Another friend told her, “You get all these great tricks from Black, like ‘Don’t commit to teaching for more than a year at a time.’”
“That’s a great trick?”
“Yeah, because you don’t want to get dragged under by things that haven’t happened yet. Or won’t happen. She says you’ve got to teach like an athlete. You’ve got to be ready to return the ball.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’d have to take the class. A lot of what she says sounds weird out of context. Besides, she says that we have to process things for ourselves. Teach the student, not the subject.”
The closest Karen ever got to Dr. Black was passing her in the hall. She wanted to stop her and say, “Give it to me in a sentence. What do I need to know?” But she didn’t. In Ryerson’s section, she got some good practice in teaching by lecture, demonstration, dialogue, and group discussion. She did not learn how to be ready to return the ball.
In her first year as a new teacher, Karen went to the principal. She said, “I don’t like the memo.”
“Which memo is that?”
“This business about submitting lesson plans two weeks in advance is a waste of my time and yours.”
He considered her. His frown was a bit like one of her father’s frowns. “Miss Garry, you’re a first year teacher.”
“Exactly. What will do me more good than writing out formal lesson plans is to have you observe my teaching more often. I’d appreciate the feedback.”
His eyebrows went up. “I don’t have time for extra observations.”
“You can use the time that you would have spent reviewing my lesson plans.”
“Everyone got the same memo. If you don’t submit your lesson plans, I’ll have to write a letter for your permanent file.”
She thought, That’s okay. I’m only committed to one year of teaching anyway. She said, “I have to do what’s best for my students, and that means using my time well.”
During her first term, she was observed once by a senior administrator, once by the principal, and once by a master teacher.
The senior administrator saw her give a demonstration. At the start of the class, she discharged ammonia gas in a beaker of phenolphthalein solution. The solution turned pink. Then she inflated a red toy balloon with ammonia gas and put the balloon in another beaker of the same solution. At first, the solution remained clear. Karen lectured on the states of matter. By the end of the hour, that solution in the second beaker had also turned pink. “We won’t get to kinetic theory for two more weeks,” she said, “but in the meantime I want you to come up with at least three possible explanations for why this solution turned pink and a method for testing each explanation.”
Her written evaluation from the senior administrator noted that two weeks was too long for students to remain in suspense about a demonstration. He noted that a red balloon might serve to confuse some students and said that she should have used, say, a blue one. He also observed that state-wide exams stressed factual knowledge and that demonstrations took up valuable time.
Later, the master teacher observed a session where Karen opened with a dialogue about what happens to sugar in a glass of water, led the students in an experiment at their lab tables, then demonstrated Brownian motion with a beaker of water and a drop of food coloring. Karen closed with another dialogue to confirm what the students had learned. The master teacher offered a few concrete tips, but wrote that Karen “clearly knew what she was doing.”
The principal’s only written comment was that Miss Garry was not submitting her lesson plans in advance, as required.
Karen took all of this to mean that she was doing as Dr. Black would have advised, teaching the class and not the front office.
Karen corrected the lab books for spelling and grammar. One student complained that the class was chemistry, not English. “Do you think the world divides up the way that school does?” Karen asked him. “Do you think that the annual report of a car company can be badly written just because they aren’t in the publishing business?” That didn’t mollify him. His mother called Karen at home to complain about the unfair grading.
“All right,” Karen announced to her class. “Anyone who brings a note from home excusing you from learning job skills in this class will be graded strictly according to test scores.”
Two notes came in. One referred to her as the “teecher.” The other was typed, grammatical, and spelled correctly. She honored them both, and supposed that this constituted returning the ball.
No one had ever told Karen that Dr. Black used dynamic equilibrium as a metaphor for the classroom, but Karen thought of it as the sort of thing that Dr. Black would have taught. It fit. Like the chemistry of a living cell, the class room was always shifting.
Walking was another good metaphor for teaching. A person walking on two legs is never perfectly balanced. The body is making constant adjustments. It’s not balance that keeps us on our feet, but constant motion.
In Karen’s second year, a student that she’d taught in the fall committed suicide late in the spring. He shot himself in the head on a Saturday night. Monday morning, the first period class wanted something that Karen wasn’t trained to give them. So gave them what she had. She invited them to talk about the boy who had shot himself. They asked questions she couldn’t answer.
Near the end of the hour, she went to the blackboard and wrote:
KNO3 C S
“Gunpowder,” she said. She explained that potassium nitrate’s role was to provide oxygen for rapid combustion of the carbon and sulfur. Gunpowder didn’t need air to burn. In a confined space, combustion would result in a very fast build up of pressure.
One girl said, “Why are you telling us this?”
“I don’t know,” Karen said. “It’s the place where what happened touches on chemistry. And also, I think, because sometimes the best way to think through something that weighs on you is to really look at it, to see it from every angle.”
Later, she wasn’t sure if it had been the right thing to do. But it was what she had done. She had kept moving.
