In my first year of teaching English at a failing middle school in Brooklyn, I shared a classroom with a recovering alcoholic. While I frantically planned lessons on “The Outsiders,” he regaled me with tales of whiskey-sodden escapades that could not have been further removed from my concerns. Across the hall, a special-education teacher who took me under her wing in those treacherous first months spoke about her years tending bar in Honolulu, Austin, Tex., and Brooklyn. Handling her unruly class at a cool remove, she lamented how much less she earned educating minds instead of plying them with drink.
Popular culture has generally represented teachers as idealistic teetotalers, probably because it wants to see them that way. While TV series like “The Wire” and “Rescue Me” are awash in images of cops and firemen replenishing their bruised machismo with an endless procession of beers and shots, teachers must make do with sanitized schmaltz like reruns of “Welcome Back, Kotter” and its even cornier offspring, “Saved By the Bell.” Maybe it’s simply because the notion of a teacher cozying up to a bottle of pinot noir and a stack of “Animal Farm” essays isn’t terribly romantic. Whatever the case, I doubt that a gritty HBO drama is in the works.
But if it is, I’d like to pen an episode about the selective high school in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn where, three years ago, I was asked to become the founding English teacher. We spent months composing a curriculum based on classical languages and literature, hammering out a sensible honor code and, finally, convincing parents to send their children to a school that only existed on paper. Once that was done, we needed a drink. But our search for the right way – and the right place – to down a couple after work proved only somewhat less difficult than creating a school out of thin air.
Our first bar was a shabby café near the school, run by artists who lived in the lofts above. Its primary assets were comfortable couches and a happy hour that began in that no-man’s-land of early afternoon where neither alcoholics nor social drinkers dare to tread. The sun was nowhere near the yardarm when we first clinked our glasses, while around us messy-haired intellectuals drank black coffee and updated their Facebook pages.
But then, one day, a group of students leaving school late spotted us through the café’s windows. They poured inside before we could conceal the damning evidence: empty beer bottles, half-filled wine glasses, boozy smiles. They giggled; we blushed. While legal enough, our drinking flew in the face of the very virtues we had been tirelessly preaching. Our moral high ground was lost. I despised windows that afternoon.
How and why teachers drink is a topic that rarely receives the discussion it deserves.. For the average drinker, alcohol provides mental escape, but for teachers that escape is physical, too – after spending entire days surrounded by children or teenagers, we are retreating to the one place that will be – ideally – certifiably child-free. During school hours, nothing is more important than quadratic equations and auxiliary verbs, and nothing will ever be. The classroom is the bully pulpit from which we articulate an ironclad triumvirate of maturity – attention, organization, responsibility – that the real world renders pretty much unrealistic. In the bar, we finally loosen our ties, and life’s beautiful imperfections return.
For the youngest teachers – those freshly minted Teach for America graduates and energetic education majors from whom I am, admittedly, not far removed – hitting the bar after class seems only natural, close as they still are to the collegiate drinking culture and the freewheeling rowdiness that first made drinking after class so much fun. The rest of us have our reasons, too.
In almost every generation, education has been demonized as an enemy of fun. For those of us who came of age in the late 80s and early 90s, as I did, that message was stamped all over popular culture: the sexually frustrated Mrs. Krabappel and effete Principal Skinner of “The Simpsons”; “The Breakfast Club,” a cinematic testament to the woes of Saturday detention that depicted your average educator as a prison guard crossed with a fulminating minister; and of course, Ben Stein’s soporific teacher in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” who made a strong case for boredom as the eighth deadly sin. Maybe we drink to stave of these classroom ghosts, to convince ourselves that, deep down, we are just that prankster Bueller with an abiding passion for chalk-and-talk.
* * *
In our search for a more secluded bar, my colleagues and I eventually began frequenting the local reincarnation of a popular East Village haunt. Here, blinds covered the windows. But the bar was near a large middle school, and it routinely filled up with the feisty teachers who braved those hormone hurricanes. The wear showed in their drinking habits. Teach for America became Drink for America. Spill Your Beer for America. Shout and Shove for America. Many of these fresh-faced pedagogues sported golf shirts emblazoned with their school name, disconcertingly similar to the uniforms students often wear. They snapped triumphant pictures of empty bottles, turning the bar into Spring Break: Costa del Bushwick. Our timid, slightly older group felt like the unpopular kids with nowhere to sit at lunch.
And then we found the perfect place: anonymous, concealed behind a rusted steel facade, a dim cocoon of comfort away from the fluorescent lights and linoleum floors that mark our daily existence. When we asked the bartender why he unlocked the door at the late hour of 4 p.m., he offered to open earlier if we came over after school and helped him set up. I felt honored. This was the promised land.
These days, my colleagues and I like to occupy the darkest corner of our newly anointed after-school bar, hoping not to frighten off other customers, who usually filter in as we’re deep into our second round. At first I sought to institute a no-talking-about-school policy, figuring that alcohol would help us return to our normal selves. Then I realized that we no longer had normal selves. Unlike most other professions, this one drains you completely, refilling you with its own insular, infinite concerns. The intensity may ebb and flow, but it never disappears.
Drinking together allows us to reclaim an experience that is too often defined by politicians, bureaucrats and reformers who have not spent nearly enough time in the trenches. Brooklyn Lager will probably not close the achievement gap or solve the merit pay debate. But it sure feels good on a Friday afternoon.
This blog was taken from the New York Times
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