“But that works, right?”
“No.” He decided then and there, truth was hell on romance. “Here is where, already, those who do not teach have suggestions.”
“Keep them after school if they don't listen to you,” she said, filling in her part of the script.
“I can't without written parent permission given twenty-four hours in advance. If the child fails to bring back the signed note, I am stymied. I try calling home. The number is disconnected, or both parties are at work. Or mom doesn’t speak English.”
“Send them to the counselor,” Grace offered, undaunted. There was nothing like naïveté for flying in the face of reality.
“Counselor sends them back with a note saying that they have been ‘counseled.’ Child smirks as he hands it to me.”
“Send them to the dean,” she trumpeted, confident—off the top of her head—she could best his strategies devised over however many years.
“Dean sends them back with a note saying, ‘This is a matter for the counselor.’”
She smiled demurely. Still no indication this was anything but his fault.
“There are byzantine paths I can trudge down to finally get children to pay twenty minutes of their lives to me for failing to get out their book for homeroom, but I don't have the energy for that because this is nothing compared to the resistance and apathy I'll face in actual classes. I'm saving my powder.”
She shifted uncomfortably in her chair.
“I take attendance. The minute my eyes are off them, the whispering and giggling starts. I stare them down a few times and eventually they dissolve into sullen silence. Books in their hands, they stare defiantly off into space. Never mind I let them pick out whatever book they wanted, provided by the tax payer, at the library. Could be Harry Potter. Could be James and the Giant Peach, or The Godfather. Only four of the students read. The others mark time, preferring to waste twenty minutes rather than read for pleasure. They'll do anything to avoid reading. They hate the written word with a passion. By the time homeroom is over, I am depressed, because they are our nation's future.”
“But—”
He didn’t give her the chance. If he was going to bury her under an avalanche of facts, he may as well get on with it. “Now comes my eighth grade English class. Most of them read at the fourth grade level. For this district, that's pretty good. My ESL classes are at the second grade level.”
“But—”
“I say, ‘Please take out your notes from yesterday.’ Four children take out their notes. Three children take out iPods and try to sneak them on. They thread the earphones up under their shirts, sneak in one earpod, and hide it with their hand, as if resting their heads on their hands. The girls cover the iPods with their hair.”
“You could take away the iPods,” she offered sheepishly. No longer was she the adolescent ram with the fresh horns.
“I could confiscate them, but the administration has warned us that if we do and we lose it or it's stolen, we have to pay the child's parents to replace the iPod. It's happened once already to a first year teacher, so I don't risk it.”9
He stopped suddenly. He noticed she hadn’t breathed in a while, and didn’t want her passing out on him, not on a first date. This was a first date, right? He hadn’t come this clean with his mother.
“Can you speak more philosophically about what might be underlying these trends?” she said finally, blinking again, circulation returning to her face. Although, speaking selfishly, he thought the alabaster skin flushed of all color worked fabulously on her. “Like, maybe if parents were to push their kids more,” she suggested.
It was as if she hadn’t been listening. Dare he hope it was because she was equally enthralled by him, distractedly so?
“My parents’ generation was the era of the over-involved mom,” he said. “They rode your butt like a jockey at Candlestick. The latchkey kids, these days, have no parents to concern themselves; they’re both working. If the parents don’t care, why should they? And not just about school, about themselves in general. And without the parents to provide the motivation and the structure, I can’t teach any more, I can just do crowd control. What motivation can I give, some gold stars? Candy?”
“But surely you’ll get sued for generating no results,” she said. The sense of horror playing across her face made Ezra feel positively predatory. Although when it came to unwanted advances by teachers on their protégés, she struck him as every bit as jaded and overly well-informed as he was on the subject of middle school education.
“You know why we don’t have PE—sorry, physical education—anymore?” Ezra asked. “The kids were getting sprained ankles, and the parents were suing. Now the kids get obese and contract diabetes by the age of twelve. Next solution.” Maybe he was pounding her hard as a kind of foreplay or as an outlet for his sexual frustration. If so, she gave no indication of noticing, and she didn’t seem the type to be clueless as to any ruse a man could run on her, having no doubt been subject to them all by the age of fifteen. But then she was distracted by all that caring. He figured her for twenty-eight, thirty, but women still in their flawless years were notoriously hard to date. He was being wholly inappropriate in any case.
“What about those theme schools, like the performance arts schools, or the ones for future bankers, or the Montessori and Walden schools?”
“Sure, in theory, if you can right-fit your kid from the get go, if you’re positively psychic about what they want to do in life and the best route to get them there. It might well help. But who’s running these schools? If it’s just another for-profit venture backing a really catchy concept, and the people aren’t passionate about what they’re doing, it’s just another way to bilk the public, suck out the money without putting much back in. That’s what’s wrong with this country, in general, and it extends way beyond the school system.”
“That sounds jaded, even for you.” She straightened her short, tight-fitting dress over her knees.
