So I endured Statistics, Fundamentals of Education, and Testing Measurements. My eyes glazed over as I watched male professors wearing dark suits and frowns explain a female-dominated profession. I barely managed to solve basic math problems as I yearned for poetry and short stories. My student-teacher semester was my one worthwhile education class because the supervising teacher was a white-haired angel whose sage opinions included “Everyone deserves a year living in New York City.”

Dr. Hair made guiding fifteen-year-olds through challenging literature as natural as eating popcorn at the movies. She prepared me for juggling my time among too many students, too much paperwork, and too many unforeseen problems. She gave me the perfect balance of praise and pressure. I led reluctant teens through theme analysis and recognition of the eight parts of speech. I believed I could be a strong teacher. I thought I could handle any challenge the profession tossed my way—until my first day of teaching at Anderson Junior High.

The school was in a small, south Louisiana town set literally “on the wrong side of the tracks.” On my first day of work, the principal handed me a wooden paddle – “for discipline.” The English Department chair did not tell me how happy she was to have me at Anderson Junior High when she gave me a key to my classroom. Nor did she ever smile.

In theory the schools in Louisiana parishes in 1978 were integrated; in reality Anderson was 90 percent black, and its faculty included only four white teachers. Most other teachers ignored me, maybe because my pale face looked as soft as my disciplinary skills, and they believed I wouldn’t stay there long enough for them to bother learning my name. Their assumptions were as right-on as fried-catfish specials on Fridays in that predominantly Catholic state.

My miscalculations began when I missed the obvious warning sign connected to a teaching job starting in January: a teacher had quit in December! My first day of teaching a class without Dr. Hair in her office cubby next door was as bad as stepping barefoot into a bed of fire ants. The seventh graders had run off their last teacher the week before Christmas break; in January they took one look at the remnants of my bad perm and my plaid wool skirt with its matching vest and recognized new-teacher inexperience.
I’d gotten to school early enough to write the day’s agenda on the blackboard below the day’s date and next to my name, Ms. Keller in white powdery cursive. The front of the room was cluttered with heavy cardboard boxes filled with that semester’s new grammar workbooks. My department chair, who had looked at and spoken to me as little as possible the day before, said, “Distribute these,” after she concluded our thirteen-minute new teacher orientation.

I straightened the rows of battered wooden desks and my neat stack of “Welcome to Seventh Grade Language Arts!” packets. I reviewed the names of the 172 students I would meet that day, and I went over the index cards on which I’d outlined my first-day-of-school welcome speech. I said a fast Hail Mary and made the sign of the cross when the first bell rang.

In seconds the halls filled with the energy of thirteen- to sixteen-year-olds. (Our school did not practice “social promotion,” and a few boys with facial hair sat in seats next to boys whose feet did not touch the floor.) I messed up at least five names that day, but the students did not hold it against me when I changed the roster’s “Edward” to “Eddie” or made pronunciation notations on “Janie” (a short A beginning and a long E at the end). I think they were still uncertain about where I stood on the spectrum of clueless teachers. The first time I turned my back on the class to list the “Being Verbs” on the board, I heard a four-second belch and saw, on my right, a wad of paper flying toward the waste basket near the front door. It missed its mark. After I repeated “Be, am, are, is, was, were, being, and been,” I picked up the paper and dropped it in the trash in movements both smooth and confident. I raised my eyebrows when I realized the paper ball was my welcome packet but remembered Dr. Hair’s advice: “Give students your respect and as much eye contact as possible.” Several kids were smirking, and at least five occupied desks had nothing on them, so there was no way I could know which student had tossed the paper; but I had my suspicions about a tall, black-haired boy with slits for eyes.

I paced in front of the class and moved to my packet’s next bullet point.

“Who knows what an adverb is?” I said and prayed for an answer. The girl in the front row who had answered every other question that period raised her hand. “Let’s give someone else a chance to answer, Trina,” I said as I looked toward the slit-eyed boy. He leaned back in his seat and folded his arms. I decided to call on someone from my seating chart.

“Whitney?” I said. “Could you read the definition of an adverb?” I nodded as she complied. Then, walking closer to the middle row of students, I said “Adverbs give verbs and adjectives more flavor.”  I scanned the seating chart: “David, can you use the adverb ‘quickly’ in a sentence?”

Slit-Eye snorted, and a thin boy looking lost in what was undoubtedly an older sibling’s pale blue sweater asked, “Which one?” I then realized there were two Davids in that class. I chose “David Fontenot.” The much taller—slit-eyed—David was ready for me, even as Trina raised her hand and wiggled her splayed fingers.

“Stupid bell can’t ring quickly enough to get us out of here,” David said slowly.

Most kids laughed, and a girl with overlong bangs clapped and smiled at slit-eyed David. I smiled, too, and said, “I totally agree!”

I ruined my tiny victory by saying, “Good job, David. Our packet also tells us that adverbs can modify adjectives. Can someone give me a sentence using an adverb with an adjective?” By this time, eager Trina had given up on me. Why had I stomped out any possibility of connecting with new students by starting the semester with a lesson plan about the eight parts of speech?

