The Circus

Hey, Michael, you wanna hear a joke? I don't know. Is it a good one? Are you asking whether or not I'm a funny guy? Yes, of course, it's a good one. Ok, then, I could definitely use a laugh. What do you call a place where wild animals are tamed under a tent? Oh, I should know this. I'm pretty sure I've heard this one before. The circus is the obvious answer but that wouldn't be funny. It's not the circus, is it? Is that your guess? No, that's not my guess. I was just asking. Well, what's your guess? A place where wild animals are tamed under a tent? I give up. What is it? English class. Oh, ha ha ha, I get it. Very funny. English class. Because I teach under a tent and the students are like wild animals. Good one. A joke is like a magic trick. Trying to explain it ruins it. That joke was not at all like a magic trick.

I do teach under a tent now. Or I will starting on Monday. This is the result of a failed attempt to quit my job. When I walked into Mary's office on Wednesday, it was to be for the last time. Had I needed any reminders of my dissatisfaction, they were all around me. The white office looked half-finished, half-moved-into, the hotel room equivalent of an office. An improv teacher once told me, “Never play in a white room. It's boring and lifeless. You have to create a space the audience can see.” In this case, the audience would have seen nothing but me and Mary squatting to create the illusion of chairs, whose white color – providing no contrast against the white floor, white walls, white desk between us, and white iMac upon the desk – rendered them invisible.

The only visible objects then were the tall case, like a grandfather clock with a glass door, which protects the Mexican flag within, and the school mascot – a stuffed, black Scottish terrier floating in midair. It was in this pretend office that I sat down to quit my pretend job. I had been hired to teach acting. I had assumed that meant drama, not teaching literature without books. I could not, however, accuse Mary of lying; my job was certainly acting. And I had grown tired of it.

Days before, in a full faculty meeting, Mary stood and announced that she did not intend to scold us – a clear sign that we were about to be scolded. “I am deeply concerned. We are only five weeks into the school year and we have already lost four students. This reflects poorly on our teachers. Your attitude, commitment, and professionalism are essential to our success. It is difficult to have parents come into my office and say I sold them a school that doesn't exist.” A school that doesn't exist. I had to wonder whether this was our fault for not living in her fantasy, or her fault for not living in reality. Who has the courage to tell the emperor that he is, in fact, naked?

The entire school is naked. And when the faculty gathered to watch the slideshow of a visit to another private school in Mexico City, I could clearly imagine the moment when Adam and Eve looked at themselves and realized, “Hey! We're not wearing anything!” This other school was the apple. Its beauty eclipsed and embarrassed us, made us suddenly self-conscious. Stunning artwork covered everything. An enormous purple dragon crept from the ceiling down one of the walls. And endless vine snaked its way across the halls, and from it sprang drawings of characters from the literature the students read in real books. The walls were hidden behind beautifully decorated bulletin boards. An awed teacher raised her hand and asked, “Can we have bulletin boards like that?” To which another – not at all under her breath – turned around and replied, “What would you put on it? We don't have any paper!”

In the center of the playground – a small, fenced-in square covered in astroturf – stood a tree. “Oh! The tree!” Someone gasped. The auditorium gilled with murmurs of wonder. “The tree!” It was the scene in “Wall-E” where the robot returns to the spaceship with a sprout growing in a boot that he discovered on the otherwise dead planet Earth. This is how disconnected my school is from the planet it aims to save. No wonder it's so hard to separate the recycling. It is fall in New England, and here I am working at a school where a photo of a tree that looks like a houseplant makes a room full of teachers gurgle and coo like babies. If only we had a tree!

This is the life I was more than ready to leave behind when I walked into the pretend office. “I don't want to do this,” I told Mary. I chose my language carefully – not “I can't do this” because I didn't want to be convinced otherwise. It's hard to argue with “I don't want to.” Not impossible, though, as Mary proved by interrupting me to ask, “What can we do? How can we make this work? Tell me what would make the situation better.” I had not even yet told her what was wrong with the situation. Mary's m.o. is to skip information gathering and go straight to problem solving – the old “measure once, cut twice” approach. This is perhaps why I found myself squatting over that imaginary chair for the second time in eight days. Solutions that don't bother to understand the problem tend to be short-lived and moving me from 8th grade to 2nd and 3rd (in addition to 4th, 5th, and 6th) had been one of those solutions.

“Please don't try to fix my problem before you understand it,” I said. Would I have spoken so boldly if I weren't so certain of my departure? “There's nothing wrong with what you're doing” – it's important to balance boldness with restraint – “but my vision and your vision...” I made that gesture of hands passing from opposite directions without meeting. “For me, relationship, knowing the kids, is fundamental to good education. I teach thirteen groups of twenty-five students once a week each. It'll be Christmas before I even know all their names.” This was only one of the many reasons I was quitting and I chose it as my opener because it seemed the least disputable. I had expressed a fact and my personal opinion. Mary's brow furrowed as much as possible given how taut the slick, black bun pulled it, and her eyes narrowed like bird of prey ready to dive. “Now wait a minute.” She said this is the voice that she calls “not scolding”. “There isn't any class larger than twenty-three.”

My piece of evidence had been defeated, invalidated, thrown out. The fact that trying to quit felt more like a legal proceeding than a conversation only strengthened my conviction to do so. Mary then used that most odious of all tactics; she played the “when I was your age”/“you don't know how good you've got it card” card. “I routinely taught classes of fifty or more students. So believe me when I say that these are small classes.” I told her of a school where I taught classes of ten to fifteen students – a school I love but never dreamed would attain the near-utopia status it now enjoys in my delusional reminiscing.

Then Mary did something I had thought impossible. She suggested that we split the classes in half. I could work with eleven or twelve students for forty minutes instead of twenty-five for eighty minutes. And I could do whatever I wanted. “It doesn't have to be literature,” she said. “What matters to me is that they speak English with a native speaker. That's it.” This change would drastically improve my life but win me no friends with the colleagues who would now be forced to do something with the other half of the class. “Don't worry,” Mary began with her favorite words. “We'll say it was my idea. We'll call it differentiation.”

“Differentiation” is the buzz word that permeates the school's pedagogical jargon. While it refers in theory to a complex educational model, it seems to function in practice as a convenient justification for any decision. And because “differentiation” is such a sacred cow, arguing against any decision based on it could be grounds for immediate dismissal.

It was at precisely this moment that I realized how badly Mary wanted or needed me to stay. And though there was a voice in my head, which I'll call “integrity”, that complained, I decided it was also in my best interest to stay. One problem remained: where to teach my class. There is not one empty classroom or space in the entire school. Mary suggested various hallways – the one outside her office, the one across from the art room. I refused. She suggested dividing the classes but keeping all the students in the same room. Again I refused.

For a moment it seemed that she was out of ideas and I would have to quit after-all. And then she suggested the tent. We could have class out in the playground under a tent to protect us from the sun. (Remember that there are no trees.) “I know just the corner,” she said. “No one ever goes there. And it's far enough away from the basketball courts that it should be pretty quiet.” She watched me expectantly. “If the owners don't approve the expense, I'll buy it myself this weekend. So what do you say?” I say when you're living in the circus, it makes sense to work under a tent.