Shoes for Crews, OR: On Dumbness

Today, it was a bad idea to wear this dress, because it's short enough that it doesn't cover my chicken-flesh thighs when I sit on this chair, and I have to constantly readjust to prevent sticking to the seat. Like peeling off a band aid, but the chair is the band aid and I'm aware of tiny hairs on the back of my legs.

This week, I am learning how to teach AP Composition, and I am learning wonderful skills and finding wonderful new websites that I add to my AP Comp blog as the teacher names them off. I am also getting free textbooks and learning how to get more free books. My suitcase will weigh 50 lbs. more on the way home. I still will not be able to identify it in luggage claim, like always, because it looks like everybody's suitcase.

I will also weigh 50 lbs. more on the way home, because I'm stuffing my face with two free breakfasts, and free lunch, and two free snacks a day.

This week, I am also learning about myself being-in-Denver-by-myself, having flown in alone, and renting a car alone, and going up to my hotel room alone.
When I had my first observation meeting last fall, my principal said to me, I was surprised to see you so funny, and open and casual in your classroom--when I would see you in the hall before I knew you, you were always so stoic and serious.

And I thought: no. Silly. That's not me. But when I told this to the other newbies at school they were like yeah, that's you, that's what I thought, that's you.

That's me. I'm avoiding people here. I get sick at the thought of awkward silences that might occur if someone sits at my lunch table. So I sit on benches and face my back to the crowd. I click on my phone to look as though I'm about to make a call.

I smile, and I respond, and I engage, but I rush to my car at the end of the day. I won't initiate small talk.

I'm always talking about how I can't stand socially awkward people, but at times during this class, I've been socially awkward. Perhaps perceived as negative. Maybe even a bitch. I can learn from this group, I should ask them questions, I should take advantage of the experience that they have and I do not. But my shyness takes over.

I'm not good at this. I won't go downstairs for happy hour and plastic cups of wine to start small conversations about small topics, I don't find any desire to establish common ground.

At least, not in this environment. I have no confidence in this world.

*

If you put a group of teachers in a room, then it will became an elaborate competition among most of them to out-smart the other, to raise a hand in order for a chance to throw out a multi-syllabic vocabulary word, to arouse some sort of controversy (or to introduce a controversy that isn't really there, but to appear smart by doing so).

There are a couple who dominate the conversation. I'm in the back row, so I only see the backs of their heads. I know them as see-through shirt white bra, and egg-eater, and Shoes for Crews.

Of course, there are teachers in here who seem normal, versions of us. One of them gave me a cool resource for teaching fallacy with movie clips. She said she teaches at a school that is half Indian Reservation, half white in Utah and that it's crazy racist and the white kids blatantly call the Native American kids lazy. How would you not totally favor all of the Native Americans and hate the white kids?

Some teachers here say actual smart things. I like the three who are sitting near me in the back of the room and become the rest of my group of four. We analyzed pictures today. Found secrets in the images.
There are mostly unattractive people in my class, if that matters, save for a couple of youngish female teachers and maybe one or two men with rings on their fingers that I've noticed as they use their male-English-teacher scrawl. One of them looks and behaves exactly like Lance--crosses his legs the same way, gestures the same way--and I want it to be Lance. He is never Lance.

The older men wear shorts with cargo pockets with tall socks. Today one of the men ate a hard boiled egg for breakfast, in the classroom. Currently, he has a pile of food garbage on his desk. Why not throw that shit away. He looks like Artie Lange. I can see the outline of his wife-beater through his gray polo, and I imagine it is the same color of his egg.

But, what has moved me this week is the biggest dick of all. Some guy from Utah who wears shoes for crews, so in my head I call him Shoes for Crews. He volunteers for everything and he thinks everyone in the class thinks he's just hilarious (although I heard one of the male marrieds sigh silently at him today, and I was secretly like yessss).

Case in point, the teacher asked for a volunteer reader, and he read a student essay, but he read it in this goofy, extravagant voice. The kind of thing that if a student did, you'd be like, oh fucking great, just read the goddamned essay and stop starving for attention for five minutes. But what was really annoying was that people in the class were encouraging it and laughing, and I was like I hate everything about you, Shoes for Crews. Today, he read twice. Once, the teacher called on him to read, and I wanted to stand up and storm out of the room. I never would like to hear Shoes for Crews read Lincoln again. Instead, I will prefer Sam Waterston. SFC's not even fake good. It's a high school freshman Great Speeches round, and I'm giving negative speaker points.

Anyway, in class we had to write mock-up multiple-choice questions for the AP test, and we used a section of Dillard's An American Childhood for the prompt (a small piece about the Polyphemus moth that the students in the essay eventually killed by studying it), and we had to write questions based on some lead-ins. I chose to do one about tone, and I figured that since this test measures vocabulary, too, that I would use "fancy" words about tone to add to the question. I pulled up a document I used in Upper Comp with a bunch of "words to describe tone," and because I didn't know what all of them meant, I shift F7ed some of that shit. And it turns out I nailed the definition of pithy and supercilious, but in my "right" answer about tone, I noted that it would be "best identified" as altruistic and poignant, and while poignant was dead on, my interpretation of altruistic was not.

So, up went my question on the overhead, and the class fell for my "distracting question," and I did a great job of explaining why nostalgic and empathetic wasn't accurate. But when I said the answer was altruistic and poignant, goddamned Shoes for Crews was all, condescendingly, douche-illy, yellingly, attackingly, UM PLEASE EXPLAIN TO ME HOW THE TONE OF THIS PIECE MEANS THAT SHE MADE SACRIFICES FOR THE MOTH. And I was, in my head, hey, thanks for putting me on the spot, fucking Shoes for Crews, I can tell your students hate your guts because you are so goddamned self-serving (opposite of altruistic).

And I said that my interpretation of the definition of word was not "unselfish" in the way that she made sacrifices for the moth, but that she was generous and considerate of the moth. And then the class half-bought it but mostly went along with SFC's outcry, and then the teacher said well, we just need to be FULLY prepared to defend our answers and then I felt humiliated because she implied that I wasn't. And I wanted to raise my hand and just be like, you know, this isn't the best word to describe it, and it wouldn't be a great test question, but if you give me a minute, I can really defend this shit, because this piece is written from a child who should be really fucking selfish about a science experiment in class, and she wasn't, and this opposite-of-expectations makes the tone altruistic but I didn't, because who would do that.
Also, I feel like a dumbfuck for not knowing what altruistic means. And now I will probably never forget. I hate classes where I feel dumb. I just sit in class and stew and feel like everyone is staring at me and judging my dumbness, and I want to redeem myself, but equally fear I will make another mistake and be seen as more dumb or possibly, even worse, desperate.

Here, I think, we are all desperate. Desperate for approval, desperate to be taken as smart, desperate to be the best, the leader, the most successful, the one who, when people pass in the hall, think man, she must move students, man, she was born with this, man I wish I was her, or even more, I wish she'd have been my teacher.