WE need a bit of magic

I can’t begin to list all the intangibles that go into creating a successful class, much less make one come true.

However, I want to brag a bit about a great class. It was one of my all time favorites. It met directly after my lunch period. I was often late—more than a minute or two. They were always quiet, expectant, waiting patiently.

It was my fault of course, but I had a good excuse. I had an unusually good lunch bunch. We would be right in the middle of solving all the world’s problems, reinventing the school or giving each other a brilliant self improvement list. And then, all of a sudden the bell would ring—just as one of us was going to start the grand finale, the moment of true enlightenment.  And so we’d scurry off to class. Some of us might linger for just a moment or two. And then of course, there was always a student or two who just like me didn’t belong in the halls and needed to be hustled along. I arrived a minute or two late. I’d rush in and I say, “Redd, where did we leave off yesterday?”

And Redd, unlike me was always prepared, always ready, and he’d answer, “Mr. Wemstrom, we just started to read ACT II of Purlie Victorious. We just started the watermelon count when the bell rang.” I’d ask if everybody remembered their parts from yesterday, the class would nod and we’d begin. Maybe we didn’t have forty minutes like we should, but we had a great thirty minutes.  And then all of a sudden the bell rang startling us, bringing us back to Chicago. They’d moan and groan as they left. On the way out I’d yell, “Finish tonight and we’ll read and talk more tomorrow.” Then they'd be gone and I wondered who ever invented such a retarded system.

By the time the class got to February, I relied on Redd completely. When we were reading Purlie Victorious, he asked about sharecropping, Jim Crow, or what else Ossie Davis wrote. When we read The Learning Tree, he asked why they didn’t talk more about blacks in the US History book. I told the class he was right the books should spend more time talking about African Americans in the standard US History books and not just in the Afro-History books. And I said we shouldn’t be on the third floor reading literature and studying history on the second floor. And we were off and Newt and Kansas were left far behind and God only knows where we’d go from there, but the students liked Newt and we’d be back in Kansas the next day. It was all good.

  I had discovered that the class was interested in whatever he was interested in. If I got too longwinded, he’d interrupt, ask another question or change the subject. If we were doing something the class liked he’d want to stretch it out a bit. No telling what boring stuff was coming up next.

If I was attempting to do something that the class wasn’t interested in, he knew just what to do. I’d come rushing in slightly out of breath and before I could ask Redd for my cue, he’d ask me a question. “Mr. Wemstrom, yesterday you said… or we were talking about… or I saw on TV last night that….” And we’d be gone. But not just the two of us, he knew just how to do it, so he had the whole class interested.

Redd was tall, over six feet, all muscle, built like a basketball player. But he didn’t like sports. He never said, but you could tell right away he wouldn’t like anything competitive, with winners and losers. He didn’t like anything that involved hurting people, even for fun. He was gentle, quiet and a natural leader.

A couple of years later, I had his sister in class. It was a good class. We were all about business and we got a lot done. One day, I asked his sister how Redd was doing. She answered, “OK”. A lot of students were like Redd. After high school, they just did OK. They were smart enough to go to college or learn a skill but their skills weren’t quite good enough to get in or they were worried that they weren’t quite good enough and were afraid to apply and even try.

She repeated that he was doing OK and then she said, “You know, Terrence (his sister was the only one who used his first name) came home from school every day when I was in grammar school and he talked and talked about your class. I couldn’t wait to get to high school so I could take your class. So now, I’m in your class and you know what, it’s just OK. It’s better than a lot of classes, but there’s nothing special about our class.  We work hard and we learn a lot and you’re a good teacher, but it’s not special. My brother was really lucky.”

Donna was a good student. I recommended her for the honors track and when she graduated she went off to college.

And you know what? School ought to be special. And when we talk about test scores and good classes, we forget to talk about magic. And yes, school should be magical.

Slowly beginning to settle in

The students found the room and decided on a desk more quickly than they had on the first day. They settled down and waited. They knew that perhaps not the second day, but soon a little drama would be acted out. The class was interested in this scenario which is performed every year in every class: who was going to run the class—the teacher or some of the students. The second day and perhaps the rest of this very short week the students and the teacher would both be sizing up the lie of the land. Some teachers started with an advantage or handicap based on their reputation.

