I remember reading that the University of Mississippi had banned sticks in its stadium, in an effort to reduce the number of Confederate flags at games without overtly violating first amendment freedoms. There was quite a hullabaloo apparently. I laughed about it, I think. I doubt I would have been confident to say that no such place existed, that no such controversy would erupt, that nobody cared about or took seriously that sort of thing, but I was surprised by it anyway. It seemed so strange and quaint. So archaic. I probably reflected on it for a few seconds, but if I had a thousand years I don’t think it would have occurred to me that I might one day live and work in that state, attend courses at and be awarded a degree from that very school.

But here I am. The way I got here is recorded in the early posts to this blog; a lot of what has happened since is chronicled in the posts between then and now. After college I wanted to take a few years to experience a place I didn’t know, to try being helpful during my time there. So I applied to the Peace Corps, and almost went, but decided in the end that I could accomplish the same things in my own country. I had some vague notion of a teaching program in Mississippi where a lot of graduates from my college have gone, and a friend who had recently entered the program filled me in with the details, so I rescinded my Peace Corps application and applied instead to the Mississippi Teacher Corps.

A short time later I was in Oxford, which became (and remains) a town that fascinates me. Two months and I was in Sardis, Mississippi — a two stop-sign and no stop-light town — where I would have easily the worst and hardest year of my life. Then to Oxford again, and then a year in Jackson, the tiny and hollow urban center of an overwhelmingly rural state. And then they give me a degree and I’m free to go. (I’ll be staying another year in Jackson first, though.)

That, in a paragraph of fewer than a hundred words, is my Mississippi Teacher Corps Experience, and I hardly know how to begin unpacking it.

I wrote in my portfolio (the culminating project of the coursework for the M.A. degree) that, “I wasn’t a teacher when I arrived and I am one now.” That change was often hard and I’m still not sure that I always like it. Last year I often hated the person I had to be to get anything done at school, to maintain any sort of order, to function as (I hope) a beneficent part of a system that I believed (and now believe still more firmly) to be corrupted and corrupting. I can justify my role with a belief that even this corrupted system is the only way out of something for a lot of people who badly need out of it, that it can sometimes offer a badly tarnished glimpse — but a glimpse! — of what is beautiful and true, but sometimes it takes a hard willfulness to continue making this justification to myself. This year I’ve adjusted some, and I’ve found my bearings, and I’m usually happier with who I am in my teacher clothes. But I’m not always sure it’s good for me, and I’m not sure I haven’t just become complacent about some things. That can be a disheartening thought.

Still, I am deeply grateful for this experience. One of my central aims in coming here was to get to know my country better, and that I have certainly done. I don’t pretend to know it thoroughly or with any extraordinary insight, but I know it better now than I did two years ago, and see better both its beauty and it ugliness. Mississippi is a sad and a beautiful place, and I have come to love it. I can’t stay here, but I wouldn’t trade it.

I am thankful also to the Mississippi Teacher Corps for introducing me to my classmates, so many of whom have been so instructive to me, and so many of whom I now count as close friends. The frustration and struggle and conversation we’ve shared have been as formative to me as anything has. It feels rare and somehow magical to find a community of such people. Whenever I leave from one I brood over the likelihood of ever finding another.

I can’t better describe my “MTC experience” than I did in my portfolio: These two years have taught me beyond all measure. I have become a vastly more competent and useful teacher, in just about every sense that clause can be understood, and I have become a different and better human being.

[What follows are posts I was told to write for classes at Ole Miss and which I emailed to somebody but never posted.]

Five pieces of advice for the incoming first-years:

1- The best piece of advice that I received is perhaps also the hardest to follow: don’t take work home. Teaching already takes a lot of you, and it’ll take all of you if you let it. If you have to stay at school until 9pm, stay at school until 9pm. Don’t give in to the temptation to throw that work in a bag and take it with you, because then your home becomes an extension of work, and you lose something sacred. Having said it, I now add that I ignored this advice and took work home all the time. It made me miserable, and I resolve not to do it next year [note: already failed]. It’s hard to avoid sometimes, because it seems so much worse to stay at work to do that work, but that’s why they call that place work, and it’s better for your soul. Two minutes of peace in your home at night is better than defiling the sanctuary.

