Three years ago I was teaching in a rundown middle school classroom in a rundown school building in a rundown section of Queens. My students were quiet twelve year old girls who weighed 120 pounds each and rowdy twelve year old boys who weighed 85 pounds each. They were mostly African American or were immigrants from Ghana or East India. All black, and intensely racist of each other. They treated me, white and unprepared, with vague amusement. I was a part of the structure after awhile, a door frame, a cracked chair. It was fall and my girlfriend was spending the weekend with me.
I was embarrassed to have her there. Embarrassed by my small apartment living above a Bengali family on a street with cars parked one inch away from each other. Embarrassed by the trash bags by the F train which ran inconsistently, rank with the smell of urine and discarded fast food containers. I envisioned her coming to New York, arriving at that holy city, that central point, visible from space, visible on even the simplest maps, and then making a sharp detour, another train, the city slowly fading, disappearing, before finally arriving in a broken pseudo-suburbia where I would meet her and give her a big hug. We were both wrapped in thick coats to ward off the cold fall, the leaves had abandoned the branches early that year. She was so genuinely happy to see me, and that only added to my sense of shame.
I had the great idea to start a fish tank. There were few empty 29 gallon tanks in the science lab upstairs. There was a spot in my classroom that would be perfect. Custodians worked in the school on the weekends, they would let me in. We traveled to Chinatown and found a small fish store owned by an extremely energetic young man who spoke English without an accent and had a much more attractive hair cut than me. His store was full of filters, animals, plants, gravel, chemicals, lights, and old Chinese men. He upsold me and I walked out with three huge plastic bags, two each filled with a large bag of gravel and the third filled with an expensive canister filter and some tiny plastic bottles filled with water treatment chemicals.
The trip back to my school was exhausting. My school was located on the top of a not-so-small hill, any by the time we finally got inside, my arms felt like they were going to fall off at the shoulders, the handles of the plastic bags were stretched to thin strips of razor line cutting into my fingers. We had just dropped everything off inside of my classroom when I realized my first big mistake: there was no source of water. The nearest place was a water fountain at the end of the hallway, probably two hundred feet away. I had a 2 gallon bucket.
It took about three hours to fill the tank with gravel, fill the tank with water, and setup the filter, not including a 45 minute delay when, during a materials scavenging expedition, I locked my keys inside of the third floor science lab. The custodians, who I truly believed lived in the walls were hard to find, and would scatter as they heard my footsteps approaching. Finally I tracked one down, a weather beaten 65 year old white man who had a ring dangling from his belt that held maybe a two hundred keys.
The tank was full of metallic smelling Queens public school water fountain water. The pump was running, quietly tucked away under the sturdy metal desk positioned in the corner of the room out of direct sunlight, exactly like I had read online. I added a few drops of the water conditioner, a foul smelling liquid that was chock full of beneficial bacteria to keep my fish healthy. The fish I hadn't bought yet, the fish I was waiting to buy, I told myself that I would buy fish after a few weeks, let the water sit there and become safe and healthy. I had a plan to organize my tank around plants, bright green plants, providing a natural habitat for the fish. I wanted to build an oasis in my chaotic classroom. I wanted to give the students something to look at besides the walls and their worksheets.
It never really panned out. The tank sat there in the corner of my room, full of room temperature water. The filter quietly pulsed away for the next four months, recycling the same water again and again, never having the chance to remove the fish poop it was designed to. Occasionally I would add water to the tank to fill it up.
Students would ask what had happened to the tank. When was I going to get fish? Other teachers would say the same thing. I didn't really have an answer. I would just shrug my shoulders and give the same look that people give when asked, "Why is life so hard?". This is just the way it is folks. The fish tank is full of water and empty of fish.
Of course, in reality the tank wasn't really empty. I was playing host to a whole colony of bacteria and algae, playing out their own microscopic circle of life. Thousands of generations giving birth, dying, fighting, getting sick, falling in and out of positive relations with each other, migrating to new and exciting parts of the fish tank. For them, the tank was the entire known universe, and this notion provided me with some excellent material for daydreaming on many an afternoon when, after the last student had left for the day, I would sit at my desk and feel empty and broken.
Things are very different now. I'm still bone tired at the end of a school day, but this tiredness is not an aimless, pointless-seeming thing anymore. I feel purposeful, some days more than others, but still, the fact remains that I can more clearly see the benefits of my work. I have taken great pleasure in watching myself grow as an educator, and even if I do not feel that this job is what I seek to build my life around, even if I feel like I may get up and leave one year and never come back, I still find myself fascinated at the ways in which it has become easy, almost effortless, to manage a classroom full of students, to convince them of the value of being there, even if momentarily, and to expose them to things that they are not used to seeing or hearing, like a beautiful fish tank, full of fish.
Here's a picture of my fish tank taken by one of my illustrative students Casey:
The tank was full of metallic smelling Queens public school water fountain water. The pump was running, quietly tucked away under the sturdy metal desk positioned in the corner of the room out of direct sunlight, exactly like I had read online. I added a few drops of the water conditioner, a foul smelling liquid that was chock full of beneficial bacteria to keep my fish healthy. The fish I hadn't bought yet, the fish I was waiting to buy, I told myself that I would buy fish after a few weeks, let the water sit there and become safe and healthy. I had a plan to organize my tank around plants, bright green plants, providing a natural habitat for the fish. I wanted to build an oasis in my chaotic classroom. I wanted to give the students something to look at besides the walls and their worksheets.
It never really panned out. The tank sat there in the corner of my room, full of room temperature water. The filter quietly pulsed away for the next four months, recycling the same water again and again, never having the chance to remove the fish poop it was designed to. Occasionally I would add water to the tank to fill it up.
Students would ask what had happened to the tank. When was I going to get fish? Other teachers would say the same thing. I didn't really have an answer. I would just shrug my shoulders and give the same look that people give when asked, "Why is life so hard?". This is just the way it is folks. The fish tank is full of water and empty of fish.
Of course, in reality the tank wasn't really empty. I was playing host to a whole colony of bacteria and algae, playing out their own microscopic circle of life. Thousands of generations giving birth, dying, fighting, getting sick, falling in and out of positive relations with each other, migrating to new and exciting parts of the fish tank. For them, the tank was the entire known universe, and this notion provided me with some excellent material for daydreaming on many an afternoon when, after the last student had left for the day, I would sit at my desk and feel empty and broken.
Things are very different now. I'm still bone tired at the end of a school day, but this tiredness is not an aimless, pointless-seeming thing anymore. I feel purposeful, some days more than others, but still, the fact remains that I can more clearly see the benefits of my work. I have taken great pleasure in watching myself grow as an educator, and even if I do not feel that this job is what I seek to build my life around, even if I feel like I may get up and leave one year and never come back, I still find myself fascinated at the ways in which it has become easy, almost effortless, to manage a classroom full of students, to convince them of the value of being there, even if momentarily, and to expose them to things that they are not used to seeing or hearing, like a beautiful fish tank, full of fish.
Here's a picture of my fish tank taken by one of my illustrative students Casey:
