Irrational Numbers

This week, I began corresponding with a woman ten years my senior. She remains a mystery to me, and in a way this nascent friendship, whatever it is, is also mysterious. One day this week, I actually felt like there was a reason beyond pure must-be dread to get up in the morning. I randomly woke up some time in the early hours of the morning, casually checked my computer, which had been left carelessly on, and found a late-night message from her on my email. I never really went back to bed. I ate breakfast and washed some dishes, took a shower, did some stretches, listened to music, and reveled in a pleasant, sleepless buzz in those last pre-dawn hours before leaving for work. I have no idea where this correspondence is leading, if anywhere. What I feel is an insatiable craving for attention, some reason to check my inbox every day, someone who actually takes the time to write to me and me alone. It hardly even matters what she writes, and yet it does. I keep asking her to tell me more about herself. She always says she would love to—when she has time. Instead, she writes about herself in sweeping, inscrutable generalizations. I wish she would tell me a story or something, because what I really want is to get to know a real person, who wants to know me too, not some list of exuberant, self-selected adjectives that describe her.

Since that day our correspondence has faltered slightly, under some strange ambiguity of who was supposed to write next: Her promising to write more later and somehow not really prompting me to make a direct reply; me waiting, trying to figure out what to say next and how to respond. The illusion of immediacy has flickered, and the mornings have returned to their usual sleepy dread of me dragging myself out of bed, without breakfast, at the last possible minute.

After a phone call from me begging a ride home from school today, Merry D. and I got to talking about his own topsy-turvy week, the recent crisis of conflict between his personal life and (relatively unhappy) professional life. An off and now on-again girlfriend has made an offer-slash-ultimatum, and for a few days he was barely able to sleep, sorely tempted to up and leave this program altogether to join her in San Francisco. For now, he has made a counter-offer and recommitted himself to seeing out the year. I told him he is making the right choice, and then we drove a couple miles south on Route 61 to try a restaurant called Catfish Cabin. We were both surprised by the quality of the fried catfish, fried, fried, fried & deep fried corn on the cob / okra / shrimp, hush puppies, and sweet tea. The Dukes of Hazard played on the TV above our heads, but the atmosphere was subdued, as our fellow diners, some silver-haired white ladies and, at the end, a middle-aged sheriff with a hefty gut, ate quietly. Like so many establishments in Mississippi, the place was charming in its backwardness and nostalgia, yet conspicuously mono-racial. After paying our checks, we tooled back up to town to try a local doughnut shop-slash-watch repair. Merry, impressed by the fact the proprietor (?) was Asian, spotted me 79 cents for a cream cheese pastry, and then we made our way back to his apartment. I read a rough manuscript lying on his cluttered coffee table, a travel tale written by a friend of his who is teaching English in Korea. Her descriptions of a world-traveling odd-couple, those random encounters with strangers of all types on foreign forms of public conveyance, tickled my latent sense of wanderlust and awoke in me a familiar, youthful day dream of drifting around Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia for years at a time, just to experience the world at large, romantically stopping here and there just long enough to earn my passage to the next destination. Is it possible a part of me abhors stability—the horrible dread that this is all there is?

Today at work I was only vaguely aware of the act of vandalism done against me the day before. I did mention it to two coworkers whom I respect. One of them, a grey-haired motorcyclist, white, who is in charge of our fledgling IBO Middle Years Program, offered me the use of a closet to store my bike in at school, once I get it fixed. The other, a black woman who teaches Speech & Debate across the hall from me, blurted, “I’m thinking of leaving, myself!” And now, my newfound cyber-pen pal finally tells me a story of sorts, an explanation of why she quit teaching so many years (?) ago—because the sad statistics began to have faces of children she came to know and love: “I just couldn't find that magic place that is close enough to make a difference but distant enough to protect me.”

And me? I love my students, in my own, perhaps slightly out-of-touch way, but today was a disaster—one of the worst periods teaching since the first couple weeks of the year. My fourth block Algebra II was in open revolt today, after I was quite blunt with them how their average score on a recent test was well below 50% and a good 25 percentage points below my other period of the same class. Perhaps I was in a bad disposition about what happened to my bicycle yesterday. Anyway, they accuse me of going too fast, not understanding “the Mississippi way of teaching,” etc. Someone actually said, “We don’t run around barefoot like those kids you taught over in Africa!” (What the heck does that mean? What does it have to do with anything?!! And if they only knew!) I maintain that I have in fact given plenty of time to the material—that 5/8 of the course is over and we have barely even touched on anything that is not supposed to be taught in Algebra I—and that their poor performance in most cases is due to their lackluster attitudes, as illustrated in part by the fact that other students taking the same course from the same teacher at the same time did so much better. The danger I want to avoid here, the reason I am so unyielding, is about maintaining high (or, rather, reasonably not-low) standards. I feel like it would be not only a joke, but a disservice, to teach a so-called Algebra II that was hardly more than a rehash of Algebra I. When it seems like my students are not paying much attention in class, then do poorly on a test, the thought occurs to me that they need to learn the consequences of their lack of attention, and I’ll be darned if I let their lack of effort (even if it sometimes constitutes the majority of the class) hijack me from teaching the breadth of the curriculum as it was intended. Am I right here, or wrong?

She says: “It sounds to me like you have it in you to REALLY make a difference. I wasn't that strong and gave up.” Thanks, but I really do not feel like I am making much of a difference at the moment. Still, I can and will carry on.