With some teachers the answer was obvious they were going to run the room. First someone would have to cautiously test the waters. Some teachers responded immediately and the student knew right away he was going to have to be the class clown or the pain in the neck in someone else’s class. Sometimes the test worked. It looked like the teacher was going to be a pushover. Perhaps that would be enough for one day, but soon one or more of the students would try something else, something small, just to get a clearer picture of the situation. They knew they still had to be careful because some teachers have a high tolerance level, but you’d better not cross that line or else you’d be smacked down. And the third group, the group that the students were looking for, were the teachers who either never had had classroom control or over time had lost it and they would be the pushovers.

So the first week or so everybody was getting to know each other. It was a mix of first impressions, hearsay, the little jockeying that was going on and even the time of day. Between classes students would compare notes.

 “You’ve got Lorenz? Boy you’re lucky!”

 “You’ve got Breitzer? She’s good.”

 “Kader, he’s lots of fun.

“ Milkowski? Watch out, he’s tough.”

 “Lalagos? He’s nice and if you pay attention, you’ll learn a lot.”

Mrs. Thomas? She’s really nice. You’ll like her.”

Most students liked a little fun and a little chaos never hurt to break the monotony, but basically most students wanted an education and they may not stick up for the teacher, but they were on the teacher’s side.

So we all started explaining to the students our objectives and goals. They wanted to know about homework, tests and grading policies. We pretended that those issues weren’t nearly as important as establishing a road map. We wanted to talk about learning, not grades, but the students knew that grades were the most important goal, the only outcome that counted.

Notice we didn’t ask the students what they wanted to do to learn, but we told them nicely, of course, what we wanted them to learn. I often thought that Hyde Park Career Academy was so fortunate to have Jackson Park, Lake Michigan, a golf course, the Japanese Garden and a one acre fenced-in natural area right across the street, an ideal science lab. The lake itself and the shoreline connected Jackson Park with the Lake Calumet Harbor region. If you knew what you were looking for, literally only steps from the Outer Drive and hundreds of thousands of cars, this was the place to start a biology class.  This is still one of the richest and most important ecosystems in the mid-west. In September and October, and again in April and May, with migration under way, beaver moving back and forth between the park and Calumet Harbor, another rich eco-system, the groomed gardens and plants and trees dating back at least to the World’s Fair, why would anybody want to be inside?

So the biology teacher was going to start with the cell, “the building block of all life.” And, yes, it is important and yes it is a great way to start and yes many students, but not all, get it right away. But we have to remember what the goals of the curriculum were. The science curriculum talks about goal number one: high school biology was to introduce students to high school science, the scientific method etc. etc. But all high school science was really to prepare students for college biology and college biology101 was to prepare students for the next bio class and perhaps biology major. Someplace in that heady mix of cells, formulae, and the laws of gravity, students are supposed to gain an understanding and appreciation for the natural world. Sadly, they don’t. And, sadly, it’s another missed opportunity.

And to compound the ironies. We would send our successful students off to good colleges and they would come back at Thanksgiving and ask why HP didn’t have electronic microscopes. One student said, “You know, I really felt dumb, the first day, when the professor said let’s get started and I didn’t know how to use my microscope.”

And there were and there continue to be lost opportunities. The world famous Museum of Science and Industry is only six blocks away. I don’t remember any teacher ever taking a class there. The University of Chicago was also less than a mile away and there was one collaborative program between the university and the school for a few short years and the AP students went to the Court Theater once a year, but that was it. (As a matter of fact, it was not a good idea to be a young, black male walking across campus. The University had a convoluted relationship with our school and the community and being black just seemed to complicate everything.)

But the tyrannical bell schedule ruled. Don’t tell me about the importance of bell schedules, I’ve heard about the importance of bell schedules for thirty years and all the defenders and proponents of bell schedules are wrong.

But there’s the bell and it’s time for U.S. history.  Four precious minutes—to hang out in the halls with one’s friends and then on to history. Now, if something in biology had caught a student’s interest, too bad. Photosynthesis might be intriguing, but you can only think about it third period, now it’s time to switch gears and think of the War of 1812.  The student either had to forget it or store it quickly in the biology box in his brain because now it was time for history. Every day, every student would get a dose of science, an ounce of social studies, a dollop of literature, a tiny bit of composition, a milligram of mathematics, a smidgen of volleyball and a quick dab of acrylics. Contemplation was not part of the high school curriculum. The students were right; it’s all about Friday’s tests and on to the next unit, the first unit is history.

