Thoughts on quarters

Adaptability, golden hour, classrooms, and how we surprise ourselves.

A couple of years ago, when I left Manhattan before I moved to Harlem I moved to Brooklyn. I hated that apartment.

Among many other uncomfortable differences to my home of many years in the West Village, I would now have no washer/dryer in the building. I would go to a laundromat, like many if not most New Yorkers do. The first day I went, on a freezing day in late February, the warmth from the dryers fogged the windows and the hum of the machines was soothing. I had waddled my laundry hamper, an unwieldy thing, down four floors of a spiral staircase, bursting with sweaty clothes from the move. I was delighted to see that although each wash was $4 and each dry cycle $2, you had to use quarters. How cute. I put cash in the machine that aggressively spits out a stream of coins that clang loudly in the small metal box at the bottom, and tried to scoop them into a little jewelry bag, dropping most, to further clanging. As I loaded the machine, I watched the Russian girl that works there carry around a large plastic cup filled with coins. The kind you use for sauces in restaurant kitchens. It had a piece of masking tape with black writing long lost.

She loaded machine after machine for the wash-and-fold service. She slid the coins into the tiny slit on the machine with one hand, so swiftly, so fast. When I turned to face my own machine and starting putting in my quarters, 16 per wash, I think I dropped 15 of them. The slit was so tiny, almost the exact size of the coin's diameter, and the coins so slippery. I used all my fingers, sometimes both hands, and still I dropped so many of them. I looked back at the Russian girl and thought I will never, ever learn to do it like that. I will never have that ease.

***

Three years ago today, I found myself in a high school classroom. I had left a decade long corporate job a week prior, and had volunteered to support a career plan presentation given by students at a charter school in the South Bronx. The night before, exhausted, reeling from the events of the past weeks that ended a professional phase that for better or worse had defined most aspects of who I was, I decided - I'm not going to go. Why get up early to wind up in a strange and unfamiliar situation that will probably lead to nothing. I need the rest, the sleep, peace. I turned off the 7AM alarm I had set for the next morning.

I have written before about fear cosplaying so effectively as safety, moments you swear you are pulling out of doing something because it is safer, better for you - really you are simply afraid. Those times when you push yourself to go anyway, and your life changes completely, you can't help but wonder how many missed opportunities you may have had when listening to fear instead.

But this story isn't about fear. Before falling asleep, a spark said no - you're going to go. I turned the alarm back on, and the next day found myself in a church basement in the Bronx. I was blown away immediately by the students - all seniors, a few months away from graduation, in suits and all sorts of professional dress, presenting their career plan to a panel of various kinds of professionals. Pointing to the path that would get them to be the nurse, the stockbroker, the cop, the consultant that they planned on being - how much money they'd make on year 3, on year 10. How much it would cost to buy their mother a house, or raise their two future kids, travel to Tokyo - only a few of their many goals. What the cost of schooling would be (none - the school worked hard to get them all full rides to anywhere from Bronx Community College to Brown), the cost of taxes, of the hobbies they would enjoy as adults. I had never seen anything like it before - teaching high school students real, marketable, critical skills for their professional lives. It's no exaggeration to say that I left that place different than when I entered. One particular student was so nervous that her shaking hands almost dropped her laptop, I told her I was just as nervous while she went through her impressive presentation, and we both felt better for it.

That morning was a siren call for me, a call that this work was something I wanted to be a part of, so when I got cornered into a small kitchen by one of the directors of the program who saw me euphoric, I'm sure, he asked about my background and what I was going to do next. I was lucky to make a friend that became a mentor and teacher in my new career as an educator.

I tried to get that school to hire me, and although we got pretty far and I did well on a mock lesson, my first time ever in front of students, they couldn't put someone in a classroom that had never set foot in one before. So I scoured non-profits to find organizations teaching what I discovered is called ‘work-based learning’ in the Bronx, and was fortunate to spend the next year working for three.

