I entered as a freshman teacher at Jesuit High School in 2018 the same way I started all of my jobs, with a sense of naive excitement. Jesuit is considered by many to be the best high school for boys in New Orleans. Living in New Orleans as a Jesuit alum is the equivalent to saying, “I went to Harvard.” The school can show data like test scores to prove this point, but it also leans on its established  reputation, meaning that the top students in NO generally gravitate to the school.

First Months: Expectations vs. Reality

Like some form of professional hazing, new English teachers at Jesuit are essentially given the classes no one wants. I was assigned English IV and English 8 (English I is a 9th grade level class, but Jesuit opens its doors to 8th grade students).

English IV is a British literature class with mostly seniors and a handful of juniors in the accelerated course. So why is this such an undesirable class? Two reasons: Senioritis and the dreaded 3rd quarter research paper.

The seniors enrolled in English IV had already taken their ACTs and SATs and finished most of the applications for the colleges they were interested in. The closer they get to the end of the year, the less they want to do. But for some reason, the English Department curriculum has always placed the research paper after Christmas break. The project was designed to take the full 3rd quarter, one of the shortest of the school year filled with interruptions like Mardi Gras and Holy Week.

For English teachers, this is also an insanely hectic time. This is one of the first self-guided projects that many students participate in, so it takes a ton of preparation work, explanation, and tracking students down to make sure they were on top of the assignments. Oh, and this project produced an insane amount of reading and grading, most of which were expected to happen over the breaks.

My English 8 classes were designated the “06” group and usually comprised a handful of students who needed help catching up with the rest of the class because they were either unprepared for the content or had severe ADHD or learning disabilities and needed a little extra help.

Usually, Jesuit has one 06 class of students, but this year, there were two classes, both assigned to me. The reason so many of these kids needed catching up is that the school had – somewhat inadvertently – lowered its admission requirements the previous year. The new president wanted to loosen the restrictions for allowing students in, which the admissions director interpreted as, “let in everyone who applies in.”

At a school prepared to meet students where they are, this would have been fine. However, my mentor teacher and the department head insisted that I cover the same material at the same pace as in the more advanced version of the course. The class was already designed to deviate from the original curriculum, meaning move slower, so there couldn’t be any other adjustments.

If a student was falling behind or had literally no prior knowledge of what we covered, they’d have to get extra tutoring offered by the school or approach me so we could come up with a game plan. Or, of course, the other option: quietly fail out.

I spent a lot of time after class or at lunch tracking down students who were falling behind to ask them to meet up with me to come up with a game plan, emailing parents, and more. But students started falling through the cracks.

On top of these challenges, I was essentially relearning all the material I was teaching. In the evenings I was cramming on the difference between perfect and pluperfect tense, Jesuit’s “Big 20” grammar rules,  and elliptical sentences. Plus, I spent half of my own senior year in British Literature class, living with a host family in Houston and attending shortened classes because Hurricane Katrina closed down the city and school. So yeah, there was rather more scrambling on my part than I had anticipated.

Trials of Classroom Management: The Seniors

The most important thing you need to know about my classroom management style at Jesuit is that I was completely winging it. Though I was in the middle of earning my Masters degree in “Art of Teaching,” I actually never received any substantial training in classroom management during this program. This was not a good situation when facing down the particular classes I had been assigned.

In English IV, seniors already had one foot out the door. However, I was facing more than just the usual case of senioritis in that class. A key thing to know about the culture at Jesuit is that students are divided into tracks that are meant to reflect grades and preparation upon entering Jesuit and influence the coursework that you will pursue while enrolled. This tracking system creates a hierarchy interpreted as “intelligence” that the students all intuitively understand and variously deploy against one another, as teenagers are wont to do.

The self-worth of many of my senior students had been at a crisis point for years and went through years of feeling like they weren’t as smart as others. Meanwhile, the course included juniors on the accelerated track.

