Somebody Somewhere (27 page)

I wasn't polished, but plastic appears polished and I had no desire to be plastic. Right now, I was proud of myself that I was very real.

Yes, I thought, there would be skeptics. I had lost enough of a life in entertaining them in their mind games, their ego games, their power games, their violence games, and their bedroom games. In the words of one so-eloquent street person I had known, they could “eat shit” for all I cared.

T
he September holidays were over and I had gone home as the teaching course resumed. Back at the university, in one of the guest lectures before the end of term, there was a spare seat between me and another student. Joe came and sat in it, beaming one of his Cheshire Cat grins.

The guest speaker's unfamiliar voice was hard to follow and I was having trouble latching on to the meaning of his words. The student sitting next to Joe drew me diagrams to explain what I had had trouble understanding. This made more sense to me than the lecture.

“Shhh,” snapped Joe. I asked him to change places with the other student, and with a lot of huff and puff he did.

Some other students were discussing various things in a corner of the room and another was drifting off to sleep. The student beside me and I sat there communicating through writing and diagrams. Turning to me, Joe snapped, “I told you to shut up,” his voice brimming with hate and disgust.

The student next to me rolled his eyes, thoroughly familiar with Joe's weekly, if not daily, confrontations with me. He went on to say something quietly to me when Joe interrupted.

“Listen, slut, I told you to shut up,” he said clearly and loudly for everyone to hear.

A few students turned around and scowled at me. No one gave me any look to console me. Why should they? Wasn't I the weirdo with the odd timing who forgot half the time to say the ritual “good morning,” “goodbye,” and “did you have a nice weekend?”

Crawling back within myself, I sank in my chair. I could not bear the injustice and blurted out just as loudly and clearly, “It is not my fault if Joe said, ‘Listen, slut, I told you to shut up.' ”

“Why don't you just get out? None of us want you here,” said Joe with utter conviction. The faces around us remained blank. No one put him in his place, no one even attempted to. I took this as confirmation they agreed with him.

I stood up. “Thank you,” I said with all the graciousness I could muster, “I've been wanting to leave for some time, but now that you have given me permission, I think I will.”

I walked straight to the secretary's office. “Can I have the work I've handed in so far?” I asked her. “Oh, and I will be away for the rest of the day.” I couldn't think. I just wanted to get all of my things out of this building and to get off the university grounds. If these were future teachers, then not much had changed since the ignorance I had faced from a handful of my own teachers.

“Are you okay?” asked the secretary. “I can't go back to any more classes,” I explained.

“Look,” she said. “Here is Joe. He's a bug on the carpet. Stamp on him.” “No,” I said, thinking this was the same as if someone did this to me. “I can't.” “Imagine him as a clown,” she said. “He won't be frightening if you think of him like that. He would be an embarrassment even to himself.” This helped. Like someone thrown from a horse, I went and had a cup of black tea and went to my next class. Joe wasn't there.

T
he final teaching round had arrived. As if it were fate that as much crap had to land on me as possible, I found I was placed with Angie, the woman who had picked on me after the pool incident.

All year I had had trouble with her. I found her staring at me all the time and then when I would stare back at her to make her look away she would give me funny looks.

Her big, round eyes and the tone of her voice frightened me. She seemed to take control, which made me feel powerless in her company. When I did something that appeared strange to her she jumped upon it, challenging me directly. I felt suffocated around her. I was afraid to make a move or say the wrong word for fear she would ask all the how, what, where, when, or whys of what I said or did. In frustration, doors came close to slamming, there were a lot of breaks for black tea, and a lot of mirror conversations in the solitude of the toilets.

Angie caught me by surprise. “I see we're on the final teaching round together,” she said. She had been separated from her best friend for the final round and was glad to be with someone she knew.

I compared this to how I might feel if I were now meant to stay away from home anywhere without Travel Dog and I felt sorry for her. Angie's best friend had come through many years with her, and throughout the course they had been strength and belonging for one another. I admired their friendship even if, in ridicule and exclusion,
I had sometimes felt myself a victim of it. Angie was able to achieve and hold what I could not: a permanent ongoing friendship with someone she was emotionally close to.

