When I started teaching in 2005, in Sardis, Mississippi, I quickly wrote a few lines or a small paragraph during or after each class period, to keep a record of how things were going with each group. In the hectic pace of teaching, this writing became inconsistent, and eventually became a log of discipline issues. But it started out more like journaling.
Cleaning the office today I came across the oldest ones. This is the most amusing highlight from the first day of school, August 8, 2005:
This was my best class. A little chattiness from a few, but good overall. Female athlete (whose name I don’t remember) seemed studious and generally wonderful, and said early that, “this seems like it will be a fun class.” It was before the strictness of rules and consequences, but still. She also had to “think of a book” for the information sheet [which asked for favorite book], while no other student mentioned the question and almost all left it blank. She and another girl (special ed? kept spitting into container) wondered where I’m from, the other girl saying I looked like I’m not from this country, the athlete saying I looked like a magician, and a male student saying I look like “a straight P-I-M-P, pimp.” There was some agreement that I must be from Paris (strangely, just like somebody said at Lafayette High during summer school) and a suggestion of England. They were very good w/ row-by-row dismissal, several even staying after to write the homework assignment.
I confess that I just now got the import of all your students (at every school, right?) thinking you were from another country. It’s because you were.
And here I was thinking that you appeared strange to them, wondering to myself, “What’s so weird-looking about Robbie? Curly hair?”
Yes, at every school (three of them — one just a summer school). Somewhat less consistently and distractedly in somewhat more cosmopolitan Jackson — most consistently and distractedly in rural Sardis.
And most of all in Sardis I did indeed feel an exile, a man without a country, truly and in fact a foreigner, on both sides of the tracks.