Instead of engaging with the material in class, the senior swould shield themselves by making fun of anything they deemed “smart.” The wave of anti-intellectualism was perhaps inspired by certain people holding office, but I was surprised by how deeply it ran in this senior class. For example, one bright junior offered beautiful insights into the content we covered, but he was constantly shot down by his classmates, one in particular.

“What does that even mean?” the senior would sarcastically chime in. “Does anyone even understand what this kid is saying?”

At first, I’d correct the senior for speaking out of turn and try to summarize the answer to the class. When the student continued to respond this way, my next foolish approach was to use his own tactics against him, to shame him for  shaming the junior.

If you’ve ever spent time with me, you’ll know my sense of humor is teasing and borderline mean. Bringing this style of “humor” to the classroom was one of my ways of dealing with situations I didn’t know how to react to. Once, I corrected the senior for his disparaging comments by insulting him, something I thought the high school students would find funny.

To probably no one’s surprise, this technique not only didn’t work but caused a ton of friction between myself, this particular student, and his mother. Looking back and reflecting on these moments five or so years later, I can appreciate that I shoulder some of the blame for the strained relationship I had with this student’s family and his behavior in my classroom.

At the same time, none of the schools that hired me did anything to ensure that I, as a teacher, had this sort of training. Sure, I could deal with a student who was interrupting class or seeking attention, but approaching these sorts of psychological issues was way over my head.

Eventually, the junior stopped answering questions altogether. When he told me it was because he felt other students would bully him for “being too smart,” I knew I didn’t protect him enough. The end result was a double whammy: I damaged my student-teacher relationship with the senior, and I didn’t create a safe enough space for the junior. These kinds of realizations are hard to face, especially when I had arrived at Jesuit with nothing but good intentions and high hopes.

Trials of Classroom Management: The Kids

Meanwhile, I was also dealing with classroom management of students at the opposite spectrum of the school, the 8th graders. My impression was that these first year 8th grade students had zero filters and way too much energy. As I mentioned, my 06 classes were populated with students who had learning disabilities, ADHD, or were underprepared. Constant fidgeting, distraction, and disruption were common in a single class period.

If anything deviated from the normal routine in the classroom during my lessons, all hell would break loose. Writing endless Penance Halls (Jesuit’s version of detention, referred to as a PH) wasn’t working, and some days, I’d end up yelling at the top of my lungs or kicking students out of the class. It was not a sustainable atmosphere.

One day, despite knowing I was looking right at him, a student pretended to snort a line of (fake) cocaine. As he was obviously looking to disrupt the class, I gave him a dirty look and explained I would deal with that behavior later so the lesson wasn’t interrupted. After a few minutes, I turned around to see him sticking his tongue in and out of the “V” shape he was making with his fingers.

Okay, I thought to myself, this is way above just a PH. Instead of making a big deal of it in the moment, I waited until my next free period to talk to Barry Tabshire, the school’s Disciplinarian, about the situation. Barry was a short, bald man in his mid-60s who went by Top, a nickname given to him during his time in the Marine Corps.

“There’s Barry,” he explained, describing his two egos, “and then there’s Top.” Top’s drill-sergeant demeanor instilled an incredible fear in students, especially the younger ones.

“Do you have some time right now?” he asked. Barry called the student into his office, and we caught up a bit while we waited. We chatted casually about how I was adjusting to working at Jesuit, about my family, my brother who also graduated from Jesuit, and so on. As soon as the student stepped into the room, however, it was like someone flipped a switch.

“Sit down,” Top bellowed, and the terrified child nearly tripped getting into his chair. “Now tell me what’s going on in Mr. Woods’s class.”

“Well…” the student said, voice trembling, “I’ve been… disrupting the class and-”

“No! Tell me about today,” Top interrupted. “What happened today in Mr. Woods’s class?”

“I… I made lewd gestures…” the student murmured.

“What lewd gestures?”

“It was… it was a sexual gesture.”

“No, tell me, specifically, what sexual gestures?”

I sat next to the student, clenching my lips as hard as I could to hold back my laughter.

