LOSING MY FACULTIES(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　I am just one of those rare and probably defective people who
really enjoy the company of teenagers.
　　Brendan Halpin’s It Takes a Worried Man—a memoir of how he and
his family dealt with his wife’s battle against breast cancer—was
praised for its can-dor, raw humor, and riveting voice. Halpin now
turns his unique talent to an unforgettable account of the pursuit
of his true calling: teaching.
　　Losing My Faculties follows Halpin through teaching jobs in an
economically depressed white ethnic town, a middle-class suburb, a
last-chance truancy prevention program in the inner city, and an
ambitious college-prep urban charter school. In the same cuttingly
observant voice that marked It Takes a Worried Man, Halpin tells us
what it really means to be a teacher—the ups and downs in the
classroom, the battles with administrators and colleagues, and the
joy of doing a job that matters. Not the tale of a hero who changes
his troubled students’ lives in one year, Losing My Faculties is,
rather, the story of an all-too-fallible teacher who persists in
spite of the frustrations that have driven so many others from the
profession. After nine years of teaching, Halpin ?nds his idealism
in shreds but his sense of humor and love for his work blessedly
intact.
　　From the Hardcover edition.

　　Brendan Halpin, a thirty-four-year-old high school English
teacher, is the author of the acclaimed memoir It Takes a
Worried Man. He lives in Boston with his wife, Kirsten, and
their daughter, Rowen.
　　From the Hardcover edition.

　　Comic, profane, honest and thought-provoking…an irreverent,
heartbreaking, dumbfoundingly funny book about love, fear and
perseverance.
　　The Arizona Republic
　　Traumatic, touching and shockingly funny… Bottom line: Man at
his best. People
　　Raw, undisciplined, and frequently very funny.Boston Sunday
Globe
　　If it takes a worried man to write a book like this, then Mr.
Halpins disquietude is our decided gain. With admirable vigilance
against self-pity, the unflagging knowledge that he is not, at the
end of the day, the one who is sick, and the comical contortions of
a man trying to avoid the maudlin and trite, Brendan Halpin has
written a work that is both genuinely moving and
frequentlysurprisingly frequentlyhilarious, a beautiful portrait of
the dark, unlovely rollick of adulthood.
　　David Rakoff, author of Fraud
　　From the Hardcover edition. — Review
　　

　　1
　　In June 1990, with the aid of some creative credit card use, I go
to Taiwan on a bogus “exchange program” through my university. (My
future wife, Kirsten, and I are the first and last participants.)
The “exchange” is with some English-language institute in Taipei,
and the idea is that my university sends them recent grads to teach
for a few months, and they send students to the university’s ESL
program for a few months. Of course, the real idea is that the
Chung Shan English Language Institute can put “Affiliated with Ivy
League University” on its brochures.
　　I fell into this because I worked in the International Programs
Office, and, being a senior with no ambition or clue what to do and
six months before my student loans were coming due, I decided that
spending six months in Taiwan would be a pretty cool
adventure.
　　The only downside (apart from the fact that Taiwan in the summer
is a bowl of heat, humidity, and pollution that puts even my native
Cincinnati to shame) is that I have to work at the institute
teaching English.
　　Well, maybe “teaching” is sort of a misnomer. Most of what I do
is work in the children’s English classes, which they attend on
Wednesdays and Saturdays, when they only have a half day of regular
school. There is a Chinese teacher here to run the class and really
teach them stuff, and an American teacher to run language games.
It’s like a very specialized, makeup-free version of clowning. I’m
good at it, but it gets old pretty quickly.
　　I also work the occasional evening teaching teenagers and adults.
Here I am the only teacher in the room, and though the syllabus has
every class planned out and it’s mostly going through lame
exercises in the book, it is a version of teaching. Sometimes I
veer from the syllabus and actually talk to the students. I find
that I enjoy the teenagers the most. I don’t know why this is-I
think I am just one of these rare and probably defective people who
really enjoy the company of teenagers.
　　It is July, and I have an early-evening class of all teenagers.
Years later I will still remember some of them-Julie, Jim, Kellie,
and Angle, who pronounces it “Angel” (of course, they have Chinese
names, but I never know them, which is kind of weird-it’s like your
French or Spanish teacher only knowing you as Pierre or Vicente or
whatever name you adopted in high school language classes). I’ve
been teaching this group for about a month, and they are finally
comfortable enough to start speaking, and the lame exercise in the
book evolves into something that very nearly approximates a
conversation. Most of the students are speaking, their English is
flowing pretty well, and they’re asking questions about the grammar
point and then using my answers-everything is just working really
well. I am shocked when class ends because it feels like it just
started.
