“…what is the correct understanding?”
For I had completely bombed in my classes yesterday,
after an interesting day of failure on Sunday.
OK, I now drop the ironic tone of previous posts.
Anything—until further notice—comes from the gut, not the mind.
I have never wanted to be a teacher—I’ve told you that,
right?—and I have never taken it much seriously. I do show up on time. I am as
groomed as I get. But beyond that, I don’t do much. I observe the students,
just as I observe the iguanas.
But on Sunday—that would be the day before yesterday—I
had written a post about failure. And had had a successful day studying it.
Then, it was time to work.
OK—the worst task first. I attacked the kitty litter
boxes, and thought while doing so that the wash was next. But there’s a rule
—self-imposed, but still a rule—in the house that one cannot proceed from one
room to another without carrying something (generally, dirty ashtrays or coffee
cups). It’s a big house; it’s the only way….
In this case, it was not a dirty ashtray but a dirty
sex toy. NO, not my sex toy but the cat’s. Yes I provide them, although I do
not GIVE them. I quite properly deposit my dirty underpants in the laundry
basket. Smith, the cat, retrieves them (it?) and moves to the most public area
of the house, always on a rug. There he proceeds to….
….I’ll not say. But I can only say that he makes a
quite distinctive sound as he goes about it, and that, of course, prompts me to
shout…
“FOR GOD’S SAKES! YOU ARE SICK AND DISGUSTING! PUT THAT
FILTHY SEX TOY AWAY, OR AT LEAST DO IT IN PRIVATE!”
Words, I realized a week ago, that my new neighbor must
have heard, as she was smoking a cigarette on her balcony. (It’s Old San Juan,
remember? All the doors are open here….) She gave me, well, a special look
hours later on the street….
Still thinking somewhat about the wash, I then went to
address a few words (why bother? guess it’s just habit) to the cat.
Right. He was in the bedroom where, well, the bed was
unmade.
OK, did that, and then saw—you’re not forgetting the
wash, are you?—a book on the floor. Well, that’s not right, I thought, as I
frequently do. I picked it up and headed to…
You get my drift?
I did eventually do the laundry, some hours later. But
observing as I was the trifling failures in my most proximate agenda, I had
quite a successful day. Things got done—they often don’t.
Buoyed by all this, I got right down to work, the next
day, writing an assignment for the students. It’s something I never do. Worse,
is was on conditionals, something I like, and which can be fun. And should be—I
generally sing “Oh I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weiner!” Unbelievably,
everybody in Puerto Rico knows it, though of course in Spanish. So we sing it
(in both languages) and go on from there….
In this I am bested by former co-worker, a Spanish
teacher who taught the gringos to sing ojalá que llueva café, café AND made
them dance to it. Alas, it was in the days before YouTube—she’d be famous, or
at least viral, by now.
But no—I had to prepare. All for my students….
The look on their faces still pains me. They didn’t
understand.
What were they doing wrong? How could they fail me,
their teacher?
I did the only thing possible.
“Would you please,” I said in my most teacherly tone (and
yes, computer, teacherly is a word—stop with that damn squiggle) “do exactly
what I do?” I then held the accursed assignment high in the air, turned it face
down…
…and slammed it on the table.
“I think I’ll not charge for this class,” I said,
“although in fact there is something to be learned here….”
We went on to discuss failure—how it teaches you so
much more than success, and how prevalent and necessary it is in nature.
They thought I was nuts, of course….
Well they’re probably right.
And it reminded me of my two other failures, as a
teacher. The first, years ago, in my earliest attempt at teaching. Three
teenage boys, three books on the table. A nervous and novice teacher.
Fatally, the books were…
For boys? For Puerto Rican boys? Look, it was a setup,
I now see, but I only made it worse. Now, I might possibly be able to do
something with it. (“OK, it’s crap—we all know that….”)
Second failure—in my first week teaching at Wal-Mart. I
was hardly inexperienced, and they certainly knew me, and how I taught. Was it
the life size portraits there in the building of Sam Walton, staring
down—looking so much like Jack, on his most dispirited day?
And now a third failure.
OK, so now we’re at today. I get up, I take my walk, I
touch the portal of El Morro (and no, I don’t know why, I just have to), I turn
back and see…
…a white plastic chair stuck firmly in an almond tree.
(Yes, we have almond trees in Puerto Rico—they’re just not the same. Get it?)
The image stays with me for the rest of the walk—two
Beethoven quartets long (my current metric, as we said in Wal-Mart). It’s with
me now. Nor do I know why….
Perhaps because it was an amazement, an undoubted
success. No one, I hope, had a work order to put a white resin chair in an
almond tree (which, speaking of colors, turn an amazing russet at this time of
year). Nor—no offense intended, my Puerto Rican audience—would it ever have
been executed . Or so well, at least.
And no, no one had cared—not the tree, not the chair.
Certainly not the municipal government. Perhaps it was the wind that blew the
chair into the tree. More likely, it was the students from the Escuela
de Artes Plásticas nearby who had, on a whim, placed it there. Maybe—ah,
that’s it!—it was art. But nobody had cared.
Or they had, in a careless way. And so….
“Teach me to care, and not to care,” I think. And then
wonder…
…Is that the correct understanding?
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