The Moment Between: On Tingling Stomachs and Striving for Teaching Perfection

In the summer of 1992, after five years as an apprentice teacher, recess aide, instructional aide and homework center director, I got my first full-time teaching job at Brown Middle School in Newton. My new principal Judy Malone-Neville called me in Portsmouth, New Hampshire to deliver the news.

I’d be teaching seventh and eighth grade English and Social Studies in a wealthy section of a comfortable Boston suburb.

I listened politely, hung up the phone and started jumping up and down for joy.

I sang, no yelled, really U2’s She Moves in Mysterious Ways.

I set up my classroom a couple of weeks before school started,

The pictures of Larry Bird that the Boston Globe published after his retirement went right on my coat closet.

Images of nature and posters phrases designed to inspire ringed the walls.

My stomach tingled as I walked around the room after I had arranged the desks in a long U-shape to stimulate conversation.

I bounced on my heels in the center of the room, just imagining the dialogue and learning community we would be able to create together.

It was that special moment before the school year began, when no homework assignments had been missed.

No disrespect, intentional or otherwise, had occurred.

All was perfect and everything seemed possible.

It’s more than 20 years later, and again I’ll be in a new classroom.

There are differences, of course.

The students are not in middle school, but in college.

Many are not coming from suburban comfort, but from impoverished communities.

Some are juggling working three jobs.

Others bring their children to class at times because they can’t find child care.

I’m changed, too.

Firmly in middle age, I no longer hold the same belief in teaching perfection as I did as a younger man.

I understand how formed the students are when we get them and the increasingly narrow window we have in which to influence them.

But when I think about what we’ll do together, as I start inviting the guest speakers and planning the specific sessions, when I start thinking about the stories they’ll write, the scoops they’ll uncover, the progress they’ll make and the lessons they’ll teach me, I feel that familiar stirring in my stomach.

It’s a feeling of nerves based in caring about the outcome.

But it’s also that sense that, just as it was more than two decades ago in a suburban classroom close to 1,000 miles away, for a moment, all is possible.

Classes begin two weeks from today.

Stomach rumbling, I’ll be there, ready to roll.

Gifts of the Moment at the Evanston YMCA

I’ve written before about being fortunate to have received many gifts and then spent large parts of the post listing the sources of my gratitude. When I was in my late 20s I started playing in a Friday afternoon basketball game with fellow teachers at an elementary school gym at Newton where one of the players taught. I was part of the group off and on for seven years, and even would occasionally drive in to play from Western Massachusetts the year after Dunreith and I got married.

Grateful for the end of the week, we’d warm up, shoot around and played five or even six pitched battles of games up to seven points before showering and having a few beers to wash down some fries or some of the other offering at Dunn Gaherin’s, an Irish watering hole.

Over the years my motivation for playing in the games changed.

At first, and for several years, it was all about winning with whatever combination of teammates I had and of playing without surrendering an inch of focus and determination.

My desire to do my best never left, but the meaning I drew from the game evolved.

I came to understand that the game mattered to each of us in different ways. One guy, a mustachioed math teacher with whom I taught, spoke openly about how banging in the post against us on defense helped him handle some of what he considered the more outrageous behavior of his ex-wife. (We eventually learned to gauge how things were going with his ex by the fervor of his defense.)

Others sought to stave off physical decline.

Many expressed body image insecurity in subtle ways, by making an offhanded joke as they went to shower.

Over time, too, I came to value not so much the victory and the competition, but rather the counsel I received.

Most of the other guys in the game were at least two decades older than me, and had wives and families and mortgages that felt impossibly adult.

They provided examples of how to live a moral and balanced life, and one guy in particular helped me when I was grappling with a difficult relationship decision.

Listen to your heart, he said in effective, if unoriginal, advice.

It always knows.

He was right, and I did.

I thought about the shift in the basketball game today when I went to work out at the Evanston YMCA.

We first joined the facility shortly after we moved to Evanston in 2002, and have been active members since.

In the early years I loved to go there, blast out my treadmill or lifting or shooting or yoga or biking without talking or engaging much with other people.

I was there to exercise, not to talk.

Yet, like with the basketball game, that purpose started to shift and to melt, like snow does in the rain.

I still derive satisfaction and peace from pushing my body hard, from trying to reach new levels of speed reached or weight lifted or distance covered.

But I also enjoy at least as much from seeing a former intern from The Chicago Reporter whose graduation from Columbia College I attended several years ago.

We saw each other near the entrance to the sprawling floor filled with row after row of stairmasters, exercise bicycles and treadmills.

At the Reporter we were examining the issue and experience of the children of incarcerated parents when she started working for us.

I am one of those children, she told me one day. My father was incarcerated.

From that revelation she eventually wrote a piece about the second time her father was arrested shortly before her eighth grade graduation, if I remember correctly.

Her dad, who had been imprisoned before, had made two promises to her.

The first was that he would not get arrested again.

The second was that he would cook her breakfast on the day of her eighth graduation.

In the story she described waking up for her big day and not being able to hear or smell the sizzling bacon she had expected.

Her father was back in jail, a first stop on his way to prison.

He had broken both promises.

By the time she wrote her story her father had been released and her parents had reconciled.

But the impact from his absence remained for the young woman.

Today we chatted and caught up and complimented each other before resuming our workouts.

I also saw a friend who was waiting for his daughter to finish on one of the machines.

The younger of his two sons has had Ulcerative Colitis, a disease that, in his words, caused him to lose 45 pounds in a month.

As opposed to the intern, for whom the absence of the anticipated smell of bacon meant her father’s repeated disappointment, the smell of bacon, eggs pesto and garlic taunted him, he wrote in a college essay.

His face resembled a balloon, he said.

My friend, his family and, above all, the young man showed extraordinary grace and courage under excruciating pressure.

He’s made a strong recovery and is planning to attend college.

My friend and I talked about the Chargers-Bronco games and shopping missions accomplished or yet to come.

The knowledge of what they’ve endured surfaced, though.

I wrapped up my workout, the hardest I’ve done this year, and walked down the stairs to a shower and well-earned feeling of relaxation.

As it did in the latter part of my membership in the basketball game, gratitude mingled with the sweat on my T-shirt and the appreciation of the unsung strength of so many people I have the good fortune to know.

The shower water felt divine as it pelted my face.