Running on empty

Signs of exhaustion appear at our house in mid-February. Every year by then, my wife is getting tired. She rarely stays up past 9:30. Her eyes, though still glinting with quick humor, are dark. Weekday suppers have simplified to a bowl of pasta or a can of soup. She has begun to forget small details, which frays her nerves because normally her memory is razor-sharp.

It’s not like this in September and October, even though the routine is the same:

Up at 5:10 a.m. for everyperson’s early morning, including getting the 16-year-old out of bed and nutrition into his belly. The difference for her is that he’s the first of roughly 70 teenagers that day needing pointed attention to what he’s doing and how he’s thinking and feeling about it.

They arrive at the high school about 6:45. This is a half-hour earlier than contract requires. But in that half-hour a lot can get done – photocopying, filling out forms, writing class notes or a recommendation letter – which cannot be done after the halls fill up by 7:20.

Teenagers filter in. Some want to chat, and she gives half her attention to the chatter and half to the paperwork. Sometimes the chatter is barely masking tears and so the form has to be filled out later, which almost always means late this afternoon, or tomorrow. Staunching tears is emotionally draining, and when it happens first thing in the morning, the whole day is stained.

At 7:30, homeroom. Announcements are read. Jokes are told. Attendance is taken. (Why is Bertrand absent again? He’s going to fail. I have to make sure guidance knows. Maybe I’ll call his mother.) Questions are answered – accurately, so that no one, for example, gets stranded later without a ride home. Concentration is critical.

At 7:40, the first 85-minute class begins. This is a one-act, one-woman performance staged three or four times a day, five days a week, September through June. She gives a presentation, as orderly and sensible as possible, on a prepared topic before 20 or so distracted people. Professional speakers prepare a single lecture in detail weeks in advance. Some famous ones are paid nearly as much for one lecture to a quiet audience as the teacher makes all year. And they don’t have the teacher’s responsibility to make sure the audience remembers and understands some of it. They don’t have to devise novel ways of limiting dozing, whispering, stealing pens, pulling hair, wandering around.

Sometimes disruptions involving defiance, belligerence and unpredictable orneriness occur. Confrontations can be more draining than consolations, and trickier because one incident can trigger more confrontations. Simply stepping into the hall and insisting that two boys stop wrestling and return to their classroom can turn into a weeks-long dispute with a parent who has been misled about what actually happened.

At 9:15, performance No. 2. At 10:35, a 22-minute lunch break. The hall is so crowded it takes eight minutes to walk to the lunch room, and eight minutes back.

So far, no mention has been made of sitting on a bathroom floor holding a girl’s shoulders while she weeps for her uncle who was killed in Iraq. Or the boy who refused to take his hat off and cursed so foully and threateningly the vice principal had to be summoned. Or the mailbox note from the family who will be vacationing in Aruba and must have their son’s detailed homework instructions this morning. These are real, not hypothetical, examples.

After lunch a “prep period” is in the schedule. But today a meeting has been called. Today no papers will be graded or preparations for tomorrow’s class made during contract time. The meeting is boring, fatiguing, filled with veiled and mostly unaddressable recriminations. Then, performance No. 3.

By contract, teachers may leave school at 2:30. Unless something else is required, like policing the halls, or attending a meeting that may last to 4 or longer, or hearing the story of a student success, which re-energizes everything when least expected.

Then (since I work evenings) she drives to her own son’s music and athletic events. When she arrives home between 3:30 and 6:30, no papers have been graded and none of tomorrow’s classes has been prepared. Between about 7 and 9 she reads quizzes, fills out paperwork, sketches tomorrow’s classes, (even calls Bertrand’s mother).

This weekend she’ll read essays and work on the accreditation report that has occupied many Sundays in the past year. She’ll start figuring out how to meet Learning Results and No Child Left Behind revisions she heard about last week; she’ll note that previous revisions she spent months devising are now worthless. She’ll consume Advil and Airborne hoping to quell the cold she inhaled from one of the hundreds of people – many who haven’t learned even basic hygiene – that she shares air with every day.

By February, with four months to go in the school year, she and her conscientious colleagues are physically and emotionally drained.

Businesses have stresses and difficulties too, of course. Businesspeople and employees work hard and grow tired. But the activities of business are of an order of interaction, influence and outcome completely different from that of schools. On teachers’ shoulders lie responsibilities so bound up with the future – of both individuals and the community – that every interaction, every day, can make or break a whole life.

Dana Wilde taught college English for two decades, has served as a U.S. Fulbright scholar three times, and now works as a copy desk editor and columnist for the BDN. His e-mail address is dwilde@bangordailynews.net.