The Students' First Day

The Next Day

So finally we were ready, more or less. The students wouldn’t all come the first day and some would only come and get their schedules and then hang around outside: “I just wanted to check out my program.” Others claimed, “You don’t do anything the first week, so why should I come?” Most students came to school not because it was expected of them, or because their parents forced them to come to school or because there was nothing else to do or because even though the food wasn’t great it was free; but because they wanted an education.

Most people think that teachers teach and students learn. That people are taught to read, count, play the violin, run bases and speak French. That’s what most teachers and most students believe. Then when it doesn’t happen nobody knows what to do.

Most of the students in a big city high school can’t read at grade level and fifty percent will never finish high school (1990). So because we don’t know what to do, we all play the blame game. The teachers blame the parents or the students; the administration blames the teachers and the students; the parents blame each other, the teachers, and their own kids; the students blame their parents, the school, the teachers, each other and even themselves. And of course the blame game only makes things worse.

We all knew and even today twenty years later we all know what needs to be done, but we’re not going to do it. So we’re going to continue to blame each other and continue to complain, “If only the (fill in the blank) would shape up and take some personal responsibility for academic failure, we could solve the problem.

So on the first day, I’d help clear the halls, go to my first class, settle everybody down and get started. One part of my brain would be asking students how was their summer, others if they were happy to be back ( we all thought that was a good joke a little lame, but pretty good for a teacher), and then I’d talk a bit about the coming year. In the fall of 1971, by the end of the first week I’d know everybody’s name, first and last. By 1999, I’d know everybody’s name by the end of the year, well just their first or last names, not necessarily both. But in the meantime in another part of my brain I was thinking about Lyndon Johnson and his War on Poverty. He was the last guy to get it right.

I remember when I started I could always tell the students from a late 1960s Title 1 classroom. They’d still be behind, but even a year or two in a Title 1 classroom had made a difference. So, I’d stand there talking about Gordon Parks or Romeo and Juliet and thinking what if those kids had had eight years of a model classroom instead of two. And later, I’d see a student in the hall who had disappeared last spring. She explained, “My mom got a job and I had to stay home with the kids.” Just as matter of fact as could be, she explained that her mom got laid off, so she was back until and if her mom got another job. And again I’d think of LBJ, who said there are no separate educational solutions, no separate housing solutions, no separate employment solutions; you simply had to do all three at once. And of course nobody listened and now nobody remembers and things just simply and slowly get worse.

I used to teach reading in what were called reading labs. They worked; except they didn’t help. A student would be doing great in reading lab, mastering fourth grade reading material, moving on to fifth grade and then on to sixth grade during the course of the year. However, when a student left our class and went to his other classes and had to do work on or near grade level the success he was experiencing everyday in lab quickly turned to failure in his other classes.

My last reading class was terrific. Two of us were team teaching with an aid. We had fifty students. But only twenty-five, thirty tops ever came. There was a core group of twenty to twenty-five who came every day. So Sharon and I divided the work. I settled down the students, introduced the new units, did some general teaching, and kept the class moving along. Sharon was the specialist. She’d work with a few students at a time. She’d zero in on a particular area and work with a couple of students and get it right and then go on to another little group. She was the brains of the operation. Our teachers’ aid, Mrs. Cooley, was amazing. She could play the bad cop, be the mother figure, the confidant. We had a small office next to the lab. That became Mrs. Cooley’s room. We didn’t call it time out but that’s what she’d do with a couple of students who needed to chill. They would sit with Mrs. Cooley and it always amazed Sharon and me, but in a few minutes Mrs. Cooley had those students working away. She’d also help with a little make-up work, do some testing, help keep the records and listen to the students.

But that doesn’t describe what she did. She created an atmosphere, an ambience. Students wanted to be with her for an hour whenever they could. They wanted to study with her, or help her with some of the classroom housekeeping chores. They wanted to do well in the class for her. They wanted her to be proud of them. Sometimes Sharon and I were jealous, students wanted to sit in Mrs. Cooley’s little room and do their work in there.