2- The second best piece of advice that I received is related to the first, but easier to follow: Change your clothes the minute you get home. Maybe be undoing the top button as you walk in your front door. If that’s really inconvenient, at least get down to an undershirt or something. However you’re inclined to do it, ritualize the return to your sanctuary. Home is a sacred idea, and it deserves physical manifestations of sanctity. Chants and incense might be overdoing it, but change your clothes. And don’t bring work there.

3- There is of course the perpetual and unfollowable: be more organized. If you’re the most organized person you know, you’re almost organized enough. Teachers have to keep track of so much worthless garbage, you may drown in it if you let yourself fall too far behind. I was always behind, and resolved at the end of each 9-week grading period to do better, and yet remained nearly drowning nearly all the time. Don’t grade everything if you don’t really have to, if you do have to grade it then grade it quick, and keep meticulous records of everything (note: throwing things into piles or files is not meticulous). And while lots of teachers will warn you about not throwing things out, you can probably throw out an awful lot more than you will. Lord knows the office does.

4- Think about grading while you write materials. Do not make a test without thinking at every step, how hard will this be to grade? What can I do to make this easier to grade?

5- For the gentlemen: loosen your tie. Ladies: get more comfortable shoes.

I hadn’t given much thought to corporal punishment before I came to Mississippi. Like a lot of us in the Mississippi Teacher Corps, I don’t think I was aware that corporal punishment was still practiced in public schools anywhere in America (or, probably, in the civilized world). I was surprised to learn about it, but not aghast. Of course I am aware that parents spank their kids, even progressive liberal parents, and that corporal punishment has been used just about everywhere just about forever. It’s never been so distant to become for me an archaic relic of less enlightened times. It only seemed strange that it was used in public schools, since public institutions have been for me sterile and bureaucratic, subject to endless regulation. Touching children at all, not even to mention hitting them, seemed to break the formality that separates everyone in such institutions. Violence, or at least punitive violence, seems like a kind of paternal intimacy. Police and judges and schoolteachers administer the cold effects of justice: fines and forms, procedures and policies, incomprehensible jargon. They are not allowed the warmth of violence, of anything physical.

(I’m not sure I want schools to follow this model. For better and for worse, such schools create barriers between teachers and students. For a student to see a teacher in a grocery store comes as a shock: the teacher is a human being who eats and has physical needs!)

When I arrived, I was skeptical of corporal punishment, but not disturbed by it. I did not think it warranted the tone of moral outrage some in the Teacher Corps allowed it. I did not think it responsible to compare the crusader against corporal punishment to the civil rights activist. Maybe the crusader is right, but in such a comparison his issue is dwarfed and his ego, too often, inflated. Now, at the end of a year teaching in Mississippi, I am much more deeply opposed to corporal punishment; and while I remain put-off by some of the rhetoric of those who oppose it, I have come to see it as a much more sinister presence in the raising of children.

Putting aside arguments of its effectiveness or ineffectiveness as an instrument of discipline, corporal punishment associates authority and violence. To some extent this is a natural association. For most of us the threat of violence becomes very abstracted in our understanding of social consequences; but it may always remain, in whatever form. Why follow burdensome laws if not for the distaste of the consequences, which are at least abstracted “violence” done to our financial or social standing, or to our ability to continue living the lives we live?

But for my students this association is not nearly so vague. Whenever I deferred to a school policy on anything at all, students would say, “You must be scared of the principal.” This was a generic response, as common as, “Ah!” Surely I heard it dozens of times. I would respond, “No, but I respect the rules.” This was senseless to them. Respect and fear are not distant and abstracted cousins, but two principles so similar as to become often indistinguishable. I obey rules insofar as I fear whatever authority enforces them, and not otherwise.

My students hit each other constantly. They play by hitting, like men or dogs who must seek or establish a place in the social order by competitions of aggression and submission. And how likely is it, I wonder, that the psychology reinforced by such a culture will find an expression in more serious violence against one another, or against women and children?