My friend Anna was born to teach elementary school.\u00a0 Specifically, she was born to teach elementary school in Harlem.\u00a0 That’s where we met in 2002.\u00a0 I was starting my first year of teaching, she her third, even though she was a few years younger.\u00a0 Anna was infinitely cooler than me.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Anna found it enormously funny when she fucked up; I blushed with shame at my errors.\u00a0 She carried her fleshy body around as if men would find her irresistible (and they did); I tried in every way to camouflage mine.<\/p>\n
Anna always<\/em> played devil’s advocate.\u00a0 If I was being hard on myself, she’d point out how and why I wasn’t giving myself a fair shake.\u00a0 But the opposite was true too.\u00a0 She’d call bullshit when she heard it.\u00a0 When I complained about not being able to do something our administration mandated, she said, “But you can.\u00a0 You don’t want<\/em> to, but you can.”<\/p>\n And Anna loved<\/em> her students.\u00a0 I mean, unconditionally.\u00a0 Like many inner-city schools, ours had some pretty needy kids:\u00a0 abused kids, violent ones, pathological liars, kids with undiagnosed and untreated disorders, crack babies, everything.\u00a0 Anna loved them all.\u00a0 And because of the relationship she had with her students, she could afford to be, shall we say, unconventional.<\/p>\n One time, a boy was transferred to Anna from another fourth-grade class because the other teacher was about to blow a gasket.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He even did some work and learned a few things.\u00a0 Finally, I asked Anna how she was controlling this formerly wild-ass kid.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Now I just have to hold it up, and he gets his act together.”\u00a0 I stared at her.\u00a0 She laughed her gravelly laugh and said, “What can I say?\u00a0 He’s a kinesthetic learner.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My friend Anna was born to teach elementary school.\u00a0 Specifically, she was born to teach elementary school in Harlem.\u00a0 That’s where we met in 2002.\u00a0 I was starting my first year of teaching, she her third, even though she was a few years younger.\u00a0 Anna was infinitely cooler than me.\u00a0 She grew up on 106th … Continue reading Anna<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":441,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions\/441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}