She had never seen the inside of a college classroom, but she was every bit as good as Sharon and I with our fancy degrees. She knew all about the art of being a good teacher. Over time, teacher aides who were actually hired to help teachers in the classroom were eliminated. The penny-pinching accountants from downtown had never seen Mrs. Cooley in action. Of course, if they had, they wouldn’t have recognized what she was doing. They would have seen a middle-aged black woman just sitting around talking to a few students. She was so slick that for months when we first met her, even Sharon and I didn’t know how much she was doing.

Oh yes, it would have been expensive, but just imagine if every student who needed that kind of attention actually received it. When the student left the lab and went to geography, the geography teacher could also have an assistant, and there would be room to spread out, and there would be enough varied materials that the teacher really could individualize, at least to a degree. Imagine a geography room with lots of maps, atlases, not just topographical maps, but other types of 3-D maps. Imagine if there was lots of drawing paper and students started by making maps of their own street, and then their neighborhood, and then writing about it instead of memorizing the seven this and the five that and the fifty this. Imagine if there were field trips to the Loop or even across the street to the Japanese Gardens. I know computers have probably made some of this possible today. But I wonder.

It always struck me as strange that one couldn’t tell the difference between an English, history or math classroom except for some scribbles on the chalk board.

It always struck me as strange that every encounter outside school is always one-on-one. It doesn’t matter, from the banker to the shoe clerk to the waiter it is always a one-on-one inter- change, but in school it’s always how many students can the administration jam into a room and into the school itself before the teachers rebel. It doesn’t make sense.

Back To school
I
For the first twenty-five years of teaching, I looked forward to the first day. If I had
taught summer school, I would have liked another week or so, but I was ready. However, there would come a day in late October when the folks, who had taught summer school, including me, would be walking down the hall one afternoon and we would turn the corner and walk smack-dab into a brick wall. We hadn’t realized we needed a longer break until bam! And then of course it was too late. If I hadn’t taught summer school, I was ready by mid-August to get back to school, anxious to get back into the swing of things.
Everybody looked good the first day. Lots of teachers were dressed up. Many of the white teachers had tans, they had lost five pounds of that old winter fat, their clothes fit a bit better and they had a little bounce in their step, a tiny swing in their hips, as they hurried from one meeting to another. The women looked especially good—a little sexier, a little younger and a little bit more enthusiastic.
That was all destined to change over the course of the coming year. The white teachers would lose their tan, take on a pasty look as the year dragged on. The black teachers would go from the fresh look of summer to kind of a dull, gray, dusty complexion. But that would all come later. On Tuesday, everybody was bright and fresh and full of optimism. Many of them were Cub fans, after all, and this was ‘the next year’ that they had been waiting for. We were excited to see each other. Many of us hadn’t seen each other all summer.
“What were every body’s summer vacations like?”
“Did you really work as a house painter all summer?”
“Do you still like selling beer at the ball park? And will you still be doing it weekends?”
“Did you find a new babysitter? We hope she works out better than the last one.” (And hopefully, we won’t have to hear your litany of daily complaints.)
There was a lot of catching up to do. We wanted to here if Maryanne’s daughter got off to college. “Was Tom’s son’s wedding as lovely as everybody imagined it would be? Where are the pictures?”
“Was Pete still dating Angela?”
And, “Did Ken have another new girlfriend in addition to his wife? Just one?”
Everybody got there early for coffee and rolls. Bubbly and excited, we headed for our first meeting. It was the same old, same old. The only interesting stuff was the introduction of the new teachers. And, then it was on to attendance: tardies, cuts and absences. A little bit about discipline: “Remember each teacher has to be his or her own disciplinarian. The office can’t take care of everything. It’s your job to see that it doesn’t get serious enough to warrant outside help.” And then a special reminder about the seriousness of controlling and monitoring hall traffic, the need to get to one’s hall guard post on time. And especially, “If every teacher could stand at their doors until the halls were cleared, we wouldn’t have a hall problem.” But of course it never worked and we always had a hall problem.
I was the union delegate. I always got a minute at the end. “When you get your rosters, check to see that your classes are in compliance with class size. If not, I can take care of it right away. And it’s easier to do it now. Just let me know.” Class size was one of the few things that we felt that we had a little control over, at least in high school. Even when the classes were in compliance, they were still way too big. Much too big when all the literature said, “Individualize, try a variety of activities to match different learning styles. Don’t teach to the whole class; help individuals learn at their own pace.”
By the day’s second meeting, usually the department meeting, the bubbles were getting a bit flat. But still we were all looking forward to an early and long lunch and some beer. The department chair tried to start out positively. She’d re-introduce the new teachers. We all marveled at how young they looked. And we wondered, “Were we ever that young; did we ever look that good; were women that sexy twenty years ago?”
And then, she got serious, There was only a limited amount of paper for the risograph copier. If people didn’t use it sparingly, she’d have to ration the paper. She wouldn’t like it, but she would, if we forced her. “Fair’s fair, after all.”
“No books until the second, maybe the third week, give the students a chance to get here, get the program changes taken care of and get your classes organized and then we can think about books.” This was always met with a groan, especially in English. Many teachers don’t really need a book every day, but they liked the comfort of having them there just in case. “A nice back-up just in case” they’d mumble. “A crutch”, the department chair would sigh.
I was in charge of the English Department bookroom. Already the teachers were coming up to me. Couldn’t they just get a room set? Could they just get in for a minute and check, double check how many copies of English Literature: From Beowulf to GBS there really were. They would stand extra close, almost touching. Their bodies hovering just near enough, trying to tantalize, hoping that I might say, “OK, just this once.”
“Take the rest of day to get your rooms ready; remember, you can pick up your class rosters; don’t forget lesson plans are due at the end of the week; a bulletin board in each room would be nice; we need a volunteer to do the department’s hall bulletin board; don’t forget to get a signed book card for every student when we do check out books. And she’d conclude with a sigh and a whisper, “Don’t spend the whole afternoon at lunch, remember you’re getting paid for a whole day, try and get back and do a few things.” And then she’d whisper, “Jimmie’s?” “At Hyde Park, it was always Jimmie’s”, we’d stake out the middle room. Others would go to Medici’s, especially the ones who would fight over the bill, who didn’t believe in simply adding 20% and dividing the bill.