After that, she did her best to notice the students more, to really see each one every day. I like the new haircut. What’s the T-shirt logo? Is that a band? Pink really is your color. It made a difference, she thought, though she couldn’t be sure of exactly what the difference was. And two years later, there was another suicide. Like the first one, he was a boy who had been in her class before, but was not a current student.
She dreamed about this boy. She dreamed that she opened her front door, and there he was, soaking wet, standing in the rain. He said, “It’s okay.” She tried to speak. She couldn’t. She could barely breathe. He said, “It’s not okay, is it? It’s not okay.” She woke from the dream struggling for breath. At the end of the term, she committed herself to teaching for just one more year.
Because she committed herself to just one year at a time, she always knew how many years she had been teaching. In her eleventh year, one of her students would come to her morning class with alcohol on his breath or his pupils dilated. She told him he had a problem and that he should talk to her when he was ready to get treatment. Soon after that, he disappeared from school for three weeks, then called her at home. “I’ve screwed up everything,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.” When she called his mother, the woman was drunk. Hell, no, her son didn’t need rehab. He needed a kick in the ass now and then, but he was fine, and fuck you, anyway.
Karen drove the boy to a treatment center and got him admitted. Days later, she was in the principal’s office answering the mother’s charge that Karen was having sex with her son. “I don’t care how necessary it was for you to drive him,” the principal said. “You should have been smart enough to have someone else along. I don’t believe her, but you’ve opened us up to a nuisance suit. You’ve got to think these things through!”
The boy wrote her a long grateful letter. She saved it. For one thing, she might need
it for evidence in case the mother sobered up and still wanted to sue.
She won no awards for her teaching. Some students adored her. Some didn’t. Every year, she decided again that teaching was important and that she wasn’t bad at it, so committed herself to another two semesters.
In the midst of her twentieth year, one of her college classmates phoned her. “Have you heard that Laurel Black died? You were one of her students, weren’t you?”
Karen was not technically entitled to a bereavement leave to attend the funeral of a favorite college professor, but the new principal was younger than she was. She persuaded him.
Dr. Black had retired to her childhood home town in Iowa. Karen rented a car at the Des Moines airport and drove for two hours along fields of stubble. Trees had lost their leaves. The sky was gray.
At the funeral home, she met Dr. Black’s daughter, Elizabeth, who told Karen what a great, encouraging mother Laurel had been. Karen told Elizabeth that Dr. Black had been a superb teacher as well. For the first two hours, Karen was the only visitor who was not family.
In death, Dr. Black looked smaller than Karen remembered her.
At the memorial service the next day, the minister recounted Laurel Black’s great contributions to generation after generation of student teachers. There weren’t many of those former students in attendance. The chapel was small, and half of the pews were empty. The minister invited friends and family to stand and offer remembrances.
Karen stood. She said, “There may be days where I don’t think of Dr. Black in my classroom. But there aren’t weeks. She shaped what I do. I hope I’m a good teacher. I think I am. That after twenty years I still care whether or not I’m good at what I do, that’s something I owe to Dr. Black.”
Afterwards, there was a reception where Karen offered her sympathies to the family. A man Karen’s age approached and said, “I had her for Methods.”
“You’re a teacher?”
“Was. I got out after six years. But what she taught me touched on everything else I’ve done. Thank you for saying what you said. You spoke for a lot of us.”
“I never got to thank her.”
“When were you her student?”
Karen said, “I’ve never stopped being her student.”
7. Curriculum Vitae
It was, from some perspectives, a brilliant career. When Lance Reed first joined the humanities faculty, the theater program was like the theater program at any other tiny, struggling liberal arts college. Each year they staged two productions with cheap costumes, unimaginative acting, and uninspired direction. A year after Reed had been teaching, the students were acting convincingly in four plays a year on well-designed inexpensive sets. Where before the audiences had always consisted of students, parents, and a few idealistic faculty, now word began to spread in town that the college’s productions might be worth seeing.
Reed brought a kind of energy that his mid-western students had never encountered before. He talked about their bodies as their instruments. As he coached them in breath, posture, familiarity with the muscles of their bodies, he would touch them, men and women alike. He would stand close to shape and arrange them with his hands. “Breathe in so that your belly pushes against my palm. Yes, like that! Now tighten your buns. Good.”
The first student he slept with was the young woman playing the title role in Hedda Gabler. Teresa kept the affair secret, but suffered for living two lives. Suffering, Reed told his students, was good for any actor, but especially young ones who had little experience with it. “Boleslavsky said that acting is the soul receiving its birth through art. Birth is painful. It is a struggle!”
Teresa’s soul was born on that stage as she played Hedda. “Now I am burning your child, Thea! Burning it! Curly locks.” Lance had all the power in their relationship. Teresa knew a lot about Hedda Gabler. The affair didn’t last, but Teresa was the first of Reed’s students to go on to a successful stage career.
Reed’s romance with Alice added little to the staging of Oedipus Rex. The production was done in masks and relied on technique rather than method acting. That was Reed’s downfall; he was attracted to Alice, who played Jocasta, without ever having seen her act from her own core. But the time he discovered how little she had to draw from, she was pregnant. He married her knowing that such a marriage was doomed. But he lived what he taught: that the artist suffers.
