Chapter 4 Learning Curve toward June #2
“I just,” he whispered, staring at the piles of yarn, “I-I never did this when Todd was alive. He… he made me stick to six boxes. He hated when I bought yarn. I had to write—write, mind you—a justification, a plan, a reason for all the yarn. That’s why…
that alpaca? It’s such good stuff. And I wanted it.
I wanted to make something with it. So I wrote, I’ll make a sweater for my husband, and Todd…
he was like, ‘Okay, but it can’t have a design in it, and no colors, a simple goddamned brown pullover, Isaac, do you think you can do that?
’ and… and I wanted to work with the yarn so much, and now when I touch it, it feels…
it feels like I sold my soul for a pile of shit-brown yarn.
But I don’t have to do that anymore. I can buy bins of yarn.
I have all the money in the world. I can buy all the yarn I want.
I just….” Oh no. Luca heard the wail building. “I don’t have anybody to knit for!”
Luca had his arms around Isaac’s shoulders and was holding him, sobbing in the parking lot at Michael’s, as he used one arm to shut the hatch over a giant pile of discount yarn.
Eventually Isaac’s tears subsided, and for a moment they stood in the bright May sunshine, uncomfortably warm but—at least on Luca’s side of things—not wanting to part.
Luca stepped back, smiling grimly to himself when Isaac wouldn’t meet his eyes.
Then he gently but firmly held his hands out for Isaac’s keys and, when he got them, ordered Isaac into the Sportage.
Then he drove them to a local sandwich shop.
As Isaac got out of his own vehicle and followed Luca obediently, he said, “Why are we here?”
“Because it’s easier to talk while you eat, and brother, I could eat.”
Isaac gave him an amused glance through puffy eyes and a face swollen with weeping, and Luca offered his best, most comforting smile.
“What do you want to talk about?” Isaac asked.
“Well, for starters, what kind of sandwich do you want?”
Fifteen minutes later they were seated outside in the shade, with a scenic view of the parking lot but a lot of fresh air and early May sunshine that definitely lifted the spirits.
Luca had paid, his treat, because he said it was his turn, but also because he liked to pay for his dates, even when he was broke.
That probably made him a controlling bastard, but he also liked to think it made him Italian.
After a few bites, Isaac set his sandwich down and said—as if surprised—”This place is really good.”
“I like it,” Luca said.
“Todd never wanted to come here. Said Jersey Mike’s sounded pretentious in California.” Isaac sighed. “I’ll have to bring Roxy here. It’s close to the school, and we’re always looking for a good place to run away to on Friday.”
“You mean they let you out of the building?” Luca asked, feigning big eyes. “They don’t lock you in the basement and pipe in the federal allotment of sunshine?”
Isaac laughed—a real laugh this time and not an insane giggle.
“No, no locking in the basement. But usually there’s not enough time. We get thirty-five minutes to eat, so most of the department has somebody with an early prep go out and get food.”
“But not you?” Luca asked perceptively.
Isaac shrugged. “Most of our department is sort of a conservative toolbox. Roxy and I have a prep period that backs up against lunch, so we go early. And we still remember what it was like to be young.” He took another bite and chewed ruminatively.
When he was done, he said, “I had a master teacher when I was coming up through the credential program. She was on the verge of retirement, but you wouldn’t know it with the way she played with the kids.
She took me aside and told me to watch out for the teachers’ room.
‘Sometimes,’ she said, taking a drag of her Virginia Slims in her car, mind you, because she wasn’t going to stop smoking at sixty if they arrested her, ‘sometimes, those people are the lambs of God, and you couldn’t imagine a finer bunch of sheeple in the universe, doing the bidding of the man.
But sometimes,’” and he mimed taking a drag and letting it out on a blissful sigh, “‘sometimes, kid, they’re a cancerous lesion on the collective consciousness of education. And the thing is, you’ll never know what it’s gonna be.
Are you going to walk into the teachers’ room and find your friends and colleagues who will give you solace and support and tell you how to be the best teacher you can be?
Or are you going to find a bunch of conservative bigots who laugh at the gay kids and are still pissed that you can’t teach the Bible in California? You don’t fuckin’ know.’”
Luca stared at him in shock. “You are shitting me,” he said. “It can’t possibly be that—”
“Oh, but it is,” Isaac assured him. “The trick is to find somebody—even if it’s just one person—you can talk to.