II
Just three hours ago our spirits were soaring; our heads were in the clouds.
Over Labor Day weekend, and even coming to work that morning, I had made plans. No more procrastination—as soon as I collected the papers, I’d grade them, record and hand them back and even take time to discuss them. I promised myself that finally I’d reread all those stories I had assigned over the years and try a fresh new approach. No more of the same of old same old. No more winging it. Leave the ad-libbing to the late night TV punsters. All those newspaper and journal articles that I had snipped all summer had lots of good ideas. I’d try some of them.
The teachers who took summer classes came back all fired up. They were going to do journaling, have a class room library, let the kids read young adult literature. Get the kids ‘hooked on books’ and then they’d worry about the classics. Hey, they were going to slow down, read less, but have the kids drill down, read more carefully. Read something contemporary, maybe try some black lit. It never worked. The system wore them down. Other teachers thought the idea of teaching Judy Blum was a hoot, “You can’t be serious?”
There were no books for what they wanted to do. The department chair would repeat, “It’s not our year to order books. You should have told me last spring; I can’t order books today and have them here tomorrow. What are you thinking? Are you thinking?” Some of this isn’t said out loud, but it’s in the air. If you want to do something different do it on the QT, get your own books. “Order a room set from Dell. Make the kids buy them.” One developed a sixth sense after awhile. One learned the lay of the land. It helped if you were young, attractive, especially good or very gregarious. It made life easier.
Driving south on Lake Shore Drive or north on the Dan Ryan we’d all have these pep talks with ourselves. Boy we were up, we were ready, we’d do it all and we’d do it right.
Later in the year, we’d all read the articles in the fancy ed journals or more likely in Parade Magazine—Johnny can’t read, can’t read a map, still doesn’t know his tables, and worst of all, he can’t write. Those articles laid a guilt trip on most of us and ruined many a perfectly fine Sunday afternoon. We’d take every one of those articles to heart. We practiced self flagellation. When we got to school we’d berate each other. “I can’t teach juniors Macbeth, if you don’t teach sophomores the structure of a Shakespearean play.” My problem was I couldn’t pronounce much less spell denouement.
Every article accused us of not doing our job; we simply had to do our job better. So we’d incorporate a vocabulary unit into our lesson plans, the history teacher would spend more time teaching geography as part of his unit on the great westward movement, the algebra teacher would try to squeeze in a review of the multiplication tables. And then the following week more articles, more finger waving, more of the old blame game, “Johnny can’t spell, nobody teaches civics, don’t sacrifice the classics for black lit, teach more black lit, and don’t water down the curriculum, ‘For God’s Sake.’”
In the seventies we had fought to open up the curriculum a bit. After that we would never quite agree on what or how or when to do anything. We were all beginning to do a bit of black lit; some of us did Jane Austen so we had the women’s lit thing covered (kind of). To Kill A Mockingbird was already popular. Seriously, it is a great book, an instant classic, but also, it was perfect for us. It’s written by a woman, with a female heroine, it was contemporary (almost), it was about a black guy (kind of), the reading level was not a problem and, most of all; the kids loved it (most of them). And we could easily talk about white prejudice because they were southern whites. It didn’t challenge white teachers.
To Kill A Mockingbird should have taught us something. If we had looked around, we could have found similar books. Instead of saying if they’re going to college they need to read…, when they take the state exam, they better have read…, to get ready for next year, they should read…. In retrospect, a lot of teaching was about missed opportunties.
