“Don’t say it. Don’t you dare say it.” – Anonymous

 

    I began substitute teaching at Robert Smalls Leadership Academy in the Spring of 2024. A Social Studies teacher, a certain Mrs H., was set to pop and have a kid, and so the school posted a long-term substitute teaching position on the ESS claims portal. Teaching was not something I ever thought I’d do–not for one godforsaken day in all my godforsaken life. There’s a common saying about teachers that goes, “Those who don’t do, teach.” It’s not true, that adage. But what I can confirm is that teaching does pay as poorly as advertised.

 

    Attaining the requisite go-ahead to teach in South Carolina is a laugh. I visited the District Office and took a six-hour course that was taught at a second-grade reading level, passed a basic background check, and then somehow found myself pacing ahead of the Social Studies room’s whiteboard in front of a room of hormonally-radioactive, slang-obsessed thirteen-year-olds. Little did the administrative staff know they had hired a lunatic. Background checks dredge up only criminally-relevant information. HIPPA laws prevent employers from accessing PHI (Personal Health Information). If this were not the case, Robert Smalls Leadership Academy would have known I had the sort of mind that only a military bomb squad, clad in teflon suits and triply-reinforced helmets, would be able to defuse in a crisis scenario. Think about it. I had been diagnosed with the Society of Psychically Disordered People’s litany: schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, anxiety, major depressive disorder, delusions disorder, etc. And I was being paid $88 per day to teach, of all people, children about a subject I had no authority on inside of a school I had barely even seen before. 

 

If I were a parent… 

 

Thirteen-year-olds, these days, in case you don’t know, are as unhinged as ever. The ubiquity of the smartphone serves as a vehicle for these pimply-faced, piccolo-toned, Tik-Tok-talking animals to interface and share information and plan and plot and, generally speaking, pick up terrible habits and watch terrible and occasionally beautiful and rarely educational content. 

 

More pertinent: phones throw a wrench into classroom learning.  

 

On my first day, I showed up early to school. Robert Smalls Leadership Academy had recently undergone a concerted “rebranding” effort to shed the image of its days as a dilapidated institution intended exclusively for local black youth. White students in town historically had gone to different schools–better schools–schools which were not planted beside a garbage dump or which lacked central air. Al Green, one of thirteen children, and a student in the inaugural graduation class of Robert Smalls Leadership Academy, described the stench that wafted off the dump as “disruptive.” Teachers back then faced a dilemma–they could either open the windows and invite a cool breeze, or suffer the heat. 

 

Nowadays, the waste management facility sits in another part of town. Architects and interior designers reckoned admirably with their $72 million dollar budget, allocating monies towards tearing down the old RSLA building and standing up a new one, outfitting the facade in a pockmarked red brickface, and erecting a gorgeous front atrium behatted by a vaunted roof that was meant to mimic an Eighteenth Century fishing vessel. The designers even oriented any walls bearing high-ceiling windows to take on as much sun as possible during the day to conserve energy. 

 

First period was awkward, but more or less successful. I shook the jitters out of my noggin by way of a basic introduction. The students were strident, vigilant, and curiously quiet. Conferring with the teaching notes Mrs. H. left behind for me to peruse I identified the “problem” children. “Josh likes to sleep. Mason will take advantage of you by asking to go to the bathroom. He wanders the halls and vapes in the bathroom stalls. Don’t let him leave.” Then, a general note: “First Period. My best class. This is The Honors class. You shouldn’t have a difficult time keeping them on task. They are mostly self-motivated.”

 

“Do you have any questions for me?” I polled the class, hoping to make my mark by relating to them my wild and diverse experiences in the marketing, hospitality, construction, healthcare and finance sectors. In ten years’ time, I’d held sixteen jobs. This in no way prepared me to be a teacher, but it did mean I had this small, rangy, intangibly valuable thing us grown-ups like to call “perspective.”

 

“Would you like for me to share my perspective?” I asked the class. Silence.