The Dean of Faculty was appalled by the marriage, but by then Reed was attracting serious grant money to the school, along with students who came specifically to study with him. Reed was warned, and then tenured.
A few years later, the junior who played Helena in Uncle Vanya was indiscrete. Jordan pledged her best friend to absolute secrecy, then told her about liaisons with Reed. In a week, almost everyone in the production knew. A freshman who disapproved of adultery on principle thus kept a prim, tight lid on her performance as Sonia. In the title role was a young man who had a crush on Jordan, and his speeches to Helen sometimes veered close to things he really did feel for the actress. Serebrakoff was played by a student who somehow missed the rumors, but who detected and responded to the tensions in the rest of the cast. In short, the entire ensemble was perfectly motivated. A reviewer came all the way from Minneapolis to see and write about the production.
In her senior year, Jordan played Lady Macbeth, Roxane, Katharina, and Sadie Thompson. All of these productions were emotionally charged for reasons that the audiences and the administration did not suspect. The acting and directing were consistently superb. Jordan graduated in the spring, Reed divorced his first wife in the summer, and the professor married his star pupil the following winter. Three of the students who had played opposite Jordan had some degree of success off Broadway, and one launched a modestly successful career in Hollywood.
Jordan Reed quit acting. She bore Lance two children, kept house, and did what she could to protect his reputation with the other faculty. It wasn’t easy. For one thing, most faculty continued for many years to treat her like a student. For another, her husband continued to have sex with his pupils. Sometimes he was careful, though he wasn’t as effective as a teacher or director then. Intrigues and jealousies were part of what made his stage spectacular.
The year that Hamlet closed out the academic year, Reed was coupling with the actress who played Gertrude—sometimes in her car and sometimes behind the locked door of the prop room where her dramatic, rhythmic outcries left no doubt as to what was happening. That Hamlet was, according to one reviewer, better than one that had been staged the previous summer at the state university using professional actors.
The next fall found a black-haired, dark-eyed junior playing both the roles of Lady Macbeth and Reed’s dark, Scorpionic lover. She liked asking him to do things to her that both excited and shamed him, and his intensity as a teacher was that year at its peak. She went on to a successful Hollywood career, though Reed often said that she’d have found her way there as easily without him. She was made for Hollywood.
He was still brilliant for a good many years after that. The college was named among the top ten undergraduate acting schools in an issue of Stagecraft. The alumni pledged funds for a theater building. More students made their way to New York, Los Angeles, or regional theaters.
Professor Reed’s decline was gradual. His hair grayed and thinned. Though he worked to keep himself trim and limber, no man can escape the wrinkles or the loss of muscle tone that change him, in the eyes of young women, from a dangerous and exciting father figure to a pathetic, horny old man. Even if his appeal had not waned, his sexual appetite diminished year by year. His own children grew up and became parents. Eventually, he could not look at his students without thinking of his grandchildren.
His teaching became rote, routine. “Breathe in so that your belly pushes against my palm.” He could give instruction he always gave, but he wasn’t igniting his own passions. He wasn’t making his students burn with deep emotion. Jordan had stayed with him, knowing everything,
and his life at home with her became more important as his teaching became less so.
He retired early. The administration named an endowed chair after him. They were pleased to have the benefit of his reputation without the risk of, well, his reputation.
The college hired two younger professors to replace him, a woman and a man. Both came with excellent credentials as actors and teachers. The theater program continued to have the college’s full support. Theater Arts was, after all, the shining star for a college that had never had much to offer beyond being small and local.
Professor Reed developed emphysema. He and his wife moved to Arizona for the sun and the air. Ten years after that, students at the college proposed a symposium in his honor.
Holding hands, Mr. and Mrs. Lance Reed sat in the darkened theater for a production of Uncle Vanya. The woman playing Helena could act, she could really act. More than that, she was breathtakingly beautiful. When she said to Astroff that line that could be such a disaster, “I am angry at you yet I will always remember you with pleasure,” she made it true, complex, heartbreaking. Marvelous, Lance thought, squeezing his wife’s hand. Marvelous girl. Marvelous teacher!
8. Little Monsters
In the classroom, she was the grownup, the person who was supposed to have the authority, but when she told the children what to do, they often ignored her. And what could she do? She couldn’t hit them. It wasn’t allowed. But if she sent them to the principal’s office they would come back an hour later with smug smiles.
She asked the principal about his notions of discipline, but he would say only, “Send them to me.” But she wanted to know, were the children actually punished? “Send them to me.” Whatever he was doing, she told him, it didn’t seem to change their behavior in the classroom. “Send them to me.”
That wasn’t the worst of it. The worst thing was that she couldn’t quit, couldn’t afford to go somewhere else. She was stuck in the middle of these wheat fields, stuck in this little town that all summer baked under a cloudless sky and all winter stiffened under a glaze of ice. After school sometimes she would get in her little car and drive toward the horizon. Not far. She’d have to go such a long way for the scenery to change. A long, long way.
The Keyhole Opera Page 17
