Dancing With Myself on Zoom With Teenagers

[Pic: I like my students so much, I once went camping with them. I do not like sleeping in tents. At all.]

Unless it is school or medical related, I am avoiding conversations with a great many people because I am afraid they will shatter the peace I am trying to keep in my mind and soul for the next seven to ten days.

I’m wobbling hard on my mental axis. Trying to stay grounded in music and good art and stupid-but-great movies like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

Or maybe I just miss the company of teenagers.

As a high school English teacher, I’m used to spending most days with teens. I like them.

I used to want to be a college professor because it seemed more fancy and like a lot less work (and in terms of grunt work, blood-and-sweat, sorry my beloved profs, but the K — 12 circuit is far more grueling).

Anyway, I ended up at a high school, and now I’m in my mid forties and sick and don’t feel I need to “prove” my intelligence to anyone anymore.

I know some shit. If you know me you know this.

There’s also a lot of shit I don’t know. For the next little bit, I’m taking tons of comfort in all the things I do not know, cannot possibly know. Isn’t it nice to not know things sometimes, boys and girls? I sure think so.

I’m being serious. A little flip, but also kind of dead serious.

When my wife and I were first dating, we talked about horror movies that don’t know they’re horror movies.

Mr. Holland’s Opus, one of us said.

I knew then we’d probably get married, because it was so fucking true.

Mr. Holland’s Opus is the story of a man who has big artistic aspirations, but ends up at the same school in the suburbs in a complicated marriage and a super strained relationship with his kid, until he retires at which point his former, now highly successful in a classic “American” way students, play his magnum opus for him on the day he retires. After which he probably went to someone’s basement and ate cake that was probably a sheet cake from the local grocery store chain. Like, fuck. Horror.

Anyway, that’s before I started teaching at a high school somewhat accidentally. I mean, I didn’t think my wife and I were actually going to stay here in Arizona. The Midwest was far superior. Chicago was vastly more interesting than any town in this beige state . . .

Then I met the students. Teenagers. And something intangible inside me met something intangible inside them, and I was struck dumb by this new realization of purpose.

Made no fucking sense to me.

Like whatsoever.

I wanted to be a college professor. Hell, I kind of even was for a minute. Students called me Professor Gruber and I didn’t correct them. I wanted to be cool. I wanted to be Professor Gruber. Not Mr. fucking Holland.

Gross.

And at the time I was starting to teach highschool, my writing career was finally starting to lift a little. Got signed with a division of W.W. Norton. Got an advance. Agent. The whole lot. Like one of my students that first year at the high school “found out” about my artistic/educational past (she googled me) and literally asked, “What are you doing here, Gruber?” Like I was in Witness Protection or some shit.

But it didn’t make any sense. My career should have been getting cooler in proportion with the trajectory of my creative life . . .

The thing is, it was getting better.

I was just too superficial to see it yet.

I mean, I noticed details, like the fact I had the most spectacular classroom view that was mine-all-mine (a meadow full of sunflowers beneath snow capped mountains) and was second only to the view I had as an adjunct in a very-much-not-mine classroom that was virtually all floor to ceiling windows overlooking the rocky shore of Lake Michigan.

Sublime classrooms. In which I have both learned and taught. I could write a whole essay just about that. The east facing classrooms in the Michigan Avenue Building at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago?

Do not even get me started on beautiful classrooms. Were it not for beautiful classrooms, maybe I would have settled for a cube, a corner office, a desk job . . . but probably not.

When I started teaching high school I think that what I realized was that though I liked the college version of me better, I most acutely felt and remembered the hopes and dreams and needs of high school me: the agony of being smart, but not good at grades; the shame of hanging out with the AP kids, but only able to get into the regular English classes that usually weren’t as much fun; the feeling that you knew things or were on the precipice of knowing things, but had no power whatsoever; the feeling of being constantly in competition over every little fucking thing and so tired of being in this weird kid limbo. I remembered this. So when I looked at my kids, my teenagers, I didn’t see Teens(™) , but people who were young.

Fortunately, for the past seven years, I’ve ended up liking most of the young people I’ve had in my gorgeous classroom.

Young people are easy to like.

I mean unless you’ve let your heart get all chewy
and gnarled and sweaty in your chest and you’re just
afraid and mad all the time. A lot of Americans are like this.

I know. It is very hard, as you move through life, not to let
the messy, tangled business of living fuck you up bad.