 

“We could also play twenty-one questions, if you’d like.” My younger brother, an actual teacher, suggested I use an ice breaker to “warm the kids up.” 

 

“No? Ok. Well, it sounds like you all have your… Edgenuity to do. Is that right?”

 

Amari, brazen, socially-entrenched and well-liked, perked up and shouted: “Yes! You can leave us alone.”

 

Over the course of the rest of the day my classes became progressively more challenging. “They are not allowed to eat in class. They all know this.” Another one of Mrs. H’s notes. During Sixth Period, Takis, popcorn, sour candies and mysterious “pocket treats” made the rounds the way gossip barrels through a country town. Seventh Period was a complete and utter wreck. Only Ronald and Liam occupied their chairs. Ronald, because he was fashioning ninja stars out of paper. Liam, because he had pulled his winter coat up over his head like a turtle shell so that he could, in his words, “rest his eyes.” All the other members of this horrific classroom circus pranced around like meth-addicted lizards in a Jim Henson production. As they did, I shouted out commands, like:

 

“Get OFF the desk!”

 

“Three people cannot sit in the same chair.”

 

“Hey, can you all like, please, sit down and stop talking.” (x 1,000,000)

 

“Neither can two!”

 

“What’syourface: Does your mom let you smush brownies into the ground with your bare toes? I doubt it.”

 

Within three days’ time, this last class had utterly defeated me. Seventy-two hours prior I had strided onto campus thinking, I will incite change. I will be the cool, smart, worldly teacher who cares about the kids and motivates them to “do the work” for “the right reasons.” Antonio Banderas did that in some half-remembered movie. Why couldn’t I? “J has problems with men. T and J are thick as thieves. Separate them at all costs.” The teaching notes went on and on, riddled with understatement after understatement. “D can be hyper.” No. D has created a fort out of the desks and, during the active shooter drill, boldly egged on the hypothetical shooter sneaking around the hallways. “Trenton is an ass.” This one, though inscrutable, was right on the nose. “If you can get R on your side, the rest of the class will follow his lead.” Am I currying favor with miniature lobbyists in D.C.? Why do I have to trick and connive my way into eliciting halfway decent behavior out of these overgrown rugrats? 

 

The end of the year couldn’t have come sooner. I was exhausted. My brain was scrambled. All Dramatics aside, it felt like I’d served time as the class dork. I had more or less been ruthlessly bullied for forty-two days straight. Today’s bullies don’t deal in wedgies or physical intimidation like they used to. Now, it’s a steady dose of insidious social pranks, virtual chiding, inside jokes that just barely creep out onto the peripheries of mainstream knowledge.

 

With that said, I may have also set the record for the highest number of daps received in a middle school hallway. It wasn’t all crass and cruel, I s’pose.

 

The following year, this year, I’ve substituted sparingly. And the circumstances have improved. Maintaining a steady, reliable presence in the vicinity of kids as an adult is far more important than I ever could’ve imagined. The first time I conjured the gall to substitute teach again, I did so with supreme doubt. Wholly rankled, I was, with apprehension. Engorged, I was, with fear. 

 

But the kids were kinder to me this time around. Because I coached the soccer team and occasionally flitted through the hallways to say hello to my players, many students came to recognize me. Warm up to me. 

 

One ordinary Thursday in October I accepted a random assignment on the ESS portal and rolled into the building at 8:15a. I learned from the mistakes I’d made the year before. To command a classroom, one must be demonstrative. One must deliver clear instructions and set a reasonable, “do not fuck with me” sort of tone. Stick to the script. Deviate only when necessary, only when it feels appropriate. 

 

My deviations, mainly, constrained themselves to the attendance sheet. I joked about last names, first names, and everything and anything in between. 

 

“Washington. Washington. You’re not related to George, are you?” I’d say.

 

“No. Who’s George?”

 

“Nevermind.”

 

Or:

 

“Theodore. Is there a Theodore in here?”

 

Silence.

 

“Oh. Let’s see. How about Carvell.”

 

“Here.”

 

“Your middle name is Theodore?”

 

“Stop.”

