You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik [22]
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It was my third year teaching at ISF, my tenth as a teacher. I was thirty-three years old.
I had four classes—three sections of tenth grade English—Huckleberry Finn, Macbeth, The Grapes of Wrath, Civil Disobedience—and one section of Senior Seminar. The class would be, I imagined then, a haven from the repetition of teaching sophomores the difference between Transcendentalism and Romanticism, explaining why Macbeth “talks like that,” trying to convince my students that Thoreau had something to do with their lives.
Not that I didn’t like teaching tenth grade. But the curriculum was the same year after year. I was tired of listening to myself talk. I was tired of the road-weary Joads, of Blake, of Whitman. I never tired of Macbeth but the fatigue I felt in teaching that class worried me. I focused my energy on my seminar.
In Greece I had read Sartre for the first time. I ran along the cliffs. I returned to my hotel room dripping with sweat to scribble my plans for the class in a notebook. Field trips and essay topics. It was the first course I’d been able to create from scratch without the influence of an English department.
I believed that this seminar would buoy me, would carry me through my third year at ISF. I’d teach with everything I had, devote myself to it, assign difficult work, learn along with my students, teach as if I were a first year teacher. I would, for the first time since I’d begun at ISF, come to class committed. That is, without plans for escape, for a new career, without the idea of teaching the needy in some unspecified African nation, living cheap in Thailand or any of the other fantasies I used to avoid the apparent permanence of my present life.
GILAD
I see their faces, their backpacks, their clothes, their notebooks.
Cara Lee, a quiet, brooding Korean girl who sat across the room from me. Ariel Davis, a strange, aloof, deadly sexy girl with long black hair. Jane Woodhouse who once wore angel wings to class and began all of her statements with “I don’t know what I’m trying to say here.” Abdul Al Mady, nervous and painfully awkward. Hala Bedawi, a graceful and smiling brilliant Lebanese girl who understood things twenty minutes before anyone else. Colin White, a tough, wiry, kid from Dublin who seemed totally out of place at ISF, who carried with him a suppressed violence I’d never seen in expensive international schools. Aldo something, who sat as close as he could to Ariel and always agreed with her. She abused him, bestowing and withdrawing attention as her moods dictated. Rick Tompkins, a strong, cocky soccer player. And there was pretty Lily Brevet with her braids and heavy breasts.
One day early that year he drew a black swirl of lines on the board. I copied it into my notebook, a notebook I still have. I recorded everything I could those months. I imagined I’d make a movie, the camera moving from the trees across the field and gliding into the room. Mr. Silver at his desk. And then he looks up. And then he begins.
I listened. I sketched us. Day after day I wrote dialogue and now it serves as an intricate map.
On the first page there is this:
Then beneath that drawing a few inches down the page I have the same drawing but this time with a grid superimposed on top of it:
What is.
What we insist it is.
“Existentialists, more or less, believe that the human world is like this,” he said, pointing to the scribble. “What does Sartre say about the letter opener?”
It was the first time he’d asked a direct question to the class. I don’t remember if I knew what Sartre had said about the letter opener but I know that I didn’t answer the question.
Colin White raised his hand.
“It’s Colin, right?”
“Yes sir.”
“Two things before you answer my question—first, you don’t need to raise your hand and second, please don’t call me sir. It’s creepy.”
We laughed.
“Sartre doesn’t talk about a letter opener, sir, he talks about a paper knife.”
Mr. Silver smiled and nodded his head, “You’re right, Colin. Thanks for being precise.