Missing the Big Picture (6 page)

One teacher that stood out to me was Sergeant Carey, who taught military science for the sophomores. The first day of class Sergeant Carey told us, “I am fifty-six years old. Some of you may think that’s old, but I don’t think that I’m old because I can still do this.” He then proceeded to perform a sidekick, and his shoe almost hit another student in the face. Sergeant Carey didn’t even have a college degree. He learned from the U.S. Army all that he needed to teach military science.

In 1998 it was impossible to watch the news and not see something about Monica Lewinsky and her relationship with President Clinton. One of the students asked Sergeant Carey what he thought about the affair. He said, “I kind of feel sorry for the president. Not many married men are going to say on national television, ‘Yeah, I got a blow job.’” I was laughing so hard that I turned beet red.

Another student asked Sergeant Carey about his views on gays in the military. In front of twenty or more high school sophomores, his response was, “Before Slick Willy [his name for President Clinton] was in office, we used to take the queers out back and beat ’em.” One student then said that people who are gay could control their libidos. Sergeant Carey’s response was, “How would you like it if you were sharing a tent with somebody and felt a dick go up your ass?”

In April 1999, after the shootings at Columbine High School, he suggested giving some of the teachers guns. However, Sergeant Carey was one of the most caring teachers in the school. When one student’s mother kicked him out of the house, he actually offered to let the student live with him. Out of all the information that students need to process when they’re in high school, one quote to which Sergeant Carey would often refer, and which I took away from high school, was “KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.” This actually helped me when I was in the working world.

Due to the high teacher turnover at Saint John’s, I had several new teachers my sophomore year. For religion, I had a fifty-one-year-old retired insurance salesman, Mr. Bryant. It was Mr. Bryant’s first year teaching, and he had difficulty controlling the class. Students would often talk and interrupt him. One time, Mr. Bryant was hit in the face with a pen. Two fights almost broke out over the course of the year, and there was constant trash-talking. One time, a student said to a Jewish student, “Why didn’t you burn in the oven like the rest of them?” Years later I would find out that Mr. Bryant didn’t have a degree in education and wasn’t qualified in any way to be a teacher. He was just a friend of the associate principal, Mr. Ramone.

One new teacher that most students noticed was the music teacher, Ms. Nelson. She was only twenty-three and very attractive. Most of the boys had no respect for women, so teaching at Saint John’s was a challenge for her. One time I remember a student showed another student a picture of a woman, saying, “I’d rape her.” During mass, students would often roll up their mass programs and then give them to her. She then had to go through and fix all the programs. Another time when Ms. Nelson was a substitute, all the boys farted to try to make her feel uncomfortable. She was very professional and actually handled these situations well. During the next few years at Saint John’s, the music department experienced a sizeable increase, and the number of bands and musical ensembles grew from one to three or four. People used to say the main attraction for Saint John’s was either athletics or the military program. After Ms. Nelson, people now say that the main attractions are sports, the military, and music.

My sophomore year also saw the addition of some new students. There was one student who admitted to beating his mother over the head with his textbook. He told his fellow classmate, “She was being a bitch, so I had to beat the shit out of her.” There was another who was asked to leave Albany Academy, an upscale private college prepatory school, because he stabbed a student with an eating utensil in the cafeteria. I sat next to this student, Dave, during our class religious retreat. I asked Dave why he kept his nails so long. Sure, I was breaking boundaries by asking a personal question, but I wasn’t prepared for his response: “kids on the bus make fun of me, so I scratch them.” Then Dave scratched me, and I had to endure the rest of the retreat with scratch marks.

In late September, my mother attended the meet-the-teachers night. Someone brought up that most of classes had between twenty-six and thirty-four students, when most public schools in the area only had twenty-five students in each class. As a result, the school hired Mrs. Binda, a woman from Mexico to who would teach honors math and earth science classes, which broke each class in about half.