 

“What kind of a name is Theodore?”

 

“Don’t call me that.”

 

“Washington. Are you good friends with Theodore?”

 

“Stop glazing, bro!”

 

“What’s glazing?”

 

As the hours crept by, and as my game plan took effect, I realized it was working. By messing up names and acting like a complete fool during the attendance announcements–which inevitably transformed into filibusters lasting upwards of ten minutes–and jostling the kids, haranguing them, really–I was turning my adversaries into compatriots. Haters into scant admirers. Taking molecules of indifference, loading them up into a rhetorical Hadron Collider, and crashing them together to ignite some nominal, yet palpable, crucible of emotion in the hearts of the stone-hearted and cold.  

 

Then… then, well. Then, the unthinkable happened:

 

“Angelica.”

 

“Here.”

 

“How’s Tommy Pickles doing? I haven’t seen him in a minute.”

 

“Tommy Pickles?”

 

“Maybe you know Chuckie better.”

 

“Chuckie. Like the doll?”

 

“In every way except candor.”

 

“What’s a can door?”

 

“It’s how tomatoes get in and out of their houses. Moving on. Is Brutus… Wellington… in the building.”

 

“He is.”

 

“Are you he?”

 

“I am he.”

 

“And do you like beef Brutus? History would suggest you are indeed, ‘one who likes beef.’”

 

“I don’t understand.”

 

“And you shouldn’t.”

 

I looked up. A thin brown hand was raised in the back of the class.

 

“Yes? You with the hand in the sky.”

 

“You skipped me.”

 

“I did?”

 

“You did.”

 

“What’s your name.”

 

“JaQuez.”

 

My mind lit up like a Christmas Tree. JaQuez. JaQuez. What the Hell is there to say about a name like JaQuez? Man, I’ve got nothing!

 

I thumbed the attendance sheet and found his name. 

 

“Ah. Here it is. JaQuez… umm…”

 

Manigo.

 

“JaQuez. M.”

 

Manigo? Impossible. There’s no way this itty bitty brown child with those big, beautiful hazel eyes has a last name like…

 

“You can say it.” JaQuez, prophetic sounding, said.

 

“Say what?”

 

“Say it.”

 

Don’t you dare say it. Don’t you dare.

 

“I don’t… I don’t think I can.”

 

“Why can’t you say my last name?” JaQuez was immovable. With a face as placid as stillwater, JaQuez appeared to be oblivious to the conundrum that presented itself to me there and then, in the unlikeliest of all places.

 

 Don’t you dare say it. Don’t you dare.

 

“Is it… Ma - Knee - Go.”

 

“No. Try again.”

 

“JaQuez.” I huffed, exasperated. 

 

“Say it.”

 

“Don’t you see I can’t?” I brushed my fingertips along my forearm, along the white skin there.

 

“It’s nothing, man. Just say my last name. And say it right. It’s not a big deal.” JaQuez said, urging me on.

 

I gulped.

 

“Ma - nigo.” I felt the electricity of the word percolating on my tongue after shooing it out of my mouth. Manigo. Phonetically: My N****. The N-word and (other) F-word are the only words in the Dictionary that I refuse to say. Even when shouting out rap lyrics in the car I omit the N-word out of respect for the history, the enculturation; there’s too much blood and inertia behind it. 

 

“There you go.”

 

It felt good, saying it. It felt wrong, yet… also… 

 

“Manigo.” I repeated.

 

“That’s perfect. That’s perfect, teach.” JaQuez assured me.

 

“Manigo!” I said, louder this time. This was my Hall Pass. Never again in life would I have the opportunity, the license, to say this goddawful word, and in front of a group of mostly African-Americans no less, with complete immunity.

 

Maybe, I got a little too excited:

 

“Manigo, Manigo, Manigo! What’s up, Manigo! Yo, Manigo, you good? You wanna take this outside, Manigo!”

 

“Ok. That’s enough, man.”

 

“Thanks, Manigo. I mean, JaQuez.”

 

“You’re welcome, dude.”