Chapter 35
At the end of his first full year at Pemberton Secondary, Marcus sat down to write his own teaching review not the formal document that Mrs. Baptiste required, but a private accounting, in his journal, of what he had learned and what he had not yet learned and what he wanted to do differently.
He had learned that preparation was necessary but not sufficient; that the best lessons were the ones that breathed, that had room for the unexpected, for the question that changed the direction. He had learned that the students were always ahead of him in certain ways not academically, necessarily, but in their knowledge of the world they actually inhabited, which was the world he was supposed to be helping them examine. He had learned to listen to that knowledge.
He had learned that Aaliyah was not an exception that every class contained several Aaliyahs, several students whose capacity was running ahead of the permission they had been given and that his job was to find them and give them the permission, not in the grand sense of a single transformation but in the daily small ways that accumulated into permission over time.
He had learned that the work was exhausting in a way that was different from any other kind of exhaustion he had known. It came from being fully present for six hours a day from giving real attention to twenty-eight or twenty-two young people simultaneously, from holding the room and the lesson and the individual all at once. He came home tired in the bone. But he also came home satisfied in a way that he had not been in any other kind of work.
What he had not yet learned: how to stop himself from taking work home. Not papers he had a reasonable system for marking but the worry. The boy who had gone very quiet in the third term. The girl who was being pressured into leaving school by a family situation he could not fix from outside. The small defeats that accumulated when the system around the school was not equal to what the school was trying to do.
He wrote: 'I cannot fix the system. I can only do excellent work within it and around it and sometimes, carefully, in resistance to it. The children need me to be realistic about what is mine to do. But they also need me to refuse, absolutely, to stop caring about what is not technically mine.'
He read the entry to Leroy over the phone.
Leroy was quiet for a moment. Then: 'You know what that sounds like?'
'What?'
'A man who's found his purpose,' Leroy said. 'And knows how to hold it right.'
Marcus looked out the window at the Kingston night.
'Yeah,' he said. 'I think I have.