The only qualification that Mrs. Binda had was a college degree in clinical engineering. She had no teaching experience. Her thick accent made her difficult to understand. When I started her class, my grades soon dropped drastically. In fact, she was the first teacher who had to call my mother. Like a good and attentive parent, my mother immediately returned Mrs. Binda’s phone call—but then Mrs. Binda said she never meant to call my mother. My mother thought she had just called her in error—until, that is, Mrs. Binda left another voicemail stating that she wanted to talk to my mother. Again my mother returned the phone call, and again Mrs. Binda was adamant that she didn’t call my mother, even though we now had two voicemails from her. After having the second conversation with Mrs. Binda, the next afternoon my mother received a third voicemail from Mrs. Binda saying that she wanted to talk to her and she was upset that my mother hadn’t called her back yet. My mother never ended up calling Mrs. Binda back, and I switched math teachers.

Sophomore year, I was also required to take biology. My teacher, Mr. Patterson, was himself was a former Christian brother. He was known for his odd and eccentric behaviors. He would drive around the parking lot during his lunch break for fun. Patterson once told my biology class that he used to test drugs for Benedictine monks. He would usually go to the faculty lounge each day and say, “I am coming down from the mountain today.” Most of the teachers just appeased him and never knew what he was talking about. Mr. Patterson believed that the best teacher was one who did the least. He actually made fun of students for wanting to take notes and for being so dependent on them. He would often deviate from the assigned curriculum and make us write short essays on oceans or the Eurasian gypsy mouth—a special type of insect that wasn’t even included in most high school biology curricula.

In tenth grade, I really wanted to give Saint John’s a chance. I decided to get more involved in extracurricular activities. I wasn’t athletic at all—I was made fun of because I couldn’t do a pull-up—so I joined the speech and debate team instead. Most every Saturday, the team would meet students from different schools and have debate competitions. My main motivation was that I could meet girls, which actually made me feel like even more of a loser for having to use the debate team as my main way of trying to find a date. My mother still worked part-time at a local grocery store, Price Chopper, so the group’s faculty advisor, Mrs. Brady (also my Spanish teacher), drove me to and from the debate competitions.

I enjoyed the speech and debate team very much. It was a very positive experience because I got to meet other high school students and socialize with my classmates at Saint John’s. I wasn’t a debate person and I didn’t enjoy spending hours researching why the death penalty was wrong, so I participated in something called declamation, in which each competitor was judged on how well he or she presented the speech. In my first competition, I came in third place and won a trophy. There were only three people in the competition, but I was very proud of the award. It was like when I worked at Home Depot and won the Cashier Olympics; I was so proud that I put the Cashier Olympics accomplishment on resumes and job applications for the next three years.

During my time on the debate team, I got to go to Chicago, Boston, and other high schools in the Capital District. In the spare time we had between the competitions, I would mainly socialize with some of the girls I met. There was one girl I ended up having a crush on—Janine. I never dated her, and she thought I was weird, but I enjoyed her sense of humor. One time she broke into a chemistry lab and pretended to be Tom Cruise in
Mission Impossible
.

Mainly I remember Janine because for years when I had to defend myself to other guys, as I hadn’t dated anybody or done anything sexually with a girl, I said we made out so that I didn’t seem like a complete prude. It worked well. There was actually a senior student who got kicked off the team after getting caught receiving oral sex in the hotel room at a debate competition, so my claim was certainly plausible. People had seen me talking to her, but she didn’t know anybody from my school well enough to have heard the rumor. It was adolescent gold.

If there was one thing that I took away from my experience on the speech and debate team, it was the quote that I referenced in the speech that I gave almost every Saturday, which was from an unknown author: “I take people as I find them, I like them for who they are, and not despise them for who they are not.” As a sixteen-year-old, I would practice this speech to make sure that I had spoken clearly, demonstrated good body language, and had good stage presence, but the meaning of the speech, and especially that quote, was as foreign to me as organic chemistry.

I turned sixteen that February. My mother told me in the weeks and months before my birthday that over the summer I would have to get a job somewhere. She told me that she worked when she was sixteen and actually had to pay rent. I wasn’t expected to pay rent, but my mother wanted me to experience what it was like to work as soon as I could, even though she had just received a promotion that increased her salary by about fourteen thousand dollars. She was promoted to a senior computer programmer/technology specialist and had the luxury of quitting her part-time job as a bagger in a grocery store.

