Read Online My Mistake by Daniel Menaker - Free Book Online Page A

English Department happens to be attending the class. Observation. The students pick it apart, and I join in the general disparagement, pointing out affectations and lame tropes and sentimentality. When I tell them, at the end of the class, that I wrote it, they—and my boss—are delighted.
    But I find the sequestered and bucolic life of a boarding-school teacher stifling. I eat all my meals with students, I am the resident in a small dorm, and I can’t see the girl I’m going out with as much as I’d like; she’s taking acting classes in Manhattan. After four years at Swarthmore and two at Hopkins, I keenly miss New York and Nyack. So I apply for and get a job teaching at the Collegiate School, on the Upper West Side.
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    Collegiate, the oldest private school in America, differs as much from the George School as public school in Nyack did from the Little Red School House. And there are no girls. The students are more worldly and streetwise. They go home at night after carousing through the bars with fake IDs. Many are the sons of rich people and professors and attorneys. There is a Bronfman there, an Ausubel, a Dupee, a Kristol, a Bartos. A contingent of black and Hispanic kids descend from Manhattan’s upper, poorer reaches and attend Collegiate on scholarship, under a program called ABC—A Better Chance. They’re usually among the best athletes in the school, and they sometimes manage to form friendships with the privileged boys, but more often don’t. The Castilian-speaking Spanish teacher flunks a Puerto Rican kid in Spanish I.
    The students have to wear jackets and ties. The ties grow very wide and floral. This is 1966, 1967, 1968, after all. The pupils (the parts of the eye, I mean) are often similarly wide. When I first arrive, I laugh when the students in my classes call me “Sir”—as they are required to do. After a while I come to like it. On my third day, I hear a usage of the word that I like even more and that contains an inadvertent compliment, about my work and about my looks. A kid says to me in passing, in the hall, “Are you in that new Sir’s class? He teaches English. I hear he’s going to be pretty good.” I say, “I am in one of the new Sir’s classes. I’m in all of them, because I’m the new Sir. So thank you.” The kid says, “Wow! You look too young to be a Sir, Sir.”
    The smarter students feel free to argue with teachers about anything. In a doctrinaire way—I should know better but am feeling my authority more confidently at this point—I talk about Macduff’s sterling character in
Macbeth,
and one of the boys is able to fluster me by citing a far more negative interpretation of his motives from a respected critic. My second year at the school, I teach an Advanced Placement course in American Literature and assign readings from the Puritans, especially Jonathan Edwards, to Hawthorne to Melville to Poe to James to Hemingway, with some stops in between. The students complain about the workload and the tediousness of the Puritan material, and the Headmaster, Carl Andrews, talks to me about it, and I feel a little abashed, as if I have somehow been showing off with this ambitious curriculum. But I keep on with it, too embarrassed to stop. Not knowing exactly how to stop. But also how much I myself have learned out of doggedness.
    The students in the class are seniors. The next year, when coming back to Collegiate to visit, three or four of them, mostly the whiniest, tell me how helpful the course was in their college English classes—which is not only a compliment but a reaffirmation of the delayed gratifications of persistence.
    In that senior class, on Parents’ Day, I criticize the Introduction to James’s
Daisy Miller
as being more biographical than literarily enlightening. One of the visiting fathers comes up to me when the class is over and says how much he enjoyed the