My friend Anna was born to teach elementary school. Specifically, she was born to teach elementary school in Harlem. That’s where we met in 2002. I was starting my first year of teaching, she her third, even though she was a few years younger. Anna was infinitely cooler than me. She grew up on 106th Street in Manhattan; I spent my childhood on Old Highway 421 outside Boone, North Carolina, which occasionally got blocked off by Farmer Proffit’s cows who would wander into the road. Anna had smoked since she could hold a cigarette so she had this sexy, gravelly voice and a low, rumbling laugh; my voice is sort of mid-range and boring, and my dad once described mine as a tavern-wench laugh. Anna found it enormously funny when she fucked up; I blushed with shame at my errors. She carried her fleshy body around as if men would find her irresistible (and they did); I tried in every way to camouflage mine.
Anna always played devil’s advocate. If I was being hard on myself, she’d point out how and why I wasn’t giving myself a fair shake. But the opposite was true too. She’d call bullshit when she heard it. When I complained about not being able to do something our administration mandated, she said, “But you can. You don’t want to, but you can.”
And Anna loved her students. I mean, unconditionally. Like many inner-city schools, ours had some pretty needy kids: abused kids, violent ones, pathological liars, kids with undiagnosed and untreated disorders, crack babies, everything. Anna loved them all. And because of the relationship she had with her students, she could afford to be, shall we say, unconventional.
One time, a boy was transferred to Anna from another fourth-grade class because the other teacher was about to blow a gasket. I’m not going to say it was like “Stand and Deliver”, but MONTHS went by and this little guy didn’t get sent to office. He even did some work and learned a few things. Finally, I asked Anna how she was controlling this formerly wild-ass kid. She held up a fist with the knuckle of her first finger stuck up into a point and said, “I used to dig this into the side of his neck when he got out of line. Now I just have to hold it up, and he gets his act together.” I stared at her. She laughed her gravelly laugh and said, “What can I say? He’s a kinesthetic learner.”