Shortly after my sixteenth birthday, I started looking for a part-time job. Since I had gotten into that fistfight a year earlier, I had spent a lot of time at home and my mother thought it would be a good way for me to branch out, meet people, and boost my self-esteem. While I really wanted to get a job at Hannaford (a local grocery chain in Albany), mainly because the cashiers got to wear cool jackets, I ended up applying at McDonald’s and started working there in April 1999.

I would spend my days in school with students who came from financially sound families, and during the evenings and on weekends, I would spend my time working with co-workers. Some were teenagers, others were adults working for minimum wage. Some had former criminal histories or substance abuse issues, and others were just struggling, hard-working adults.

Once word got around at school that I was working at McDonald’s, I got made fun of even more. Most of my classmates didn’t have to work, so getting a job at McDonald’s was the last thing they would ever do. I was often told, “People who work at McDonald’s are the stupidest people on earth.”

Toward the end of my sophomore year, I told my mother that I wasn’t going back to Saint John’s. The school did nothing for me. I wasn’t one of those kids who had to be yelled at by a teacher an inch away from my face to do my homework. I didn’t fit in, hated the culture of arrogance, and thought that it was just a waste of time and money. At first, my mom was a little disappointed, but she agreed that paying the tuition at Saint John’s was just throwing money down the drain.

In tenth grade, I had to take three state Regents exams. In the late 1990s, the state began a push to have 100 percent of high school graduates earn Regents diplomas. One of the largest criticisms about these exams was that teachers only taught the material that was on the tests, and not broader subject matter.

From March to the end of the school year, most of my classes would just study and use the Barron’s Regents Exam Prep review books that we had to purchase at Barnes & Noble. At the end of the school year, I really didn’t care about my grades. I hated geometry, the math class I was required to take, and I started to get seventies. About six weeks before the Regents exam, we had to take a full-length practice exam. Mr. Robertson, the math teacher I had as a freshman, decided to announce all the grades in class, regardless whether the student wanted twenty-five of his classmates to hear his grade or not. I got a sixty on the practice test, and I was worried that I might fail the Regents; I had usually gotten nineties in math before geometry. I went to Mr. Robertson, and he gave me the opportunity to do extra credit by grading other students’ tests. I remember the morning of the Regents exam, Mr. Robertson went up to a large group of students who were hanging out in the guidance office. One by one, getting right in our faces, he asked in a very obnoxious way if we were going to pass. I was no exception. Usually I was very timid, and my face would turn bright red if anybody yelled at me or brought negative attention to me in front of a group. However, this time I was very calm and simply said to him, “Yes, I am going to pass and get an eighty-five.” Mr. Robertson was surprised and said, “Really?” Actually, I got an eighty-six.

I was so happy to leave Saint John’s. I am Catholic, and I love Jesus. Saint John’s in the 1990s was not about teaching the values of Jesus Christ or Saint John Baptist de La Salle. It was about people spending twenty-five to thirty thousand dollars (over 4 years) for a high school education that they felt their public school district couldn’t provide. Some came for discipline, others for athletics. One common thread was that everybody thought that Saint John’s was the best. In reality, the school didn’t even have qualified teachers to teach the same high school curriculum that every other high school in New York State was providing.

In college, I heard a guest speaker who talked about health care as a multidisciplinary approach. The speaker pointed out that you could have the best physicians and nurses, but if the room wasn’t clean, where was the patient going to stay? Basically, in any work environment, every person from the CEO to the custodian has an important role to play. If somebody thinks that he or he is too good to be a part of the team, that team will not be able to function. When I was at private school for two years, I was constantly being told that I was the best for attending Saint John’s and that public school students were disobedient, drug users, and juvenile delinquents. Every job I’ve had, I’ve had to work with people who went to public school. If I adopted the philosophy that was taught at Saint John’s, I probably wouldn’t have been a good employee.