This morning, I had occasion to go to my kid's school for a teacher conference, and found myself shuddering the moment I entered the building and caught a whiff of the distinct school smell I left behind so many years ago.
Doesn't matter the grade level or the location; the typical American public school, K through 12, has an unmistakable odor. It's like nothing else in the world, an amalgam of many different smells, yet as singularly recognizable as peanut butter. Carried on the zephyr created by the steady flow of students making their way through the hallways is a bouquet part cleaning agent, part ground-up eraser fragments, part chalk, part sweat, part septic and part cold pasta water, with just the ever-present soupcon of urine.
What I remember about school, that is, what I'm reminded of whenever I walk into one and get a fresh blast of the smell, might best be summed up in the final scene of the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, when the principal, Mr. Rooney, is forced to ride a school bus home. He climbs on board, surveys seat after seat of the worst high school stereotypes - jocks and geeks and sluts and nose-pickers, all sweaty, pimply faced and awkward. You can almost smell the BO and dirty gym socks, see the boogers smeared on the back of seats, hear the ripping sound as your shoes attempt to escape the clutches of the sticky floor boards.
I still feel restless in a school, still get claustrophobic like I did when I was a kid, and I sense that same stress among its current inhabitants, student and staff alike. As a boy, I didn't understand it, only knew that I didn't like school. But now as an adult on the precipice of middle-age, I think I understand:
There's an unnatural orderliness to public schools.
Around the time of the industrial revolution, the modern school system was modeled after the assembly line, linear in motion, and to this day it strikes me as a tiredly ritualistic (standardized) place, where results and expectations hold little hope of ever making contact, a vestige of framework our nation no longer relies on, but more importantly, may never have made much sense.
Kids don't view their world in lines, do they?
Perhaps it doesn't help that my son is going through the same school system I went through 25 years ago; so my aversion to the smell, to feeling trapped, is informed by a host of personal memories; every playground fight I ever had, every dull classroom project I knew I would never finish, every nasty school lunch I knew I would never finish, every teacher I didn't like or who didn't like me...
There are still some familiar faces there, as a matter of fact. The first thing I saw today was Ray the janitor pushing the floor waxer across the cafeteria right after lunch. He's the same guy who was doing it when I was there decades ago. He's a little grayer now, a tad paunchier than when it was my milk stains and pizza boat crumbs he was cleaning up off the floor, but he's still there, still hard at it; still has the same lanyard of keys hanging from his belt loop. Still wears an almost handlebar mustache.
He even walks the same way, a kind of bow-legged saunter, his eyes alertly scanning the perimeter of the room with an animated (dare I say owl-like) rotation of his head. When I was young, I thought he was watching for kids causing trouble, ready to pounce (he had a way of appearing out of nowhere whenever one of us thought of doing something we weren't supposed to). Now I think he's just looking for something he missed, a pile of trays to be brought back to the kitchen perhaps, or a scuff on his beloved linoleum. Maybe he's not thinking at all; maybe the rotation of his head is merely to loosen the muscles in his shoulders, shake off the boredom of what doubtless has been a mind-numbingly repetitive job over more than a quarter century.
I always say hello to him, and he smiles with what I think is recognition, but he hasn't said my name yet. In actuality, he hasn't said my name since 1980, when he bitched me out (fairly hardcore, in full 'pounce' mode) for placing a milk cup down on the floor and stomping on it with my foot, creating an explosive popping sound that got everyone's attention, and, for a moment, made me a star amidst my squirmy grade school compatriots, but resulted in my being kept after school and forced to pop an entire garbage bag full of spent milk cups as punishment. I smile when I think of that incident, and weep a little at how much time has passed, especially when I consider that 'Ray' isn't that much older than me...fifteen years tops. He was only a very young man just starting his career when I was crushing milk cups beneath my Keds.
Interestingly, while the staff at my old school appears to be relatively unchanged ('Ray' the janitor, 'Susan' the lunch lady, 'Sharon' the woman at the front desk), most of the teachers and administrative staff I remember are gone. This is true not only in the elementary school, but middle and high school as well. The custodial staff stick around in a way teachers don't seem to, or haven't. Nearly all that I remember have either retired, moved away or passed on, giving way to a new generation of educators, who are all so damn young now!
Teachers aren't supposed to be in their twenties, are they? They're not supposed to be cute women who smile crookedly, or strapping man's man types who look you square in the eye when they talk and you just know spend their weekends doing rugged, outdoorsy things...
Are they?
When did that change?
Where are the dowdy, middle-aged spinsters, sporting plate-sized glasses, their wiry hair in a bun, mired in adulthood, in authority? Where are the scrawny, balding men in blue suits we used to laugh at?
I guess the mythos of the teacher as I remember her/him/it, was shattered for me quite a while ago, when I was in my early twenties and dating a teacher at the middle school level. I can't say I'm sad that she's out of my life (it was the epitome of a fling), but she was kind of sweet, and silly. She was a good time, and I mean that in a respectful (playful) way. We always had a good time together. There simply could never have been a future for us.
One evening I accompanied her to a school-sanctioned winter carnival, where we huddled on a park bench drinking hot apple cider. At some point, a few of her students, squealing middle school girls with their whole lives before them, ran by us.
One of them cried out, "Hi Miss 'Vervain'!" as she passed.
At that moment I realized, oh my God, I'm dating a teacher.
I was dating 'Miss Vervain!'
To me, she was 'Shelly', with a nice butt, a propensity for laughing when she didn't mean to, and an ability to drink anyone under the table when she got going. That isn't meant to paint her as some drunk, or suggest she should not have been a teacher. She was a great teacher, that I could tell anyway, dedicated to the well-being of her students (the enthusiasm with which those three called out her name was evidence of this). I'm only suggesting that she wasn't just a teacher. She was also a human being, full of complexities and frailties.
She was a girl who had grown up hating her parents, but had just recently started rebuilding a relationship with them, admitting that it was on account of her maturity that it was happening. She liked cats, and Seinfeld, certain kinds of coffee over others (a coffee snob, she called herself). Had a way of breathing deeply when she slept; she was mostly a Democrat, but a hunting-rights activist and pro-life at the same time. She had dreams and aspirations and sexual fantasies and things that pissed her off and made her cry and made her laugh or roll her eyes. She liked old music...old movies not so much. She had blood coursing through her veins. She was human. A warm, affectionate, mostly normal girl.
But to her students, she was all about lesson plans and overhead projection and chalkboard instruction. I remember 'Shelly'. Those girls who ran past us (now well into their twenties), only remember 'Miss Vervain.'
While there should always be a level of detachment between student and teacher as a matter of course, it might be a good idea to remind our children that teachers are human beings; not beyond what's appropriate, but just enough to get them to listen a little more. Thinking back on 'Shelly' makes me wonder about many of my old teachers, and wish I'd known some of them on a more personal level.
Perhaps that would have made my school days a little more pleasant, made me feel a little less trapped seven hours a day.
Though it probably would not have done much about the smell.
