For My Father: Thoughts on Teaching

After the Connecticut tragedy I said to myself is teaching really the job I want for the rest of my life? The position has changed since my earliest memories of waiting for my father to come home from his job as a high school teacher and play with me.  My little brother and I would each get on a foot and wrap our arms around his legs and hold him so tight. He would say everyday "oh I am so tired and my feet feel so heavy I can barely walk" and pretend he didn't know we were on his feet and it was the same fun game day after day and never got tired.  I took in all the politics, problems, ups and downs of teaching over dinner every night with my three brothers and mother.  I though, I would never want to do that, I am going to be an artist.
         
I remember thinking we were rich when we were poor, that he was the smartest man in the world and this is how the rest of the world lives too. Well, we were far from rich. My father would get up from the dinner table and leave us again to go to school at night to get his masters.  I remember asking my mother why? She told me so Daddy could provide us with the things we need to live good and that he never wanted to stop learning. At 4 or 5 years old that puzzled me. We had everything so I thought, why does he need to give us more and learn more? He was the smartest man what more could he know and what else do we need? I wanted to know when it would end and he would be home to play with us. It never did end because it went from getting his masters to teaching college when he finished his day at the high school just stopping long enough for diner with us. 

Why did I think we were rich when I never had new clothes, shared a room with my brothers and drove a old black Rambler that I could see the road under my feet in the front seat? It was because we had a pool and not everyone did.  Our yard was the go to yard for the neighborhood kids. The reality of it was, as my mother explained to me as an adult, was that we could not afford to go on any vacations so dad built a pool so we had something like a "vacation".  I did not even know what the word meant at the time.  I did not know we were poor and that girls had there own rooms not with boys sometimes. They did not have a line of masking tape down the middle of their bedrooms as a pretend wall like my father did for us.

 I thought getting my hand-me-down clothes from my two cousins was like Christmas FOUR TIMES A YEAR! I remember in first grade, the teacher would call me up to her desk in front of everyone (and I was painfully shy) and she would look at the tag on my "fancy dresses" and say "Oh I knew it was a such and such dress, they are the best dresses in the world".  Who wouldn't thing they are rich after that and a pool to boot?

Well that seems like a dream and  lifetime ago.  The reality was my father and mother grew up during the depression and never wanted to see us struggle for any basic need in our lives.  I saw pictures of my father as a young boy pushing a wheel barrel down the street with food in it and heard stories from my mother how she lived in what was called the "flats" at the time now called the projects, how she would dye the same dress three times to make it different. How she quit college after being the first of 6  to go so she could work to by her parents their first house when it was her dream to be a teacher. She was never able to be a schoolteacher but to me she has taught me more than any teacher from reading and writing to life lessons so to me and my brothers she was a teacher. 

So, my father worked two teaching jobs since I can remember until about the year 2000 so about 30 years.  He said most days, it made him happy and he loved "teaching" he went head to head with the administration constantly but yet they had a mutual respect for each others views.  When I got to the high school I saw first hand how overwhelming it was because I was overwhelmed.  After high school he wanted me to go to Mount Holyoke College and I could have for free.  The thought of four more years in that small town was too much for me and I left for MASS ART.  He said I will not pay for you to go to college to get out of school and be an unemployed artist so if I am going to help pay for college you will major in Art Education.  So I did a double major in Art Ed and Film. 

 I found the Art Ed classes were teaching me to how to teach art not be an artist so I dropped that major and my father dropped me.   Some things you have to find out on your own the hard way. I worked just about full time and did school full time, lived in what was then a bunch of burned out, drug ridden, abandoned brownstones called "The South End" at the hight of the crack epidemic in the early 90's now the new Newbury Street.  Back then you saw an ad in the local South End Newspaper and got an apt. Mine was a 3 bedroom stunningly intact palace on a round about street with a once beautiful park in the middle that now was the headquarters for prostitution and crack. It was listed for $800 I told him I can pay $500 until I found a roommate and the deal was done.  Boy, did it take a long time to get a roommate  when you don't want one. 

 I graduated and my film teacher who flew to Boston weekly to teach offered me a job dong special effects for a show on MTV called BUZZ with Rue Paul as the host.  I jumped a the chance, sublet my palace and ended up in what is now called DUMBO in Brooklyn and I cannot afford it.  Then, I was the naive dumbo to live there in a "loft" with 3 other artist I knew from Boston watching chips of paint fall like feathers on me as I slept.  The best part about it was if you opened up the huge old windows and looked up you saw the bottom of the Manhattan bridge and you could walk the abandoned cobblestone  streets and factories that smelled of pepper still so strong you would sneeze.  

After moving to NYC and a year working for MTV which sounds but was not glamours in any sort of way I was done with NYC.  If you want to live like you live here in Boston you need a lot of money to do that there. I worked two jobs day and night just to pay rent and eat. MTV barely paid because people would do the job for free so why pay me a reasonable salary.  I guess the word around MTV was you are lucky to be here and you are paid?  You do not say a word and you do what you have to to get ahead which I was unwilling to do. So, after 12 months of cheese out of a can and working my second job first from 4 am to 8:30 am 5 days a week, handing out towels at an upscale health club to the likes of Cindy Crawford and Diane Sawyer.  I would get ready there and run down the block to my second job.     