Looking over my seating chart I saw a name I loved. “Chloe?” I said. From the back of the room the girl with extravagant bangs aimed her chin at me.

“Adjective?” she said in a voice of smoky disdain.

“Trina, please define adjective for us.”

With a voice like a defeated postal worker, my former ally said, “Adjectives describe nouns and answer the questions what kind, how many, and which one.”

“Chloe, do you have a sentence where an adverb could describe the adjective ‘happy’?”

As Chloe shook her head, I noticed the green of her left eye; her smile revealed uneven teeth.

“Common adverbs are ‘very’ and ‘too’ as in ‘too much,’” I said. I gave Chloe the appropriate wait time to answer and took a few steps to my left. “Anyone have a sentence with an adverb that modifies ‘happy’?” I asked, as the ticking of the large round school clock seemed to make time go slower. I decided to write some examples on the blackboard. I took three steps backwards—but I had forgotten about the cardboard boxes of workbooks. My right heel hit the corner of one that was open and half empty, and my left foot turned sideways as I half-fell, half-sat into the box. My only bit of luck was that my plaid skirt was maxi length and I didn’t “bomb” the class with a view of my underwear.

After two seconds of surprise the class erupted into a burst of laughter that unified them against the enemy, the outsider, the one they viewed as a temporary teacher. To get out of the box gracefully, I would have needed a helping hand, but no seventh grader would put a teacher ahead of her reputation—not even Trina. As I spread my feet farther apart, I used my good right hand to grab the metal leg of my desk. My first attempt to pull my butt off a pile of Houghton Mifflin’s Workbooks for the Fundamentals of Grammar and Writing did not succeed in ending my humiliation. I needed to push off with my feet and rock backwards a couple of times to get enough momentum to fall forward onto my knees. The laughter gained strength, as if a seasoned comic had followed a dynamite joke with the gag that killed it and ended his best set. Staggering up, I ripped out a few inches of my skirt’s hem with my right shoe. I took a long breath as I bent down to retrieve my papers, and caught my department chair’s tired eyes looking through my door’s narrow window. She probably dreaded starting the search for my replacement so soon.

I mustered a close-lipped smile. “That’s enough,” I said. “That’s enough.” One student was slapping her desk with opened palms. I walked towards her and repeated, “Enough.” The girl stopped the slapping and several kids stopped laughing. I had never before wished I could evaporate into a mist and make everyone in the room forget the last several minutes. The laughter stopped, and I felt twenty-seven pairs of eyes focused on me. I cleared my throat and looked at the tops of their heads. I opened my mouth, but before I could speak, Chloe loudly cleared her throat and said, “Bet you ain’t too happy to be here, Ms. Keller.”

Despite the fact that she used my name and not the traditional “Hey, miss”; despite her using the adverb “too” correctly with the adjective “happy”; and despite my ability to keep from crying in front of these seventh graders, I could feel nothing but fear in my gut and shame in my soul. How could I ever be a teacher? Why had I not begged Momma to convince Dad to let me major in creative writing? When would be too soon to call in sick to work? What if I quit my job at Anderson and moved back in with my parents?

I did not hate my students that day. I did not blame the principal, my unsupportive department chair, or Chloe for my disastrous first day as a teacher. I accepted the blame of that day’s failure and relied on my 22-year-old optimism to get me through the spring semester.

I didn’t realize then that there would be thirty-seven years of teaching ahead of me— instructing high school students, junior high students, college freshmen, and kindergarteners. I would become as comfortable in front of a classroom of teens as a crawfish is in a flooded rice field. I would even miss teaching when I became a student-teacher field supervisor after I retired from full time teaching. Before this first teaching job, I’d never believed teaching would be my profession. I fell into it the way I fell into that box of workbooks.

Sometimes, if we’re lucky enough, we improve our talents and learn to like what we do. And maybe we land in a box built just for us.

Old Stranger: Poems

by Joan Larkin

Poem after poem, Old Stranger unearths moments that shape a woman's life. The poet's eye is unflinching as she sees the past folded into the present. Her body is the ground of deep soul hunger. Her language is music.

“To discover the ‘old stranger’ is a knife, not quite, it’s an old piano. No, it’s a book about mortality and the debt of flesh, about love, rot, relationship, smiles that cut like knives through every seeing moment. It’s about painting. It’s a beaut. There’s so much masterpiece here. I mean, wow, this is why one is a poet all their life. To make this.” — Eileen Myles, author of a "Working Life"   “Joan Larkin’s much-awaited Old Stranger: Poems is a miracle of compression, mystery, and innuendo. Here is a poet for whom craft is an extension of wisdom. Whether revealing the archetype secreted within an object, or the elemental, persistent grief within a memory, Larkin expertly hones the edges of poems like a luthier shapes a violin.” — Diane Seuss, author of Modern Poetry   "Engaging with curiosity and often startled affection, this poet tells of how it feels to be both enamored and shaken with what connections reveal. Quiet and absorbed, one reads this most graceful of books until pow and one is alerted!" — Jody Stewart, author of This Momentary World: Selected Poems

    More about Joan Larkin: www.alicejamesbooks.org/bookstore/old-stranger Available from Alice James Books, Bookshop, and Amazon.

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