　　I meet up with Kirsten, who was teaching across the hall,
and
　　prepare myself to leave the air-conditioning and step into the
lead apron of swampy heat that is Taipei in the summertime. When
the heat hits me, it’s like a punch in the stomach. I’ve been here
a month and I’m still not used to it. I immediately start sweating
from every pore in my body, but I feel something else too.
Something strange. Something I have never felt at the end of a day
of work before.
　　I am happy and full of energy. I feel great-I’m buzzing
tremendously and talking a mile a minute as I practically run down
the street searching for some kind of cold beverage to save me from
imminent dehydration.
　　”I can’t believe this!” I say to Kirsten, who is looking at me
“with stranger eyes,” as one of our Chinese buddies would say. “I
feel great! You’re not supposed to feel great after work! You feel
like shit, you go to happy hour to try and get happy, you don’t get
happy just from work!”
　　I worked the five previous summers in an insurance company and
had a variety of jobs in college, and never, even when I watched TV
for money in my dorm as a work/study “job,” did I feel this good at
the end of a day of work.
　　In my senior year of college I didn’t feel very enthusiastic
about pursuing any line of work because I just assumed that work
was pain-in-the-ass drudgery that you endured until you had a few
pathetic hours of free time in which to do what you really wanted
to do. It just never occurred to me that work could be something
you actually enjoyed. And then I get this glimpse of a world that
few people are fortunate enough to know: the world in which work
doesn’t suck.
　　Work, it seems, can actually be fun.
　　2
　　I       t is 1992. I live in a
tiny, mouse-infested apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, a
small city that borders Boston and Cambridge, and I am about two
months into ed school in nearby Medford. I just got through with a
year and a half of working at a computer company as a
bottom-of-the-ladder, assistant-to-an-assistant mail
sorter/photocopier/trash taker-outer. It wasn’t horrible (except
for one particular day when I was taking out the lunch trash and
these bags of unused fish stock exploded all over me), but it
wasn’t exactly what you’d call fulfilling, and I sure as hell never
felt great at the end of the day, so remembering my experience in
Taiwan, I decided to go to ed school. So far it’s not as horrible
as everyone says. I have met some great people. Ten years later I
will still be friends with two out of the thirty of them, which is
really not a bad ratio. And we do nothing but think about teaching,
which, I will find, is something you rarely have time to do when
you are actually teaching.
　　I go to interview at the Boston public high school where I might
get placed as a student teacher. The teacher, Gordon Stevens, wants
to talk to me before he agrees to take me on, to make sure we can
work together. He asks me why I’m interested in urban education. I
give him a version of the truth-that this seems like where the real
action is in education, the front lines, that if I have any talent
for this at all, this is where I should be.
　　I do not tell him that I don’t have a car and that this was the
only placement I could get to by public transportation after my
classmates snapped up all the Cambridge and Somerville
placements.
　　The whole truth is that I really can’t articulate why I feel like
I want to teach here instead of in the suburbs. Certainly part of
it is feeling like I want to make a difference, like it matters
whether I go to work or not, which is something I never felt at the
computer company. I remember having a number of really incompetent
teachers (along with a handful of superstars) in high school, and I
wasn’t really harmed by them-basically anybody coming out of my
small private high school started with enough advantages to be okay
one way or the other. I feel like maybe that’s not the case here,
like maybe what I do could make a difference, like I would increase
my own importance by working with kids who might have their lives
changed by me. Yeah, so that’s the liberal do-gooder
really-out-to-make-himself-feel-important part, which is widely
derided (unfairly, I think-isn’t that kind of a win-win?).
　　I don’t know. I’d like to say that I’m over that feeling
completely now, nine years into my teaching career, but I know that
one of the reasons I still love my work is that it feels
important.
　　What I don’t tell Mr. Stevens, because I haven’t figured it out
yet, is that I feel called to urban teaching (maybe a pretentious
word choice, but it does feel that way-like somebody’s tugging me
to get into this, like I can’t imagine working in a rich suburb or
a private school, even though I never set out to be the Urban
Education Warrior) not just because it will make me look big, and
not just because I want to try something hard, and not just because
it’s where the action is. I want to do this because it’s mine.
Because I have spent my whole life in cities, because I can’t seem
to get away from the problem of how to live with people who aren’t
like you (or even people who don’t like you), because I was brought
up by a single parent in the city, because this is where I
live.
　　Maybe Mr. Stevens understands all this, because he tells me he
gets a good feeling from me and is looking forward to us working
together. I’m looking forward to it too.
　　Of course, I’m also terrified.