Someone who loves the job. Loves the kids.
Can tell the administration to go suck rocks when you’ve got a toolbox in the front office.
Carly Vogel taught me that, God love her, and I hope she’s in a retirement villa somewhere warm, wearing nicotine patches and getting laid, because it was the best advice going into the profession that I could have gotten. ”
“So, you and Roxy?” Luca surmised.
Isaac shrugged. “Me and Roxy,” he said. “We were both in the same credential program. Masomat High School was hiring math teachers—they had a twenty-to-one program—”
“What’s that?” Luca asked, curious.
Isaac rolled his eyes. “Common sense. Most schools have to apply for grants to get it. Basically it’s a policy of only having twenty students in basic freshmen classes—pre-algebra and English, although they should include everything else.
But this was a grant for only twenty kids per pre-algebra classroom, and the grant is to pay the extra teachers.
It’s how a lot of teachers get hired on, and then the school loses funding, and of course the profession eats its own, so the few teachers left after the initial hiring burst are there to teach thirty-six kids per class. It’s awesome―”
“Oh my God,” Luca said, feeling like his brain had been assaulted by too much bad information at once. “Let’s go back to ‘the profession eats its own.’”
Isaac took a glum bite of his sandwich. “It’s… it’s not for the weak, Luca. Besides knowing math really well, you also have to know politics—which I don’t and Roxy sort of does, but she doesn’t like to fuck with it—and they throw kids at you who have third- or fourth-grade skills—”
“But shouldn’t they be in remedial classes?” Luca asked, appalled.
Isaac set his sandwich down regretfully. “Do you remember maybe fifteen years ago—probably when you were back in high school—there was a thing called No Child Left Behind?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, what it was—what it really was—was a way to blame teachers for every kid who had a problem learning. That philosophy and a lot of those policies have hung around. If a kid, or even an entire class, isn’t at grade level, the teacher isn’t allowed to go back and reteach the lesson, or make sure half the class has the skill.
The entire class must move up, and if not, the teacher takes the heat.
So the result is, when the kids get moved up to high school, your supersmart, A-level kids are in the honors classes, and that’s about fifteen percent.
And the other eighty-five percent, who needed help or, hell, a little bit of slowing down, weren’t allowed to get help or a little bit of slowing down, and they are either below grade level or so disillusioned that it doesn’t matter.
And if you complain about it—see, politics—you’re considered part of the problem, and you’re fucked. ”
It was dawning on Luca that Isaac swore a lot, but hearing him talk about his profession, he was beginning to understand why.
“That’s awful,” he said, dazed. He could vaguely remember taking classes, passing classes, having teachers tell him he was a good student, and figuring that was nice, but he couldn’t wait to get out and get a real job. He’d had no idea what his teachers had gone through for any of that to happen.
Isaac shrugged and reconsidered his sandwich. Took another, more enthusiastic, bite.
“It’s got its hard parts,” he confided. “About a week before school starts in the summer, I have a series of nightmares: My alarm doesn’t go off and I sleep through the first week, my pants fall down in the middle of class, or—and this is my favorite—I’m standing on top of a desk, screaming at the top of my lungs, and they keep talking over me.
And the worst part of that one is that it actually happened during student teaching. ”
Luca’s chuckle rumbled out from his stomach, surprising them both.
“That’s terrible,” he said, holding his hand over his mouth so he didn’t spit food. “Is that true?”
“Yeah.” Isaac nodded. “Yeah. I… I mean, I was the twinkiest of twinks. What high school kid was going to listen to me? Half the juniors had thicker mustaches than I did at twenty-three. But I had a degree in math and nothing to do with it, and everybody said, ‘Hey, you’re gonna be a teacher, right?’ So I thought, ‘Why not?’” He blew out a breath.
“And my parents died when I was right out of college, and I was a mess. I mean, a mess. I spent three months after their car accident hitting every club between here and San Francisco—I’m lucky I survived.
They didn’t have PrEP back then, and I’ll be honest, sometimes I was too high to be safe. ”
“What made you decide to clean it all up?” Luca asked, suddenly curious—and aching for the lost young thing he could still see in Isaac, for all that he tried to be a boring, quiet little widower.