I up and quit one day, I just left and piled in an old VW bus with some friends on summer break from University in England and we moved back into the Boston Brownstone.  I went to MASS ART's career resource center and franticly looked through all the ad's while hearing my fathers voice say I told you so but he never really did.  Then there it was jumping off the page Paint a mural at a private school in Jamaica Plain. I did not really know JP it was the suburbs to me at that time.  This sounds great I thought to myself at that time. 


I interviewed the next day, "nice little school" I said to myself as I drove up except the bars on the windows? I buzzed to get in and this was 1993.  As I walked in I was put through a check with a metal detector and was interviewed by a very serious but nice Muslim gentleman wearing a bow tie.  He was black and most of the staff in the outer office were too. He loved my portfolio and explained that the school was "special".  It was special, .5 special education special yes, there is a place after .4 and I was in it.  The classrooms had metal grates like the corner stores over the doors and a student being restrained on the floor after throwing a chair at a window, yet there was a sense of calmness there too.  I said thank you and he said we will give you a call. I ran for my life. He called twice a day for two days asking when I could start.  I felt I had no choice I needed the money and what, be scared, let them down? I started the mural and for a month I painted with each class K-12 all day for a month for $500 which I managed to survive on. I had fallen in love.  Not with painting the mural but with the kids.  They begged me to be their art teacher.  

There was no money for an art teacher at a small non profit school for high, REALLY high risk kids.  The director said we would love to have you as our art teacher but there was no money in the budget for that kind of thing.  I thought and thought.  The I wrote and wrote.  I wrote to big companies and small telling them the truth, I needed funding to teach at this school that did not have money to fund my position and the kids did not have art.  I received two offers one for a fair amount to get the supplies I would need and the other said they would commit to fund my position for a year! The director met with the head of the company that week, I had actually made it happen.  So the school wrote a grant as well and it ended up being able to match the funds of the company so it could be two years. Well two turned to 5 then 7 years.  I fell in love with teaching all on my own.  I did not know really how to teach art formally so I went back to school and got my Masters Degree in Education all to my fathers dismay but quiet support. 

After 7 years and loosing 8 students to violence over the years and many funerals later I had to leave the "nest" and make some real money, the loans were piling up.  I sadly left my special job and came to Boston Public at twice the salary.  After 7 years I could see I wasn't in it for the income but instead for the outcome but the bills were not paying themselves. 

                            2001 The Worst Year I Remember

My father had since retired a year earlier, became a full time crazy at home carpenter, building a second floor on the first house. I would visit and have an idea for something to build and we would build together, shelves, cabinets, whatever we came up with or I needed.  That fall I would be starting at BPS, a small Middle School in West Roxbury called the R.G. Shaw.

My father never lived to see me teach there he was diagnosed with Pancreatic  Cancer and died quickly and shocking my entire family. Sadly, I started school with a heavy heart and seven days into my new job September 11th happened. I was glad my father did not live to see the world change overnight from the strikingly blue sky, perfect fall day to seeing people jump off towers and huge monster buildings collapsing on them.  The New York as I knew it was gone.  As was the feeling of safety anywhere. The sky became so quiet it was deafening. 

Now, here we are two major school shootings later in 2013.  Can I do this the rest of my life? I see teaching as a calling not so much as a choice.  Teaching called me and I never dreamt  it would. When you love something you hold on to it.  I never saw the light leave my fathers eyes while he was a teacher and just hope it does not leave mine.  With all the new demands on teachers and increasing pressures to perform and all conform to a certain standard, knowing the reasons but not understanding them fully I am scared I might be gone one day because a new principal or superintendent is a a big supporter of sports instead of art who knows.  I worry that instead of planning my lessons I know the students will love because when my passion comes through they feel it and I see their passion.  I am up until 2 am not lesson planning as I normally would be but instead trying to understand a new teaching rubric and struggling to connect it all together as expected for 12 different classes and 8 different grade levels and 300 + students.  It scares me. I do not want the day to come when the light leaves my eyes.  

So Dad, what do I do? Things are always changing, I know this. I know we are not given more than we can handle or are we? I don't know it hasn't happened yet? I hope you help guide me down this road where I do not know where it may turn or what is ahead and where the end is.  I know if the light leaves my eyes I would not teach anymore.  I will not shortchange my life or the lives of the children I teach.  I have seen the light leave teachers eyes both young and old.  I say to myself it will never happen to me because this is part of my life an important part.  It brings me joy even on the hardest of days. Children are so open and free of so many burdens and experiences we carry that for a moment, maybe more if we are lucky we get to feel that way too and the hardships we have to carry feel smaller.  I had a student ask me and tell me on day recently "you're smiling Ms. Drakes why??, you are cutting paper"  then she paused for a single moment and added you are always smiling even cutting paper.  I was almost embarrassed by the comment. I responded " because I am happy and you smile when you are happy right?" She said yes, but you are just cutting paper. I tried to explain to her its an overall happy when I am teaching not having to do with paper, crayons or things.  Its because of them and I enjoy what I do, simple as that.  She just said "oh I guess thats a good reason."

So do I, so do I........

For us teachers please watch the following link. 
Thank you Sue Trotz. 


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