And we’d ask, “Where are the new books, the extra resources and most importantly, the planning time? We need time to prep, to collaborate. We can’t team teach, redesign the curriculum, and teach brand new books without more planning time?”
Instead of answers, we’d get, “World lit is Euro-centric. You must take a multicultural approach. Teach the literature of all the peoples of the world and put it in a historical, geographical, and social context as well as literary perspective.” We respond, "You’re right, but you’ve got to remember we were taught the ‘New Criticism’ (I know not so new now.) We’re willing to change, but we need guidance and support.” But next week the press and the principal would both have a new idea or two. More homework, more thoroughly graded. Pop quizzes at the beginning of the period. It worked at Quigley Preperatory Seminary thirty years ago ( the 1950s). It will work here now.
In the meantime, we had five classes to teach, perhaps a study hall to supervise and a homeroom to monitor. In the meantime, what about sex? It was everywhere. Ken was out and about, unobtrusively, talking to a teacher here and there, everywhere. Fishing he called it. Not every cast lands a fish, not every cast gets a strike but a good fisherman always brings home the catch. Not to his wife of course. His wife had blurted out after a wee bit too much Chardonnay and after one of Ken’s slightly more blatant than usual flings, “I don’t want to hear anything from anybody about anything.”
Bill had assured Mary Ann that no, he wasn’t married and yes, he could see her often, but mainly after school, some evenings, but never on the weekend. When her girlfriends found out, "They asked, "Did she really believe him?” To themselves they said, “She couldn’t possibly, it was too obvious. She had to be desperate to believe such a creep—such a rat.” But, there was more than one woman who would have traded places with Mary Ann regardless of the future consequences and perhaps they could changed the outcome lived with the situation.
The funniest one of all of course and people laughed for years was when three very proper and very conscientious students went back to the art room on their lunch period, they quietly let themselves in and got started on their projects then they heard the distinct sounds of pent up passion finally released coming from the art supply closet. It was their art teacher and another teacher from down the hall. They quickly left, swearing never to tell a soul, and of course the rest is history.
One day we were all sitting around have coffee and someone said, “Hey where’s Joey? You know I haven’t seen Joey for a couple of days.” No one seemed to know. There were about six of us having coffee and as soon as the two women teachers left, one of the guys leaned forward, we all leaned forward and he said very seriously and very quietly, "Someone saw him over the weekend with Tonya." He was divorced. We all agreed that he had gotten screwed; we couldn’t imagine why anyone would cheat on Joey. Everybody loved him. And, of course, Tonya was a student. Everybody loved her, too. Not a great student but pretty good, attractive, but more than that self assured, mature, in our little world she seemed grown up, sophisticated. But of course she wasn’t any of those things. The boss got him transferred and that was the end as far as we were concerned. We never saw Tonya again and nobody ever asked about Tonya.
We worry about scope and sequence and ignore the obvious. Every class has its own chemistry. A morning class is plagued by tardiness, a late afternoon class suffers from mental fatigue, a class with more boys than girls or the reverse will act differently than a class with the normal distribution. A male teacher will affect the dynamics of a class as will a female teacher. And homophobia of course is rampant.
A straight teacher can walk into a classroom and before the bell talk about the trip he, his wife and kids made to Brookfield Zoo and most students are at least momentarily interested, but a gay teacher couldn’t walk into his classroom and talk about his and his partner’s trip to the same zoo. A gay teacher couldn’t talk about his partner.