　　3
　　For the first half of the year, I’ll be observing Mr. Stevens. I
will take over two of his classes in the second semester. He is
great at his job. It’s not that he holds the class spellbound all
the time-that’s an overrated skill usually possessed by Cult of
Personality teachers who are so in love with themselves that they
convince the students to follow suit-he just oozes competence. And
I am daunted by what it takes to achieve it. Even after what
appears to be a very successful class, he retires to his
“office”-by being in charge of purchasing office supplies, he has
scored himself a supply closet in the attic and squeezed his desk
between the boxes of chalk and paper clips, making him the only
non-administrator in the entire building who has space in which to
work when he’s not teaching-and tortures himself, agonizing over
what could have gone better, what he could have done differently,
what he will do differently tomorrow. It looks like a lot of work.
I don’t know if I really have it in me to do this to myself every
day.
　　Mostly I observe him with a class full of ninth-graders. One of
whom is a class clown named Trenton. He is obviously very bright,
but he’s not doing his work and he mostly makes jokes about his
classmates. I write a paper about him and show it to Mr. Stevens.
He furrows his brow. He hadn’t noticed half the misbehavior that I,
sitting silently in the back of the room, have recorded. Now he has
more stuff to agonize over.
　　One day I have a big cup of coffee right before class. I will
never do this again. Mr. Stevens gets the kids started on some sort
of activity and then needs to leave the room-he has to talk to
somebody about something, perhaps relating to office supplies. “Mr.
Halpin can help you while I’m out of the room,” he tells the class.
This
　　is my first big moment, my first moment as a “teacher,” and I am
paralyzed-I wasn’t prepared to actually interact with the kids when
I left the house this morning! I’m just the Watcher! I watch, and
record, and imagine fearfully how I might deal with Trenton or his
classmates in every situation of every class. I can certainly
handle the activity, but I hardly know these kids’ names! What will
I do if they misbehave? What do they think of me? Who do they think
I am? I know when I was in high school, I probably would have been
instinctively contemptuous of somebody lurking in the back of the
room, and I probably would have tried to torture that person, just
out of that killer instinct that packs of adolescents possess. (At
my private high school we didn’t have student teachers-they just
threw the twenty-three-year-olds with no experience right into the
classroom as full-fledged teachers. We did savage some of them.)
What if their relatively calm behavior arises only out of their
respect for Mr. Stevens? Will this room turn into a scene out of
the first half of Lean on Me, before Morgan Freeman starts carrying
a bat and Showing Those Tough Kids Who’s Boss?
　　Trenton is having trouble with the exercise, and he calls me over
for help. I get right up next to his desk and begin to
explain-“Well, you see how the adjective goes here,” or some such
thing, and Trenton interrupts me. “I’m sorry, man, I don’t mean to
disrespect you, but you got that nasty Student Teacher
Breath.”
　　The class breaks up. I have no idea what to say. I am not yet
secure enough to laugh at a joke like this. I probably try to
pretend like I’m laughing, when of course I am horrified, so it
probably comes out all fake, he-heh. Whatever it is, I do nothing
to save the situation except for not getting angry. Have I passed
some kind of test, or failed it? Or both? I never get a chance to
find out. Mr. Stevens returns, order is restored, and the class
ends soon afterward.
　　Nine years later I see Trenton at the ice cream parlor in my
neighborhood. He looks at me without a trace of recognition, but I
know him immediately.
　　4
　　A       t the beginning of the
second semester the classes change, so the class of Mr. Stevens’
that I will be in charge of is a group of twenty-seven
tenth-graders. It is a writing class. I will be able to read and
comment meaningfully on all of their papers because I have only two
classes. I have no idea how I might manage to do that if I were
teaching five classes of this size, which is what all the real
teachers here are doing. For the first few days Mr. Stevens is in
charge, and we are meeting in a science room with long tables and
tall stools, only there aren’t twenty-seven stools, so some kids
are sitting on the heater over by the window, while others are on
the floor. Somehow Mr. Stevens engineers a switch, and we end up in
a French classroom that can just barely fit everyone.
　　On my first day of actually teaching this class without Mr.
Stevens present, I get my big Test of the Student Teacher, which I
fail miserably. I turn around to write something on the board, and
somebody, somewhere (well, I know exactly which table it comes
from, but since my back was turned, I do know enough to know I
can’t point the finger without enduring a twenty-minute debate
about how I didn’t see and I can’t possibly be so unfair as to
accuse someone without evidence), throws a piece of chalk. It
explodes on the pipe that runs across the ceiling, making a really
spectacular noise and showering dust all over the floor.　　
　　From the Hardcover edition.