“It was… licking… licking a vagina.”

“Licking a vagina!” Top answered quickly, as if putting a period on the end of the conversation. He got out a PH from his desk and handed it to the student.

“I want you to write exactly this ‘sexual gesture’ you made in Mr. Woods’s class on this five-day PH. You’ll get it signed by both of your parents and bring it to me tomorrow. If not, I’ll call your parents, and the PH will double.”

“Yes, sir,” the student mumbled as he left the room. I wouldn’t say this particular student was a saint for the rest of the year, but these types of outbursts stopped happening. In the next month after this particular incident, Top would pop up in places to intimidate the student. He’d be at my classroom door, staring him down. Once, I looked out the window to see Top peering in over the bushes.

“Am I crazy, or has Top been following me?” the student asked.

“I think you’re being paranoid,” I told him with a smile.

Failing the Kids

Over my first year, a handful of 8th graders dropped out, and by the end of the year, five or six of my students would fail out.. At Jesuit, students don’t have the opportunity to repeat the grade, meaning they’d have to find a new school.

On one shoulder, the devil told me, “This is a brutal world, and some students don’t have what it takes to make it here.” But the other part of me felt guilty, like the school and I, as part of that institution, didn’t do enough to support these students.

I met with one student’s grandmother at a parent-teacher conference in the 4th quarter. She was raising her grandchild as her own, hinting that he was abandoned by his mother.  “I’m just so busy working at night, I can’t keep an eye on him,” she said, tears in her eyes. “I know he needs help, a little motivation, but I just can’t be there for him. What chance does he have to pass the class?”

How could I give her hope yet be realistic about his grades? He failed every single vocabulary quiz, grammar test, and reading quiz and never did his homework. Even though we weren’t allowed to give under a 60% for a grade, his grades were still so statistically low that it was literally impossible for him to make a passing grade.

“Is this the school for him?” she asked when I hesitated. “Be honest.”

“No, it honestly isn’t. We don’t have paraprofessionals or any of the support systems in place to help students with learning disabilities. There are no special accommodations or anything like that for students who really need it. All we can offer is extra tutoring. I’m so sorry.”

Another student got a 67% in my class for the last quarter, bringing his average for the year to a 68%, two points from a passing grade. What I didn’t know was that he was failing two other classes. Two failures was the limit for continuation at the school.

“I can tweak his grades a bit,” I told the principal when I heard news that he was failing out.

“No,” he said, “the grades are final. We just have this meeting in case there’s anything that teachers may have missed in their records. We don’t have this meeting to change grades.”

“Ah, okay,” I said, feeling a bit guilty, even though he and his parents had known he was on the edge. In the 3rd quarter, I had a meeting with his mother, laid out his grades and areas he can focus on to do better (study vocabulary!). Ultimately, he didn’t make the changes he needed. I tried to convince myself this was the best for the student, despite not knowing how this would affect him in the long run.

It was a harsh lesson to learn, and their failure felt like mine. However, a lot of my frustration was with the system in place. With over 100 students enrolled in my classes, the overwhelming amount of grading I had to do, and two completely new curriculums to learn and adapt, it was nearly impossible to give students the individual attention they needed.

If a school was invested in keeping and growing their students, there would be additional supports in place that were easily accessed. That was not part of what was offered at Jesuit.

Into the second year

There were tough questions I needed to consider going into my second year at Jesuit. Was there any way I could look out for students better while balancing all my other responsibilities? How could I adjust my teaching style to include more engaging activities while keeping the students in check? Yet I ended the year so drained, exhausted by the grading and stress of the class, all I wanted to do was relax, binge-watch TV, play video games, and read books I chose for my own pleasure.

Sadly, my carefree summer was a bit overshadowed by the news I received right before the break. I was told I’d be moving to teach English III and English I. That meant I needed to adjust to two more new curricula, and while at least I was more familiar with it, the bigger issue was that I would have a lot of the same students. Those 8th graders I struggled to handle. Year two was going to be interesting.