I nervously knocked on the classroom door. I noticed that the teacher had the same posters up I remembered from my high school days. When he saw me, he brightened. It had been almost seven years since I had him for sophomore English. I got to tell him I was in my first year of teaching, and that I had my own sophomores now. With the shyness of an enamored student, I explained that if I was doing anything wrong it would be that I was too much myself with my students. He refused to give that credibility. "What better thing can you offer them than being human?"

I no longer have any shame that during my first year of teaching my class had a picnic on top of our long wooden table, eating bagels while we talked about literature. I am not horrified that sometimes I laugh when someone else would yell. But I am still working out the balance between being the predictable, detached adult in the room and being someone else, someone more like myself.

***

My first teaching job was at an all-girls, community-obsessed, comfortable, artsy boarding school outside of Albany, NY. I had big plans to be Very Professional. I had a new teaching wardrobe that consisted of a few choice hand-me-downs and a small collections of shirts and skirts that, when rotated cleverly, could spread out to give the week some variety. Shoes were a bit of a problem, and a telling one. I bought a pair of red shoes that said "I am a young hipster," and I scrutinized over whether they gave me away. Even though just out of college, I felt I should be trying to keep my young hipster self in the closet. I was trying to decide how much of myself I could get away with bringing into the classroom. I wanted to be taken seriously. To me, that meant pretending to take myself seriously.

It might have been a sign of the challenges ahead that the first time a student called me "Ms. Primo," I laughed in her face. Then quickly added, "Oh. Sorry. You're being serious. Nice to meet you too."

That first year, I made no grand secret of what I was like as a non-teacher. I capitalized on personality and connections. We all learned together; I was reading the assigned books just a few chapters before they were. I was flabbergasted at a character's behavior and let out these unbridled reactions as prompts for discussion. I gave up being Very Professional. I giggled uncontrollably when the window blinds rocketed into the air when I tried to open them subtly while a student was talking. I toppled over if I tried to balance on the sides of my shoes while I was calling on someone. We would all laugh if my shoes squeaked while I was walking around during one of their tests. If they asked me "How did you do that with your hair?" in the middle of my lesson, I would tell them.

With these girls it was easy to follow the motto I had chosen for myself as a new teacher. If you respect them, they will catch on and respect you back. Part of the way I respected them was to let them see me as myself. That first year being emotionally available in that way proved crucial for all of us.

One of my freshmen died over winter break, in a snowmobile accident. I remember feeling a strange mixture of two contradicting feelings when it came to helping my girls deal with the impossibility of grief: that I was on the one hand intensely unequipped and on the other hand completely the woman for the job. I felt adept because I too was grieving: shocked, in need of both structure and space, in need of a way to commemorate but in need of a way to stay afloat. I came in the first morning back from break prepared with a passage of a book I loved. We sat on the carpet and I read out loud from Bird by Bird by Annie Lammott, the part where she takes her five year old son to his first funeral. After the funeral, she takes him bowling because the matter-of-factness of the ball, the pins, the crash seems somehow the proper way to assert your still living-ness. In our ultimate twilight zone moment, I promised my class we would go bowling together before the year ended. It was a weird impulse, and I obeyed it.

It was a strange memorial service. We wore togas to the bowling alley. We had just finished The Odyssey and Roman garb seemed somehow fitting. We also went on a Reunion Bowling Trip a year later, when I no longer had them in class. I meant to stay at that school only a year, but when the administration asked if I could stay, I was unable to say no. The amount of emotion I invested has a lot to do with what we had gone through together that year. In the same way that going through a tragic life event can keep partners in a less-than-ideal relationship, I felt my heart was grappled to that school with hooks of steel. I ignored signs of stress and social insulation; deferred grad school for a year; and remained in that supportive, intellectual, and summer-camp-like environment.

***

After a reflective and challenging year of grad school, I returned to the classroom... into an opposite environment. This time, I was no longer in a gated castle, but at a public school in rehab. My new school was trying to start over, having been declared a failure. By this point, I had expanded my professional wardrobe, but that was the least of my worries. This time I was still banking on personality, but I had learned in grad school that structured planning was the way to gain deep respect. I was determined to convincingly fake organization. I knew I was smart enough for the job, but I didn't have proof that I was strong enough.

Once again, my big plans to start out Very Professional didn't last more than a few minutes. I had been told, "Don't let them see you smile for the first month," but when we stood outside in the rain during an accidental fire drill on the first day of school, I sidled over to the students I had just met. "My class would've been way more interesting than this," I joked. They looked at me, un-amused but courteous.

The way I remember it, that was the last day that they were courteous for about four months. There was a reason these kids had the reputation they did around the city. They were wary of adults, full of anger (often justified; rarely directed accurately), and uninterested in school. Their skills were low, their mouths were filthy, and within a few months I loved them unconditionally.

