The faculty lounge

I have just read the first ever novel that portrayed the lives of high school teachers exactly as it truly is, with thoughts of characters that are accurate, and certain events that are uncannily the same as they were when I was teaching in my career, spanning 33 years. The title is The Faculty Lounge, by Jennifer Mathieu. This book was humorous, heartwarming, and positive regarding one of the most difficult professions to be in.

The book begins with a shock as an 82-year-old substitute teacher is found dead on the couch in the faculty lounge. One by one, we are introduced to the teachers in the high school, starting with the young teacher who found him, and learn their individual stories and how many of them knew and were influenced by the man when he was a teacher at the school. So many of the stories were the same as or similar to stories of my colleagues over the span of my career. There is the counselor who has taken to drinking, even at school. The young math teacher who really doesn’t like teaching but who doesn’t know what else to do. There is the student who finds his teacher’s vibrator. (Yes, this actually happened to a couple of colleagues in a school where I taught.) There is the principal who writes error-ridden memos picked apart by the staff in the English department. (This also happened in real life!) The situation where an e-mail was sent to the wrong person is also one I encountered while teaching, and may have done, truthfully. Oops. There is the angry parent who doesn’t want her child reading a particular book and, therefore, thinks no student should read it. There is the school nurse who goes beyond her limits to help a student in need and the teachers who use a supply closet to engage in matters of a sexual nature. There are the district-mandated in-services that use the same old, tired methods by uninspiring human automatons to present information to the faculty, and the faculty meetings that drag on forever (and the under-the-breath collegial commentaries that are the hilarious saving grace). 

One of the sections of the book dealt with state testing and this part I appreciated because of its verisimilitude and sentiment: “The Texas Standards of Academic Readiness tests (T-SOAR, sometimes referred to by teachers as bedsore) were the bane of their existence—high stakes, poorly written tests that caused unreal amounts of stress for students and faculty alike and transformed normally enthusiastic, creative classrooms into drill-and-kill multiple-choice factories where students ceased to be human beings and instead became data points. Championed in equal measure by the state’s conservatives (who longed for concrete reasons to defund public schools and sell them to charters) and bourgeois neoliberals (who saw college degrees and white-collar jobs as the only measure of ‘success’) these tests had so damaged public education that Ms. Jackson worried their deleterious effects would be felt for generations to come. It took an exceptional amount of strength and commitment not to become worn down by the constant focus on the T-SOAR and instead remember that the children they served were real, actual people with unique gifts and needs.” 

I couldn’t have said it better myself, nor agreed more heartily.

If you have been a teacher in a public school or a student, and that means almost everybody, this is a book you will enjoy and in which you may see yourself somewhere. It also shows why, even though it’s a struggle to be a teacher in a public school, teachers continue to find purpose in and love of this profession.