“I used to work in for-profit mental health. Every kind of diagnosis you can imagine, we had it, dissociative disorders—we used to call them multiple personalities—manic depressives, borderlines; a real carnival of characters. And we had the elderly with Alzheimer’s, of course. They were all neglected and mistreated, and the few caregivers coming through who gave a damn were sufficiently incompetent to not do much to impact the overall equation. In a way, the system mistreated the patients more than the people did, as it was all about collecting the SSI money, and maintaining the population as inexpensively as possible. Real cash cows these places if done ‘right.’ Of course, to actually make a dent in these peoples’ lives, to impact them positively and long-term so the front doors weren’t revolving, that would have eaten up much of the profits. Couldn’t have that. So greed, really, just like on Wall Street, all the way down on Main Street, did us in. But let’s not stop with social services.”
She gulped, reached for a glass of water on his desk.
“Go in a grocery store lately? There’s no real food in there. That stuff is designed to last ten thousand years, with preservatives and fake food ingredients that don’t spoil. Why, because real food that’s healthy for you spoils faster, cutting into the profit margins. So doing what’s right by people, as it turns out, isn’t terribly profitable. At least no one has studied how to make it profitable, and there’s not much impetus to do so because people are too fat, dumb, and lazy to know better, to even think to ask the right questions and pressure them to do better. And do you know why there’s a conspiracy to keep everyone fat, dumb, and lazy, and checked out of the political system that big money uses to keep the whole sick game going? Because that’s how they keep the whole sick game going.”
Grace gathered up the recorder, stuffed it in her purse, fought back tears, and ran to the door. So much for the seductive strut. He guessed he’d overstepped himself in his effort to charm her with how sophisticated and worldly he was.
Feeling like shit, he ran after
her, blocked the door by leaning against it. “I’m sorry. But if you want to be a soldier, I guess you have to survive boot camp; the whole idea is to weed out the faint of heart.” She continued to pull feebly at the door. He figured showing how strong he was was another sexual intoxicant. He had clearly not dated in a while. “You want to know how to change things? People have to start giving a damn. And not just the people who we expect to look out for us, our parents, and authority figures. These kids raised on entitlement, figuring the world owes them something for nothing, they have to start giving a damn. Big Brother stepping in every five minutes with laws and social programs designed to legislate human decency, as if it can be legislated, because individuals won’t take personal responsibility for their lives, has to stop.”
She managed to get the door open a couple inches before he overpowered her.
“But how can we teach individual responsibility when corporations don’t have it, when business leaders and government leaders don’t have it? When the entire social system set up to empower people to be all they can be has instead turned to preying on them, so the one percent get fatter, and the ninety-nine percent just drown in the lack of social supports, fall through the webbing in the shorn social fabric. You want to know how to fix things?”
She struggled with the doorknob, sobbing, as if she couldn’t stand to see another one of her dreams drown in the shipwreck all around her.
“First you have to understand how interconnected everything is, and how busted everything is, and how fixing any one thing, whether it’s our schools, or our businesses, just isn’t going to do it. We live in a technological age which fosters specialists, not generalists, not big picture thinkers. When was the last time exactly you ran into a big picture thinker worth his salts who could really connect all the dots in this immensely complex and interconnected world of ours?”
“I think I just did,” she said, and started to relax.
“Milk shake then?”
She looked into his eyes, making certain there really was a light at the end of the long dark tunnel of his morose nature, and it hadn’t already flickered out.
SIX
Grace sucked on her strawberry milkshake at Dairy Queen through the squiggly straw like a school girl. “Sorry, didn’t mean to traumatize you back into your grade school years. How old are you now, six?” Ezra sensed he was walking a fine line between charming and sophisticated and intellectually suffocating, but just couldn’t cease his efforts to impress her. He had long learned how to dial things down. For some reason she brought out the histrionic in him, with his constant need for approval, and a sense of implied intimacy which just didn’t exist.
She smiled, realizing she was guilty of playing the part of the school girl. “Sorry, it’s just that I’m used to being the intimidating one. I’ve never lost control of an interview like that before.”
“You didn’t. If I wasn’t so taken by you, I wouldn’t still be working so hard to impress you, and continuing to overshoot the mark. Now, if you could get me to relax better with some assurances—”
She smiled, and composed herself, realizing he was right, and that her feminine allure could be counted on to keep the cobra entranced before the melody of the flute. She pushed the milkshake aside. “I’m entirely smitten by you, and I’m not often smitten, so you can relax. Only, fair warning, there’s no room for men in my life. I’m a career girl. And, even if we were both journalists and joined at the hip, honestly—”
“I get it. These days, careers can make one very self-absorbed. Hell, not just careers, simple jobs. You can be going after the garbage collector or the secretary’s job, you can bet there are still twenty people more qualified to do it than you are. Just to stay alive, invites narcissism, questioning everything you do and how to do it better. Not exactly what we need to turn things around.”
“You’re doing it again.”
