Tea and Sympathy

While I was on Safari in Africa, (I promise—I need to use this line one last time!) the lovely actress from the movies’ “Golden Age,” Deborah Kerr, died on October 16. She is probably best known for her lusty roll on the beach with Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity, as well as for her turn as “Mrs. Anna” opposite the histrionic Yul Brynner in The King and I. But when I was back from Kenya, looking up some of the news I had missed, her death reminded me of another of her elegant appearances: Tea and Sympathy. This play and movie were quite steamy in the Eisenhower United States of the 1950s, and her role (not roll!) as headmaster’s wife Laura Reynolds offers an interesting moral dilemma of how she tried to help a suffering, sensitive boy find himself.

I thought of this movie not just in reflection of the beautiful actress, but how both the title and a memorable line proved an interesting challenge to me as I came back from that little thing I did on that continent I went to (see—it is just easier to say, “when I was in Africa…”).

On our last day in Kenya, one of our colleagues at lunch told all of us, “Well, I guess I should tell you now that I am resigning from KA when we get back to school tomorrow.”

And he is in the department I lead.

Frankly, I was not surprised, and in many ways I was grateful for his imminent exit.

Of course as a department head, one has to deal with the mess of such a sudden move.

But let me create some context by which you might understand this little bombshell.

When I landed at the airport in Amman on July 31, this new colleague and I met and shared a car from the school together arriving historian and historian to our new adventure at KA. While I had not hired him, our headmaster shared with me in emails how excited over what this teacher would bring to the department: Harvard education, a law degree, an interesting perspective as an Asian-American, tenure at an inner-city school in Los Angeles, a deep interest in history and philosophy, a sharp-edged wit, and unbelievably impressive skills in all things technological. I had visited his vlog several times in the spring. (No, I had not heard of a v-log before, especially since my computer skills really only reached the cutting edge of say, around 1854. A vlog is like a blog, but with videos and, well, tons of bells and whistles.)

Over the next two weeks he was always snapping pictures at every orientation event piping up, “hey everybody, check all these [hundreds and hundreds of] pictures out on “photo bucket.” He and I are only a few months apart in age, so I welcomed a colleague of a certain age. He helped our department use google.docs (why don’t I know any of these things???) and we shared ideas about how the courses should be managed. When it became clear I needed a person to teach one more section of the 9th grade course, and it turned out time-wise he was the best choice, he agreed to my plea (he was set to teach sections of the 10th grade course).

But by the end of August, a gloomy cloud had darkened his demeanor. He didn’t like many of the Jordanian colleagues, always saying, “they keep complaining about the Americans,” but a little more, hmmm…strange, I guess—he didn’t like our students. Now, if you read some of my blog entries over the last 10 weeks, I have relayed how many (most) of us were alarmed by the academic skill-challenged teen-agers we met in August. I remember my attempts to engage, to get them to open a notebook, find a pen, be quiet for a few minutes et cetera ad infinitum. Yes, I had a trilogy of “Scratch” entries for heaven’s sakes! But there was something more troubling here.

Yet as a department head I try and bring out the best in my department members. I emailed encouraging comments, always greeted him warmly, and suggested ideas that might help his class. I shared some lessons plans that might work…but within a couple weeks, I began to get some calls and complaints about his classes. Another of my jobs is to protect and defend teachers: I wrote earnest pleas about how we are all new, and adjustments are hard, and we all need to experience many approaches and perspectives—I am trying not type the words blah blah blah here…I said, “Look, because of his duty in the first tour of weekend duty in the dorms, he was actually “on-call” with orientation, class, and weekend stuff, a total of 19 days in a row!” Everyone would get tired and snappy, right?

It was around this time that he began to come to me and say, “I may just leave. It may be anytime. I can’t take it here.” I thought he was just suffering from homesickness, nostalgia for the First World way of life, or heaving from a bout of the gastro-intestinal willies that greeted us here in Jordan.

He had announced at the Parent’s Night that he intended to have a “paperless classroom,” to scattered oooohs and ahhhhs. (I am getting a sense of this—his classes have a WIKI page, and everything goes back and forth electronically—and I guess you don’t have either a notebook or a pencil in his class. I guess I am from 1854 then!)

But soon he had a meltdown in the 9th grade classroom. I heard reports, and they were blistering. I won’t go into it, but that afternoon he was removed from the charge of those 9th graders, and the class passed to a vibrant, enthusiastic mid-20s teacher. That evening he and I talked, and he reiterated that he may not make it here to Christmas.

I don’t think it was just the water in Jordan anymore.

