Oh these little distractions...

Picture this: I’m in the middle of introducing Romeo & Juliet to a ninth-grade English class. We are reading Act I, Scene I where two Capulet servants are venting their hatred for the house of Montague with bawdy banter. I’m explaining their punning remarks about physically conquering Montague men and sexually conquering Montague women. I ask the class what dual meaning the following lines might have:

“When I have fought with the men, I will be civil with the maids; I will cut off their heads.”
“The heads of the maids?”
“Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maiden-heads. Take it in what sense thou wilt.”

What are these two joking about? I ask.

Some students flip through the play, still trying to find the passage. Others bite their lower lips, thinking. Most stare blankly at their book without daring to look up, for fear I might call on them. Just when I’m about to ask the same question in a different way, a student sits up straight in his chair and raises his hand high. My heart fills with hope: this is it, I think, this is the student to motivate all others with contagious eagerness to enjoy Shakespeare’s language! I call on him with a smile, “Ethan?”
Out of breath, he asks:
“Can I go to the bathroom?”

These are the moments I can’t help but feel deflated. With so much knowledge to share and so few students who seemingly care, it’s a wonder teachers last as long as they do in public schools.

It’s difficult not to compare my college teaching experience to the differences I feel in H.S. The biggest differences by far are in the distractions H.S. teachers must learn to negotiate at every turn: counselors coming in for students, telephones ringing, PA systems asking us to “pardon the interruption,” students requesting passes, students needing handouts they “lost” or “forgot”, and all while a select few might be on the verge of brilliancy—some remote morsel of awareness and insight, complete preparedness and true desire to learn and share their learning. It all feels so incredibly futile. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t come to a program in secondary education from a career in college teaching. How much easier these inconveniences might seem to me if I’d been brand new to the field.

I’m trying to find ways to quiet the excessive noise of the profession, to de-clutter the clutter of distractions that seasoned secondary teachers seem entirely immune to. How do they do it? I imagine after a while one can become desensitized to just about anything. I think about Camus’ The Stranger, when Meursault is lying in a prison cell staring at four blank walls and suddenly has the most freeing revelation a human being can possibly have: “I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.” He realizes he can live the rest of his life based on the memories of a single day to get him by.

But I don’t want to live off my memories of better times in the classroom. I want to feel things happening now. I’ll keep forcing my patience. I’ll keep waiting for eager hands to fly up in a unanimous crescendo, contributing something, anything more substantial than a pesky, disruptive request to the restroom.