this. There shouldn’t be elite, exclusive private primary and secondary schools like Lab School. My salary is about $15,000 more than Lab School’s tuition. What if there was someone like me who wanted to send their kid to Lab School? They’d just have to give up the idea of living somewhere, eating, and wearing clothes?
Here comes something that I don’t like to share, but I’m not going to sanitize this: I was almost afraid of public schools growing up. Something about Lab makes you feel like they must be chaos. Fear of the very idea of something that’s open to everybody. I have at times noticed that same way of thinking in kids there now. Sometimes they come right up to the precipice of saying it. I flash back and forth all day between being one of them, a 16-year-old with a kind of privilege that I can’t name or understand, and being a middle-class grown-up who has attended, taught at, learned and grown at the very schools they’re afraid of.
I believe the Lab School of 2023 is somewhat different than when I went there—significantly more expensive, and so the kids as a whole are wealthier and more ambitious than the kids I graduated with. Not to say the Lab School of my day wasn’t mostly wealthy, ambitious kids, too. But people got shot in drug deals gone bad, had sex in the senior lounge, smoked cigarettes outside the Medici, tore down Lake Shore Drive drunk and high. I could be wrong, but I don’t think these kids are doing that.
They do, however, sometimes hang out on the corners of playgrounds, like the scary kids of the class of ‘99. Trying to focus on playing with Bea in the playground, seeing out of the corner of my eyes these kids I know, wishing I didn’t know them, seeing their finicky attempts at being individuals or seeming cool, feeling as if I were one of them. Then a flash of almost loving them, as the adult I am, a huge rush of gratitude that I get to see them try—that I even get to see the “cool kids” try, and what more could you ever ask for but the privilege of that? Privilege in the actual, deep meaning of the word, something that you can really hold in your heart, not some Tiffany bracelet everyone gets for their bat mitzvah. I’m getting kind of stressed out because I can’t find my Virginia Woolf books from college, but if I could, I would directly quote this part toward the beginning of To the Lighthouse when she’s been complaining about Mr. Ramsey all morning then suddenly she’s like, I’m not worthy to tie his shoelaces. That’s how I feel, looking at, or trying not to look at, these high school seniors limning the playground.
And then back into it! trying not to think of this but not being able to not to, like sticking out my finger into an outlet I know will shock me: what do they think of me, how do they see me? All the things I’ve done, the public schools I’ve known and loved, the way I really am falls away and I’m 16 again. And I feel so uncomfortable about having taken this job.
In the Writer’s Center, I try to be hands off. Just like when I teach anywhere else, I tell the students, you’re good and your writing is good. I do it because what if I’m the only person saying that in their lives? and I also do it because it’s true. I don’t understand why a teacher would withhold that from a student. Power? It was withheld from me when I went to Lab School, except for when I would win English awards, which was always disturbing. I really didn’t want an award that I had to walk up and accept in front of everybody, with no feedback or information about it, just a paperback copy of Jane Eyre and a stiff piece of paper saying I won. Now you get $5,000 instead of Jane Eyre when you win.
When a student is good, which they all are, every single one of them—if you know their name, if they’ve ever appeared in the classroom, if you’ve seen a single word they’ve written—then our job as teachers, I believe, is to tell them that! This is not babying them. It’s seeing them as worthy and helping them see that you see them that way. Showing them they are welcome to learn.
When teachers don’t do that—if instead they announce you won some award for who knows what at the end of year, if you write all the test scores on the board “anonymized” but look directly at me with a comic flare when you write the way-lowest score, so everyone sees mine was the worst—they are not doing their job! When every learning task is laser-pointed toward “getting into college,” a euphemism for getting to attend a place where everyone around you is just as rich as they are in your high school, you are creating wounded, unself-actualized people (who nevertheless have mastered the language of self-actualization, all the better to get into these schools). And these are the people who are going to be peoples’ bosses, their professor-tormentors, who are going to make laws and have all the money!
In the Hyde Park Herald there was a lovely interview with Gabriel Bump, author of The New Naturals and Everywhere You Don’t Belong, who was at Lab School a few years after me. I can’t find the link to this interview online, but he talked about stumbling, trying to figure out what he was going to do, leaving one school, then doing nothing, then finally starting at another. Learning! It was beautiful to see a successful Lab School graduate talk about all these tries.
Come with me to Infinite Jest. Related, I promise. In the storyline about Ennet House, the drug recovery center, Geoffrey Day tells Kate Gompert about the worst night of his life. It was related to a feeling he first had as a grade-school violinist practicing during summer break, when the sound of an electric fan and his violin combined to create the feeling of “a large dark billowing shape…out of some corner of my mind…all horror everywhere. …Shapeless. Shapelessness was one of the horrible things about it.”
It isn’t like a real interface or conversation. Day doesn’t seem to be addressing anybody in particular. ‘The last time it ever rose up billowing was my second year of college. I attended Brown University in Providence RI, graduating magna cum laude. One sophomore night it came up out of nowhere, the black shape, for the first time in years.’
‘It was the most horrible feeling I have ever imagined, much less felt. There is no possible way death can feel as bad. It rose up. It was worse now that I was older.
…
‘I simply could not live with how it felt.
…
‘It’s never come back. Over twenty years. But I’ve not forgotten. And the worst times I have felt since then were like a day at the foot masseur’s compared to the feeling of that black sail or wing rising inside me.
‘I understand the term hell as if that summer day and that night in the sophomore dormitory. I understand what people meant by hell. They did not mean the black sail. They meant the associated feelings.’
Day says the name of the school, where it is, and his graduating high status. “I attended Brown University in Providence RI, graduating magna cum laude.” It seems weird that this sentence is included in his description of cosmic agony. But it’s not weird. It is the very thing itself, the bottomless hole at the center of this emptiness. His imprimatur is floating in space, with nothing to cling to. The existence of that imprimatur is not only not a ballast against this horror, it heightens the horror, in its smallness against the hugeness of the horror.
The actual “feeling” isn’t described, just the sense of “hell” it carried. It’s a shapeless shape, like Derrida’s structure that lacks a center in “Structure, Sign and Play”—it “represents the unthinkable itself”! It’s not only that there are no words for it, it’s also that there is no way to think it and still be you. It unmakes you.
It makes you not have ever gone to Brown.
I see that as a possibility we teachers are duty-bound to prepare our students for.
Sincerely,
Lucy
I realize your point is much bigger than this but bc I feel deeply about this issue: yes, yes, we have to tell students when they do good work, and *especially* when they do one important thing right in an overall very flawed piece of work!!! After ten years I still feel like an interloper or spy at the very fancy university that I work at, but I sometimes feel like these spaces manage to combine two things that theoretically don’t go together: low intellectual standards overall; a degree of nitpicking and withholding that almost amounts to emotional abuse. That seems like it should be a logical paradox. It’s some sort of anti-miracle to make them happen simultaneously.
For me, sensitizing a student to what they already do well is the best part of the job, and also often the most productive part of the job. It makes students want to write better for internal rather than external reasons: if I can do this well, why wouldn’t I want to? It is CRAZY-MAKING for me that some educators don’t see this.
The edge is the feeling just before you create something. You have to be empty, fearless and receptive to do it— just like this, like you just did.