Just before our trip to Kenya (not really a sly allusion, it is necessary to the plot of this story!) the headmaster said to me: “I hope [he] recovers his joie de vivre on the trip.”

You know how I mentioned in one of the trip entries how on a trip you often discover someone you just adore (that would be Zeina) and another you can barely stomach anymore (guess who!)? Well, I realized on the safari he was not having trouble adjusting to Jordan—he wanted to go back to California to devote himself to a Silicon Valley company and make tons of money. That’s fine—but why did you move to Jordan?

We were on that van for excruciatingly long periods of time, and driving on the cratered madness they call roads did not allow for one to lose oneself in a book or thought. So we had to endure some interesting community conversations. I learned of his work on the side with this company, and how he wasn’t able to devote the time here that he had hoped. He would miss out, big-time, on a new trend for which he is on the vanguard: Virtual gifts. He talked about this project like a TV evangelist (minus the teary pleas for forgiveness after the fill-in-the-blank scandal) and if you are not hopping on this bandwagon of paying a few dollars to send treasured friends and family PRETEND, INTANGIBLE gifts/pets/alcoholic drinks/real estate, you are doomed to irrelevance.

On the second-to-last day of the trip, I chanted in my head: “It wouldn’t be so bad if he just left now.”

The following day at a lovely lunch, he announced his intention to leave soon after we returned.

Back to the beginning of the entry. So we needed to fill his teaching assignments, advisor responsibilities, dining hall obligations, and dorm duties. Yes, angel in It’s a Wonderful Life—one life affects many others.

I have been straining not to just “gossip” about this colleague. In fact, I have tried to distance myself from the great line “Clairee” says in Steel Magnolias: “Well, you know what they say: if you don't have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit by me!”

So when I heard of Deborah Kerr’s death, I remembered her closing line in Tea and Sympathy, when her character decides to bed the troubled young boy in the dorm to help him “save face” with his classmates: “Years from now when you talk about this—and you will—be kind.”

Yes, I was a little mad about the work involved to fill all the jobs he would vacate, but strangely, I was more moved by the sympathy I felt for this colleague. I remembered how in one of our first department meetings, as we all shared why we had becomes teachers, he said something like, “I don’t know, it just seemed a good thing to do.”

I felt sympathy because he obviously has never known the sheer joy about going to class, watching a student grasp a concept, write a brilliant thesis statement, understand Greek humanism, plow through Freud’s writings, and a million other psychic rewards. He has clearly never enjoyed the sense of commitment and the vision of a role model we are as we navigate our students through the treacherous waters of adolescence. I have wondered what it is like to drive to work and not go to a job that really means something to you. Apparently the teaching world has not done it for this man.

That’s fine—not everyone wants a gradebook hanging out of every bag or brief case or suitcase you ever use! But there is also a sense of honor to completing a school year. Frankly, I have only known a scant few to leave a school during the year voluntarily—and those were due to spousal relocations. But since his pronouncement, this sympathy (mixed with a sidecar of righteous anger) has allowed me to think about my friends in the US who, as teachers, are on the front lines of honor and commitment, even in the face of their own “Scratch-es”: my friend Doris working at St. Aloysius school for orphans, smiling and engaging her students to success with love, and a dollop of her drama skills; my other Doris, a lifetime teacher, and a rock of integrity and high standards; my friend Debbie, coaxing and compelling her learning issues-students, showing resolve that they will graduate from “Scratch”; and Shelley, working through all the tangles of public school bureaucracy to excite her elementary students about the wonders of science; and Mary, who has thrilled to relaying the joy of grammar lo these many, unnamed years (by the way, you can her swooning just saying that it’s almost time to teach gerunds!!); Christy toiling at Lehman College in the Bronx helping these graduate students to realize the potential of intellectual and social-emotional teaching to some of the roughest younger New Yokers; Chuck, a teacher and friend who combines his ebullience for teaching with a patience Job would admire; my grandmother who taught Sunday School for 62 years; my idols of Justice and Schneider and Michaels and Bork and Osborne and Wilson and Greene—probably this bunch taught a combined total of 57,000 years! These teachers, and my colleagues at Gaston Day and Latin and Hackley, who have encouraged and challenged and held me to high standards for these 20 years I have embraced this career.

This departing colleague obviously has not known these people. He has not had the examples I have known of responsibility and honor and commitment.

If you know any of these people send them my love.

On Sunday, we are having a “sorta beginning of the year” party with the history department at KA. We are soon going to begin a book together entitled, The Courage To Teach. I have outstanding “replacements” for the two 10th grade classes of the computer whiz, and I think we will be stronger than ever.

And most importantly—we want to be in our classrooms.