We’re all fucked up bad.
By life and America.
This year, mostly America.

We’re all fucked up bad, but we’re not all totally broken.
Seriously.

Feels like we’re broken, but trust me
you’re just seriously fucked up on America right now
and this, too, shall pass. Don’t be like Maureen Dowd or
those people who go to the emergency room because
they didn’t know how to “do weed” and like, really don’t
be that jerk during a pandemic (like the ERs are taxed mightily
and it probably would be a good thing if cannabis was legal
and yes even if you yourself don’t partake. You don’t HAVE to. That’s the whole thing about ‘Murica, right? You don’t have to do some shit you don’t want to do).
Drink a cup of tea.
Eat a carb.

Anyway, I love being around young people, especially the 14–22 demographic, because they’re so present and real.

Like, they’re kids so they’re not completely put together nor do they always make the wisest choices or smell amazing,
but they’re kids so they’re not supposed to be Martha Stewart
or Oprah or whatever so just fuck off on the kids, okay?

You were a kid once, too. I bet school was meaner when you were a kid. I know school was meaner when I was a kid. Lots more rules. Lots less liberty when I was a kid.
I don’t think it really helped me in any way
but to teach me how to be very quiet and very obedient
and honestly? I think half the reason America’s caught up in this fuckery right now
is that the American Education System raised two, possibly three, generations of kids
with the sole purpose of teaching them how to be fucking nervous robots.

So I know what you mean when you say “kids have it easy.” Like when you’re angry and talking about cutting teacher’s pay and talking about how you’re worried kids
will read about sex in a book because you never read about sex in books or when you did the books were poorly written and you’re American so you’re all weird about sex but that doesn’t mean all subsequent Americans have to be weird about it, too
or calling teachers Communists because “bitches” wouldn’t really suit your rhetorical purpose, but really you’re just talking about
how you’re scared because things have changed and many teachers now are curious
themselves about the world outside of their classroom and
talk to their students as though they are human beings,
which they are.

You’re scared and pissed because education sucked for you. School sucked for you.
I get it. You were hurt. I wish it wasn’t so. I wish you could have been in my class and I could have told you “you’re really good at spelling” or “I love how you think about the world from that decidedly you perspective” or “So, technically, the comma goes here. Don’t ask me why, but that’s what the comma gods have decreed.”

I wouldn’t have humiliated you.

I had so many good teachers. I got so lucky. I had great professors, too. And it’s not that my professors were cooler than my elementary or middle or high school teachers, but I just didn’t like the idea of having to apply bandaids or clean up puke sometimes.

Anyway, maybe you didn’t get lucky with teachers. I am sorry
but what I’m trying to say is be good to the young people anyway.

They have good thoughts. They’re funny.
just like you had good thoughts and were funny when you were their age, too,
but maybe nobody let you say what you meant or laugh out loud
when you just needed to laugh out loud.

Like, once, when I was a kid I painted a ceramic kitten blue and the art lady told me “kittens can’t be blue.” But 1) she was wrong because I had just read a book about a white kitten who fell in bleach and turned blue (I think it was fiction — in fact, sure of it) and 2) why the fuck can’t a ceramic kitten be blue?

What is wrong with you, ma’am?

We shouldn’t do that to young people in school anymore just because
it happened to us in school.

That’s all I mean.

I don’t mean let the writing and culture and history and math and science go to hell I just mean — please.

So I’m sitting up, drinking lavender chamomile tea, half watching the news and half listening to Spotify because it is the only website saving my ass right now.

Radio Free fucking Gruber on Spotify these days.

I’m awake and thinking about how much I miss the young people.

Did you know, statistically speaking, young people still know all the good bands? I’m dead serious.

Did you also know they’re like puppies? They’re still really cute if you can peer past all the angst and perfectly-normal-stage-of-development over-the-top social performance (or, in some cases, perfectly-normal-stage-of-development underwhelming social performance) — they trip into your class like John Travolta at the start of Welcome Back Kotter.

They’re cute as hell. This one time this girl almost poured boiling water in a Gatorade bottle from the kettle I kept in my classroom and when I frantically stopped her she was so surprised and was like, “I was going to put it on my stomach. I have cramps.” And it was such a puppy move I just wanted to hug her. That same girl, that same day, talked about T.S. Eliot with all the eloquence of a Professor-in-Residence.
This is what I mean about young people.

