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Early in the 1994 film adaptation of Jurassic Park, we are shown what appears to be a basketball court in an inexcusable state of overgrowth: a large, fenced-in rectangle of assorted prehistoric foliage with a fairly conspicuous lack of dinosaurs. We can hear, however, high-pitched screeching noises and dull collisions, and the fence rattles. The park game warden, Robert Muldoon – a pithy, unsmiling Australian with an affinity for honestly-pretty-short khaki shorts – explains that the pen holds velociraptors (the dinosaur supervillains of the film) but that they are kept below ground level due to safety concerns. The park attorney, a short, unlikable man in a double-breasted suit, balks at the suggestion that the raptors could possibly be that dangerous. That same lawyer is later eaten by a dinosaur while sitting on the toilet.

They are that dangerous, Muldoon explains, squinting, and the noises are the sounds of the raptors testing the electric fence. They hurl themselves against every square inch in a systematic test for weakness – they never attack the same spot twice. The combined force of his grimace and the exposed length of ashen man-thigh convey the deadly weight of the situation.

As I watched the movie recently, I realized that in a lot of important respects, velociraptors aren’t so different from another species no less feared for its intelligence and diabolical cunning: the North American High Schooler.

For the past four months, I have been a high school English teacher – first at Williamsburg Preparatory High School in Brooklyn, and currently at Hartford Public High School in Connecticut. I’m a corps member of Teach For America, a program which places (mostly) recent college graduates as teachers in America’s neediest schools. Nearly one hundred percent of the students at my current school qualify for free lunch. That economic disadvantage means my most advanced students – students who, had they been born into more fortunate circumstances, would easily be performing at a college level – are currently near the level of academic development appropriate for a ninth grader. The overwhelming majority of my students perform on a fifth or sixth grade level.

Teach For America’s mission is to close the achievement gap between rich and poor, a gap nowhere more apparent than here in Hartford – America’s second-poorest city, located in its second-richest state. TFA enlists young people from around the country, people who will keep up the fight for the rest of their lives by remaining in the classroom or seeking to effect change on a national level. Needless to say, having seen the many faces of the achievement gap filling up the rows in my classroom, I, too, am determined to do everything within my power to chisel away at the gap.

The real trouble with that, though, is that at the moment, I kind of suck at teaching.

And by “kind of suck,” I mean I suck heroically. I suck for every second of every minute of every day. I suck prolifically, defiantly – the magnitude of my suck is majestic. My suckitude is a robust and broad-shouldered thing, an elemental suck without age or time, a brutish, lumbering golem of suck.

But let’s go back to dinosaurs. For the past four months, I have been the electric fence.

I graduated from Furman in May and some six weeks later I found myself standing in front of forty bemused New York City high schoolers. With my heart racing and my mouth dry, I clung to my clipboard – the sole indicator of my counterfeit authority – like a childhood blanket. “Wait,” one student asked, “do I get credit for this class? Is this real school?”

I wasn’t quite sure how to answer. Real? Well, we’re in a school, so, y’know, that’s something. And I printed out some worksheets and things. Does that count? – I’ve got a clipboard! 

That initial month in Brooklyn was grueling. Hartford is a little more comfortable, if only because my shortcomings have become more routinized and I’ve gotten to know my kids pretty well. Yet even the students who like me – those who regard me with an air of warm and empathetic pity – still test me. The process is unrelenting. Did I omit a detail from a worksheet? “Mr. C, this doesn’t make any sense! I quit!” Did I reprimand one child for saying “damn” in my classroom while failing to hear another detonate an F-bomb (often rather spectacularly) some eight feet away? “Mr. C, that’s not fair! You’re picking favorites!” Did I misplace an overhead transparency? Ooh boy – grounds for a whole-class verbal gang-up. No inch untested.

They don’t do it out of spite. This is a key realization, one that I – along with the rest of my fellow new teachers – make and re-make on a regular basis. Most of my kids, due to their circumstances outside of school, crave structure – they crave structure because structure makes them feel comfortable. Though little else in their world might be stable or secure, school provides them with routine, expectations, regularity – in short, safety. So they test the fence to make sure the fence is there. They test it before class, during class, after class, in detention, in the hallways, in the lunchroom, on the way to the buses and probably on the buses too.

As the full weight of being responsible for the future success of 90 young lives has slowly made itself apparent, my inner adolescent, stalked into a corner, is making his desperate last stand. Muttering profanities and swigging messily from a bottle of cheap booze, he too hurls himself against the fence. AT LEAST THE WEEKENDS, he screams. YOU’RE A BORE – A BORE! YOU’RE OLD! YOU PROMISED YOU’D NEVER BE LIKE THIS! He lets out a frustrated screech not dissimilar to the raptors’ (whose noises in the film, if I recall correctly, were a combination of something like industrial machinery and the sounds of dolphin intercourse.) YOU CAN WAKE UP EARLY AND DO IT THEN! Robert Muldoon sneers and adjusts his microscopic shorts.

So what is “the fence,” you might rightly ask? I’ve sort of made it my central metaphor, and, as an English major – a product of Furman’s finest department – I should really have an answer to that question. But I don’t – not yet. What strength will guide my students to (hopefully) make a year and a half’s worth of academic growth in ninth grade? What boundary will ensure that my inner adult emerges victorious from my all-too-frequent crises of self? I don’t know and I might not know for a while. In the meantime, I only have faith – faith that, given time and the continued support of my truly extraordinary friends and colleagues, the answer will make itself apparent. And for now, faith will do.

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Note: this was originally written for Furman’s English department alumni newsletter, but it will almost certainly not be published due to being unacceptable in nearly every conceivable way. I figured I’d post it here since I haven’t updated in ages.