“Sorry. It’s been a while since I could decompress. Seventh graders aren’t exactly my target audience. You need someone who can boost your ratings. I need an outlet. You can’t put a gag on Nostradamus.”
She laughed in a way which suggested she was hitting a whole new gear of relaxed.
“Maybe we’re more joined at the hip than you think.”
“Maybe,” she said, but her tone sounded more placating than convincing.
“So do you have a niche, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Niche?”
“Do you just write about education?”
“No, I’m more of a travel writer.”
His eyebrows went up. “You do realize teachers get off three months of the year?”
She laughed nervously.
And so it began. The whirlwind tour of the world. Packing off to see indigenous peoples and cultures he honestly never knew existed. And slowly, through the countless puzzle pieces, a picture began to emerge. There was something transformative happening in the world. Something going on at a very grassroots level that even his big picture mind had trouble getting itself around. But then, he was in love, and couldn’t be entirely certain romance wasn’t throwing a halo around everything.
And so the mystery lingered to this day, which was it? The world through rose-tinted glasses? Or the world As It Is, as the Buddhists like to say, unvarnished, unedited by ego and its constant need to make the world a reflection of its own distorted self-image.
But he was getting ahead of himself. He wanted, he needed, to tell his tale from the beginning. Maybe so he could make better sense of it himself. Maybe so he could find out once and for all, if this gloss he was putting over things wasn’t his mind’s own way of recoiling from the shock of the amount of suffering going on in the world he was witnessing firsthand. The mind wants to make meaning of things, after all. It wants to assign profundity where perhaps there isn’t any, because that’s what we do. Maybe that’s what everyone was doing. Maybe everyone was in this same state of culture shock he was in, over a global civilization that had imploded, crawling out of it the only way they knew how, by cobbling together meaning out of the chaos, out of the meaningless. The quintessential human drama. He loved the idea. But if he wasn’t careful, this thesis too would color his thinking, erasing the vista of life as it truly is. There was no way through his quandary but to take the journey again in his head.
Maybe he wasn’t looking for the one big explanation that made everything make sense. Maybe he was looking for the many little answers that could lend some, if not all humans, a leg up. That was more Grace’s method than his. Maybe she was right, and he was wrong. Maybe it was their yin and yang approaches that had brought them together in the first place.
Once again, he reminded himself, he could do so much with abstractions. The truth of the human condition, if there was truth to be gleaned, lay in the concrete, messy details of the people, places, and things that would come to possess them.
SEVEN
On the plane headed to the Amazon rain forest, Grace noticed Ezra was correcting math papers.
“You a math teacher now?”
“Yep. As it turns out, there are too many people better at teaching middle school English and social studies. But in math, I can be fairly middlin’, at least in America. Math and science.”
“And after you get pushed out of that niche?”
“Then I guess I’m down to teaching English in South Korea. I hear they’re already on 5G networks, so how bad can that be?”
She laughed. “And me thinking you were a genius all this time.”
“Only in my lucid descriptions of how genuinely screwed we all are.”
She smiled, and went back to writing her article on her Android phone with her thumbs. “I need some filler for this story. What’s your take on the plight of the middle class?”
“I worked for a cell phone company before teaching middle school,” he said, reaching into his back pocket for his wallet. He figured now was as good a time as any to clear it out, since he was leaving much of the past behind him. “For
eight years I witnessed firsthand the campaign to gut the middle class.” He threw the self-storage card on the “to keep” pile. “The real problem was they had a mind of their own. They weren’t superstars, just reasonably bright, reasonably well-educated, and full of confidence.” He threw the business card for car wash services in the “discard” pile. “They had opinions about everything, including the bureaucratic insanity that went with working in any large corporation. But it’s a Nazi state, you see, not a democracy. You’re expected to do what they tell you without question. The middle class isn’t particularly good at that.” Throwing the latest card down on the fold-down tray in front of him, he noticed the self-help pile was rapidly outpacing the out-source services pile.
“Now people who have little or no education at all,” he said, continuing his monologue, “Low self-esteem, third world people who never saw a job and will follow you blindly to the edge of the world for fifty cents an hour—they’re the demographic you need for corporations.”
He added the Lexus business card to the “discard” pile, paused briefly, wondering if he should start a whole new pile for “in your wildest dreams.” “The only other niches to fill go to the people pleasers and people manipulators who can smooth the whole mess over and get folks to do what no human should be expected to do. The more incompetent the underlings are at the soft skills, the more management can justify their paychecks. That’s why even the Googles of the world favor socially awkward nerds. Though, in a cell phone company, social awkwardness comes about naturally due to traits already highlighted.”
Ezra held out the business card for facials, manicures, pedicures, and makeovers. He decided he wasn’t the type to be made over and threw it into the “discard” pile. “Last but not least, are the true brains, the analysts, the scary smart people, who can work the numbers and do the math that no one else even understands, especially not the executive class and the CEO and COOs, who really got where they are by being one of the people pleasers and manipulators.”
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 127