I was aggressive in my respect. Just as nonviolence isn't the absence of violence but its own very proactive decision, not yelling is not a passive state but a very active decision. I came to realize that being calm in the midst of madness had its own magic to it.

What felt so different from my first job was that I went from being a casual big sister to a deliberate Respect Warrior. I had no need to be protective at boarding school because no one would trespass: those students and I both shared a vision of what school felt like and how conversations with teachers should go. At my public school, it felt like I was training 9th graders in how to be students. It felt like starting from scratch, and I didn't just feel like I was fighting them but fighting their histories and the school's rule-by-fear mentality. School was way more removed from my students' lives now. I found myself afraid to ask what they did after school. I had to confront my own fear of what was actually going on in their lives. Would it be another story of jumping a stranger? Or taking care of their own baby? Or would my innocent question launch them into a long story that ended with them showing me the scar they had on their stomach from when they were stabbed five years ago? My reluctance to know the answer to, "what did you do this weekend?" was a real challenge to the ways I wanted life and learning to come together in my classroom.

Over the course of the year, it became easier and easier to see them as real people. The better we got to know each other, the more we had in common. I am convinced that they learned more from me because of the ways we realized we were similar. Those people telling me not to smile on the first day were wrong. It wasn't about being mean or intimidating or showing them that I know how to have a temper tantrum when things get out of hand. It's about having a spine. And being a real person. There are a lot of different ways to be firm, and they don't all involve coming into school wearing a leather jacket, Michelle Pfeiffer style. My public school was as different form my first job as night from day, but I still clung to the same nugget of advice as I had on the night before my first day at boarding school. Respect them. They will catch on. They will respect you back.

"Ms. Primo, why do you never spaz at us?" It drove them crazy that I never went crazy.

On some days, the only way I could think to process my daily life was just to write down the kinds of things they said to me: "You should be wearing something else."... "Is this what you do at night, Miss? You just sit around planning this?"... "Can't I throw the roll of toilet paper back at him? Please?" ..."I'm sorry I just shouted out a swear word. But tell him to stop shining that laser in my eye."... "I wasn't aiming for his head, Miss." ..."It's because I'm black, isn't it?"... "Why didn't you bring us candy?"...

On better days, I found myself writing down things I had said that I found amusing: "Israel, I'm over here giving an inspirational speech about taking ownership of your life and you're over there making choo-choo noises." I wrote down those moments because they felt so vivid, as if suddenly I epitomized myself. For a brief second, I felt so Me that I suddenly caught a glimpse of myself.

I tried to stubbornly insist on seeing them as learners. When they disappointed me, I showed it. I was armed mostly with consistency and kindness. Was I perfect at it? Good heavens, no. I still relied too much on their guilt as a method of discipline and I still counted on my like-ability to keep them under control. "Being liked" is not reliable or learnable; it is exhausting.

But the ways we learned to enjoy each other kept me going that year. They would say "I love you," and by the time June came around I knew that if they didn't pass my class, they would still love me. Maybe even more, because my expectations hadn't caved in. I thought I could stick it out for another year there, but I felt drained to the core. I had been giving a lot of my emotional self and there wasn't a school-wide structure to fall back on. When a friend from work turned down another job, I told her to give them my name.

***

These days, I sometimes raise my voice. I hear myself sounding like an exasperated mom, saying unthinkable things such as, "Maybe you didn't understand me when I said it the first two times but I'm not going to say it again." I am now starting to understand the use of strictness. At times when I would have once said, "Oh, that's not me. I'm not a 'mean teacher,'" I now see certain times when I have to insist on the type of environment I require. This seems like a responsibility that would be particularly neglectful for me to shirk.

I have not sacrificed "being myself" for sometimes getting mad. In fact, in my current job I now feel more myself while teaching than ever before. Now I teach some of the same students I taught at the big public school, but I catch them a year earlier (8th grade) and at a small, collaborative, conscientiously-run charter school.

Teaching is still, for me, a wackily self-exposing job. I am still under a public magnifying glass. "Ms. Primo's in a bad mood today, everybody! I can tell!" Students still pontificate about my outfit or image as if I'm not standing right there. On some level, my students know who I am. When my car was totaled on my way to work, they heard about it when I came into school that morning. They know I like doing yoga in the evenings because sometimes I make them do it. The school culture has times to share built into the school day, and I sometimes I offer my childhood memories right along with them.

These days I am less concerned with how quirky they think I am ("Ms. Primo, has anyone ever told you that you're weird?"), and more interested in how assertive I'm being about my vision for the classroom environment. I've gained confidence. I am working on being strict in an unemotional way -- as in: communicating that your behavior is unacceptable; your consequence is established and not a surprise to you; and my opinion of you as a person is unaffected and irrelevant. I plan to stay still for a while, now that I'm feeling at home at this third school. Since I started teaching, I have dramatically let go of any need for approval. What used to be "How can I make sure they like me?" has now become "How can I make sure that they're learning?" While this doesn't make me any less likeable, it does make me a way better teacher.

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