Maybe no one told you, when you were a young person, that you were cute. But you were. You were so fucking cute as a young person — even the things you did that you thought were embarrassing or awkward were actually really cute and, once more, on behalf of mine and all generations prior, allow me to personally apologize for the fact that no one paid you the compliments your cute self was so deserving of.

There’s also this thing called “growing up” and “getting over shit,” but that’s a more complex, nuanced course . . . Grad level shit.

Let’s just get you
to the point where you can believe education is actually important to our civilization and teachers aren’t meat packers — not that there’s anything wrong with meat packers; I’ve known meat packers, they’re people like everyone else — it’s just that teachers are more like nurses than meatpackers and nurses are more like doctors than, well, a lot of the time, to be honest, doctors themselves
and anyway, however much the doctor’s office is a pisser — especially during a pandemic — we can all pretty much agree, as Americans,
that we need doctors and we need to pay them money so they can live reasonably comfortable happy lives that make them feel rested and good about the work they do
so they don’t kill your ass out while performing a tonsillectomy —

so why oh why can’t we get there on the matter of education in this country?

Our young people are hurting.
I see this every morning on Zoom. This is unnatural, and they
are showing signs of strain, beginning to warp, fade. They are people.
They need watering and belly rubs and naps and peace
too.

Fact: quarantine has been way easier on me than my young students.
I am an adult who has many more choices in how I am able to spend
or not spend my day and I am a fortysomething adult so I do not need
to be taken to the Bark Park at least once a day. Know what I mean?

Like I’ve had my young person time. I did my really-foolish-sometimes-downright-dangerous-or-illegal young person
bullshit. Got it out of my system
and wouldn’t give a single memory back.

But my young people right now? They can’t get it out of the system. I mean,
I’m not naive. I know they are, in their own ways, some more flagrant than others.

I am not angry at them. Not even a little.
They are already traumatized. If they can mitigate their own
trauma by acting in sync with the natural order of who
they are at this moment in their human development
I forgive them for it.
Frankly, fuck that. There is nothing
to be forgiven. You’re young. You only get the one taste.

To my students current and former: (I would just ask, as your ol’ pal Gruber, that when you are violating quarantine rules, you do so humbly and as responsibly as possible — it’s the whole “don’t drink and drive” thing, but with a virus that would probably
give you the sniffles, but that might kill someone like me. Dig?)

I miss teenagers. Truly.

I never wanted children of my own. (I fucking love that expression — it’s so weirdly folksy — but in my case it’s true.) Babies were/are cute and what not, but the whole parenting thing was not part of my drive.

Anyway, in the classic ironic arch my life seems bent (heh) on taking, I ended up having hundreds of kids.

I remember a student asking me, a year or so ago, “You got any kids?”

And I remember that I said, “Yeah, hundreds.” And I winked, because despite my best efforts I’ve grown into the kind of adult who winks.

Anyway. I love my job. I’m so lucky in that way.

I love what I do

I mean, I love it so much I basically married it — my poor wife
has in many regards been forced into
a plural marriage, but like as an homage
to her Morman heritage
or Greek heritage

(the Greeks did the polygamy thing, right? they probably invented it)
or something to that effect.

This morning, I was playing music while I took attendance on Zoom. I like to start the class with music and this Monday the music was kind of its own wink-and-nod to my students that I had pulled through the last couple weeks, I was back, I was okay for now.

I’m way into Rumors right now. That album is just the most comforting thing to me in the world. A soft blanket for the mind. So I was playing my World Lit students (all seniors) Rumors while I was taking attendance and only one young person — I’ll call him Jay — had his camera on. I think his hair was purple today. And he was just rocking out to Dreams. Just totally feeling himself, waiting for class to start, on camera for his teacher and peers to see, truly enjoying some Stevie Nicks.

I am a shy person. Or a reserved person. Or I used to be once. Maybe way back in 2019, but as I watched Jay dancing in his digital square to the music I was playing in my living room as I prepared to teach another day online, missing my classroom and the proximity of people so badly, something came over me and I switched on my camera and began to sing and dance with Jay.

If I could “do over” I’d pick a Billy Idol song. “Dancing With Myself,” probably.
But this day, we were listening to Fleetwood Mac.
Maybe there will be another chance.
Maybe more of the kids will turn on their cameras and we’ll all dance together on Zoom in the morning and maybe that’s the
best thing I can teach them right now even as I learn
the skill myself.