Grandma James

By November, teachers pretended like they didn’t see me. My forehead was furrowed, and there were deep rings around my eyes. My shirts puffed out around my waist, and my belt didn't have enough notches to hold my pants up anymore. If my face wasn't bright red, it was lurid.   Teachers knew my class was the worst in the school, and when they glanced at face, they knew it was only a matter of days before I quit.

 There was only one person in the school who talked with me and that was Grandma James. In our school, there were grandmothers from the local neighborhoods who came in and volunteered. Almost every teacher in the lower grades had an assigned helper. The classroom grandma I had last year spent most of the year sitting and falling asleep in a corner, so when Ms. Coan asked if I wanted another grandma in the class, I said no. By mid-October, Ms. Coan approached me again, "Are you sure you don't want some extra help?" This time, I agreed. At least there could be a witness to the chaos so when I write incident reports I ask her who hit who. I first saw her as I walked my class into the library; she walked into the library with a slow limp and asked me, “Could we discuss a few things first?” She was an older lady, maybe in her late 70s. I noticed her shaky hands, and she told me that she had recently suffered a stroke, and her memory was fading. She might have trouble remembering kids' names.  Considering her condition, it was unconscionable to put her directly in the line of fire; she came to tutor kids, not restrain them. I told her she could meet with individual kids in the halls and read books with them. Each kid had a baggy of books that were picked based on the student’s reading level. She told me she taught her 5 year old granddaughter to read just by using flash cards with sight words on them. Grad school told me that flash cards were not best practice so I asked her to stick to the books. She slightly raised her eyebrows, "Okay, Mr. Slaughter. You're the teacher."  "You can call me Jeremy." "No, I'll call you Mr. Slaughter."

With a new person in the room, I wondered if the kids would behave a little better. Maybe a grandmother would garner some respect, but nothing changed. Gracyn slid a chair across the room, and it almost hit Grandma James in the leg. It was just like when my first classroom grandma was hit in the face by an errant pencil; it was one of the few times she got out of her seat. After the chair incident, I wondered if this would be Grandma James first and last day.

She did come back the next day. And it wasn't until the end of the year that I asked her why. She told me when she took the bus home that day, she was praying, “Please, Lord, I don't want to be in that class.” But then she knew she had come to that school because too many had given up on those kids, and one chair would not stop her. I didn't tell her this at the time, but I used to tell myself the same thing—"I will not allow them to beat me. No matter what."

After two weeks, Grandma was telling it to me straight, “Mr. Slaughter, you have a pregnant wife and a little girl at home. There is no sense putting yourself through this. Every morning you come in with bloodshot eyes, and by mid-day your face is red and your voice is hoarse. Your hair is falling out and your belt doesn’t keep your pants up anymore -, you losin’ weight? Mr. Slaughter, you need to get out before you have a stroke.”

At home I wondered what my wife was thinking about me. Did she think I was a failure? Did she think I was pathetic? Did she think I had no future? If I didn't teach, then what could I do? I had a master's in elementary education. It doesn't open many doors for you.

Journaling was helping me, but I was making unprofessional decisions, like taking personal sick days when I couldn't bear going in. There was no hope of another job when the economy was this bad; there weren’t even other teacher openings. We decided to add up all our savings and calculate how much money we needed to get by until my wife found a job. Our second daughter was due in December, and she would stay at home with the baby for at least the first 6 months. Without my salary, we could have lasted 3 months. I never looked at a position at Target, but I would easily have swallowed my pride and taken it if we had enough savings. She kept on saying, “It’s just one year. You can make it to June." "I can barely make it to Friday, I have no chance of making to June."

The job search begins

I guess it didn't matter anymore.  There was no time to reflect, only time to plot my escape.  First, I applied to any job I could find that required a background in education.  I didn't get any responses; I guess I wasn't the only teacher looking for a way out.  It was a friend of mine who gave me the most promising lead.  She had been a teacher before, and she took pity on  me. She worked at an adult school that taught English to immigrants. Adult education seemed perfect: students who paid attention, who didn't yell at you, who even wanted to learn. Each day my friend mentioned another supervisor she had talked to about me, and each day, I fantasized just a little more about how my last day at Daley would feel.  Would I give the principal two weeks, would I send him an email, or even better, would I just walk out in the middle of a particularly bad afternoon.  All great ideas.  I was still praying by the way.  But I was no longer praying to be a better teacher, I was praying to get out.

The adult ed school called and I scheduled the interview for 4:30 on a Tuesday.  This meant I had to leave Daley right after school to arrive on time. On this day, I had colorful marker stains all over my fingers—I spent the day erasing a marked up whiteboard over and over again without an eraser.  The erasers never last more than a week.  Sometimes I would find a broken one under my desk with bite barks on it.

It took forever to get that dry erase marker off my fingers, and I arrived late to the most important interview of my life. The first of two interviews was just about my resume, and I felt great discussing all the nice volunteer jobs I had before Daley. She asked why I was leaving behind my second graders, and I kept myself from disclosing the real reason, that it was a struggle to show up each day at work because I was starting to hate it. I just told her second graders weren’t motivated to learn, and she smiled, “I know the feeling. I started as a high school teacher, but teaching adults is much more fulfilling.” The interview was going just fine. To help students speak English and find a job seemed like just what I needed. I could still teach, I could make enough money, and I could start sleeping at night, and maybe even enjoy my weekends again. Grandma James would understand, she probably would give me a big hug; she had been telling me to get out for weeks. Well, I had given Daley my best shot, but I was beaten. It was time to walk on.

But by my second interview I realized something was wrong. She told me I had to be bilingual.  I actually spoke Spanish, but I was intermediate at best.  My second interview was conducted completely in Spanish, and it was going decently until she started asking me about the attendance programming system we used at Daley. I didn’t even know the answer in English. Then she switched to English and started explaining what the job was. It wasn’t a teaching job at all; it was registering new students.  I would be on the phone all day, speaking Spanish with people who wanted to learn English.  There would be no English speaking at all.  She also asked if I had a high school diploma or a GED. As an intermediate Spanish speaker with a masters degree, I was both under-qualified and over-qualified. It also paid an hourly wage right around that of Target; I withdrew my name from the list just to avoid the embarrassment of getting rejected by a job that I couldn’t afford to take anyway. It was back to the whiteboard for me.