***

I thought a lot about those quarters those first few months in the classroom . My first day in a public school in Brownsville, a severely neglected low-income neighborhood in Brooklyn, I walked through the metal detectors of a massive building housing four different schools, one on each floor, with no clue where to go. There was no one for me to meet upon arrival, no signage or much reason in the numbers of each classroom. When I finally found the art room where my class was being held, I apologized to the teacher for being a bit early and introduced myself, clutching my materials to my chest and asking it was alright if I sat in the back and observed - her exact response was I don't care what you fucking do. Which now a few years later, I quite admire. The class was half euphoric, half terrifying, and I half bombed, half thrived. I was teaching seventh grade, and between the lipgloss and the naps at their desks and the clandestine snacks in black plastic deli bags and the sheer volume of their voices no matter my pleas for silence, I walked out of there like I had run a marathon. I got lost in the building, winding through a bleak cafeteria and endless hallways, before finally finding a door and in my haste to run home, set off the alarm for the entire school.

Writing about that day is sweet now, almost three years later with countless bad, miraculous, mundane, exciting, terrifying days in the classroom behind me. I've worked at eight different schools, with countless different students. I've faced sixth graders unable to read or write but with a ferocity to learn, seniors with brilliant entrepreneurial ideas, kids living sleeplessly in shelters and still getting through their school day, took a group of students to the Office of School Food in Queens to pick out menu items state-wide and made a podcast about it, here) and laughed so much my abs hurt from their NY Times-food-critic-worthy description of mozzarella sticks. I've gone on college tours in Buffalo and cried locked in the social work office. I've learned about the stock market because I had to teach it, and watched a student get hired for an internship at JP Morgan after we practiced for her interview for endless nights.

***

Today, I teach tenth grade full time at Comp Sci High, that same school that hosted me in the basement three years ago. I have been humbled in every way. This past winter, negative 17 degrees outside and maybe even colder in my old ice-box of a car, I am as always out of the house by 7:00. I am literally pushed out of bed by the desire to do the work well, and by my endlessly supportive partner, who as I struggle to get up in the pitch black morning says 'You got this girl. They're waiting’. The ceaseless routine and necessary commitment that it takes to do this work would have been unimaginable to me in the days of my cushy corporate job and my cloud of mental health challenges, shrouded by self obsession and frankly, by not being busy enough. The teachers around me are spectacular - I heard recently that when you are only around billionaires you forget you are rich, in the context of reminding myself to celebrate all of our achievements when our routine is in itself daily greatness. It is the hardest job. It has transformed me body and soul, given me gray hair and burst my heart open, changed me completely, given me purpose, and single minded dedication to becoming good at it, then better at it. Seeing their frustration turn to curiosity on the good days. That's golden hour. Holding the gaping space for the impossible days, both for me and them. Mostly them. Sometimes me, too.

In December, we celebrated acceptances to Princeton, Yale, Northwestern, Columbia, Barnard, Williams. All full rides. The video of them opening their acceptance letters is almost unbearable to watch in its joy. Other days, getting through the 50 minutes without hiding in the bathroom stall like I myself am a teenage girl is as big of a win as the Ivy Leagues.

So I often think about the quarters. From the first day setting off the fire alarm in Brownsville to running a classroom of 30 in the Bronx, sometimes even catching a moment where every set of eyes was on me, curious, interested, wanting to know more about credit scores, interest rates, trade school, interviewing skills, resumes. Some days I drop a quarter, others ten. But you get the hang of it. Those hardest things. You juggle and you feel joy. You find golden hour. You trip and fall and shiver in your freezing car. You hope and you try to be generous. You get so much generosity back. You give but you get, the cheesy saying proves true. There is no greater power than having none.

So you pick the quarters up off the floor, you show off sometimes, you try again, you drop them all, you forget you ever did it before, you get a few, you give up, you hit ten in a row. Mostly, you manage. And you learn to celebrate the unglamorousness of the average day. You remember what you have seen when those regular days stack. The golden hours. And you go again. Not today, because it's Sunday, But tomorrow, tomorrow.

And tomorrow.