[Editor's Note: Eric Blair is the pseudonym for a first-year teacher of math in a Manhattan high school.]
I started looking through the haphazardly shelved books in our school library today. We didn’t have a librarian this year, and the library now is split by desks into a Teacher Center and a classroom. Sometimes the classroom part holds two classes at the same time. Today, there are three classes there.
Our dean told me that the librarian last year was useless anyway, not much of a loss. I couldn’t say. This is my first year. I never met the librarian, and I couldn’t get further details from the dean now. He left at semester.
I’m not from New York. I was brought in by one of the many teacher importation programs. Where I’m from in Wisconsin, school buildings change more than their teachers. It was not uncommon to have the same teacher that your parents had, for the same subject in the same grade.
In Wisconsin, I never heard of a teacher commuting from another state. My high school teachers were people I saw around town, at the grocery store, at church. Here in New York it seems like half my coworkers are coming in from New Jersey or Connecticut every morning.
In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, some part of the legal code actually required that teachers live within some boundary including the school where they work. People were trying to change the law on the grounds that it was too hard to find teachers in some regions. People with an education just didn’t live in some neighborhoods. Maybe so.
As a 25-year-old, above the median age of teachers at my school, it seems like maybe even if you look farther for teachers, many won’t make the commute for long.
While I was student teaching last year, people actually advised me to live far from my students — for my sanity, they said. But when I was growing up, my father walked to the paper mill where he worked, he walked home to have lunch with his family and then back to work, and he walked back home at night; his total commute for the day was under 20 minutes. So my apartment is near my school, and this year my students have told me that I live in the ghetto. Maybe so.
A new bakery opened on my block just a few weeks ago. They speak less English than a similar bakery I visited on trips to Barcelona. But at this bakery you can get a slice of cheesecake for a $1.25, and they’ll give it to you in a tiny brown paper bag the way they serve everything there. The cheesecake has got crystalline sugar sprinkled across the top.
I like cheesecake, and so this bakery has got to figure in my decision on whether I’ll be a teacher again next year. I tried very hard to enjoy cheesecake with sugar on top, but in the end that just isn’t the cheesecake I know. Then I tried the apple turnover one morning, but it wasn’t apple turnover. It was pineapple turnover. Maybe I could get used to pineapple turnover, but I haven’t been back to that bakery.
I’ve been wondering a bit about what will become of the library at my school. I don’t think there’s any plan to hire a librarian. There’ll be hiring enough just to replace all the teachers who are not returning.
The students and the books in the library will be back regardless of who is on staff. The disarray of the shelves seems likely to increase with the overall disarray of the school and the lives of those students.
The general mood is lifted by the weather, however. There is hope. Hope for