For my final teaching round, I would again be working with those of high-pitched-voice fame and sometimes-too-tactile disposition; the youngest children in the school—the four- and five-year-olds. I would be working with those most notorious for stretching stress-capacity and looking for the you in there.

Arriving at the school, I was met by the woman who was to supervise me. She seemed the epitome of the prim and proper schoolmistress right down to the well-ironed clothes and the hair neatly in its place. Willie would have been impressed.

Her room was orderly and categorized and I felt incredibly grateful for that. At least visually I would be able to function in this room without the blindness of distractions.

The wall of windows let natural light into the room, and the rows of tables on either side of the room and the large amount of space to work with made me feel free and not so closed in.

There was a large blackboard and a huge array of objects and visual-tactile resources to use. I still had my guitar, as well, so there would be music and movement through which to learn.

Words were used with rhythm, music, actions, and images. Words were something the children and I could talk “through” and not just “with.” We explored them as far more than mere assaults upon the ears, distancing weaponry, or vehicles for other knowledge. I used words in this class with the intimacy and love for them as objects that had led to my own compulsive and obsessive exploration of them, their feel, their variations, their categories, and their use as playthings.

The children had a separate recess purely for play. Not having much of a clue to how to facilitate direct interaction between people as people (as opposed to people as cases or people-objects), I just let the children do what children do so often naturally: mix.

Instead of spending this time buried in a book I hung about and looked for the patterns in what they were doing. Outside of my face,
I smiled for them. Inside of my face, I cried for me. Sometimes tears rolled down my peacefully smiling face and I moved my glasses and wiped them away. I was their teacher and yet I was aware and deeply moved by just how much I was here to learn from them.

I tried to sit in the staff room. I tried to remember to ask questions instead of just answering those thrown at me. I tried to listen and be polite. I busied myself in my lesson plans during breaks.

“Hi,” said Angie, calling me over to sit with her. I was frightened. She had seemed so unpredictable. Right now, though, she was nervous about this final round and feeling isolated without her friend. Eventually I confided in her how I had been afraid of her.

She seemed surprised to find she had been so frightening and intimidating and I was relieved to learn it was not intentional and was more often than not due to misunderstandings.

She had been disturbed by my inability both to work out when to stop looking at someone and to pick up some of the subtle messages she felt she and others were giving. This had made her wonder whether I was quite right in the head or not. My cleverness seemed to give weight to the idea that I was just insolent rather than ignorant or struggling under the weight of a processing problem.

Angie also told me that she had found many of the students threatening and perhaps especially me. “You've done so much with your life,” she said, “what have I done? Nothing. I've lived at home with my family all my life. I went straight from school to college to the university. I still have the same friends I've had all my life.” Listening to her talk about living at home with her family, being close to them, keeping the same friends for years, going straight through school to the university, and being involved in her own cultural community, I felt impressed by her achievements, which were some of the hardest things for me to tackle.

The lecturer arrived for the final assessment, which would make or break us as teachers. Our drama lecturer at the university was to do the assessment. She had been understanding throughout the year but she was by no means an easy marker.

I met one of the fellow student teachers in the hall. Her marks had been harsh but fair. Another had been surprised at getting good results from the supervisor's observation of her teaching. Angie and I were the last to be assessed.

It was a stinking hot summer afternoon and the children were sweaty, niggling, and tired. The lesson for the afternoon's assessment was on science. Twenty-five pairs of distracted beady little eyes were peering around the room and I commanded their attention as I played my guitar, gently keeping the rhythm as I spoke.

“I don't feel well, Miss,” came a squeaky little whine adjoined to a hand in the air. It seemed she had decided that the two children already resting up were doing something better than joining the class. Another decided this looked like a good strategy and said the same. Having directed them to separate corners of the room to rest up in beanbags, I discussed what we were going to be doing so that the children knew where I was taking them.