HALLIE EPHRON: We all like to complain about how hard writing is. And don't get me wrong. It IS!
Howevah... it's not the hardest job I've ever had.
Lately I've been watching in admiration as teachers in West Virginia, North Carolina, Arizona, Utah, and Ohio stand up for themselves and demand not only a reasonable wage, but books and supplies and decent classrooms and buildings in which to work. Their struggle brings back my own memories of when I taught elementary school in the early 70's.
I'm here to tell you teaching was the most challenging, most exhausting, and ultimately the most satisfying job I've ever had. And to all those people who think all we have to do is test our way to educational excellence, I say: spend a semester in the classroom and then tell me it's that easy.
Here’s me in 1974 teaching elementary school at PS 189 in Manhattan’s
Washington Heights. By this time, four years into the job, I was starting to feel
as if I knew what I was doing.
I remember arriving at PS 189, fresh out of graduate school, two days before
school started. I'd just been hired. The old brick building was north of
Harlem where I’d done my student teaching--so far north that it
overlooked the East River from a West side address.
Its double front doors opened onto a lobby with a center
staircase. Its brass doorknobs, embossed with NYC PUBLIC SCHOOLS, were worn
smooth. The main office door had a knobless-socket where there should have been
one of those knobs. Someone had pilfered it over the summer.
My classroom was three flights up. I remember looking around
Room 405 in dismay. On that hot September day, half of the windows wouldn’t open. Thirty desks, lined up in rows of six, were nailed to the floor. There was no chalk in the
chalk rail. The sliding doors of a long narrow coat closet on the side of the
room were stuck half closed. A supply closet was locked and, when I eventually
managed to get it open, turned out to be empty. The only contents in the massive oak desk at the front of the room were
love notes from kids to a teacher named Miss Silverman.
I was probably making a list of tools to bring in from home
to break into the supply closet and unbolt the desks when a woman came into the
room. A pretty brunette in her thirties was my guess. She introduced herself as Susan
Silverman. Ah, the previous tenant. She told me that the custodian would be up
shortly to unscrew the pencil sharpener and move it to her new room, a floor
down.
Pencil sharpener! I hadn’t noticed that there actually was that
single useful item in the room. And I cursed myself for not having noticed it
and removed it for safekeeping.
I was already learning to think like a teacher.
All I can say it, thank goodness for the kids. That year I had
a sixth-grade class of non-English speaking students, a mix of Dominican, Cuban,
Greek, and a lone Albanian, most of them "fresh off the boat." Though I eventually discovered that there was a supply closet in the basement with chalk and construction paper and other basic supplies, there was no curriculum for sixth grade (or if there was, it was a well-kept secret). There were no textbooks in the building appropriate for
nearly-adolescents learning English. I flew by the seat of my pants and the kids flew with me.
In my mind's eye, I can still see very one of those kids from my first class: Arturo, Roxanne, Evaristo, Eduardo, Maria, Janet, Ana, Angela, Roberto, Ephigenia, Xiomara, Frankie...
What's the hardest job you've ever had?
