Front of the Class Read online

  He didn’t flinch. There was no need to; he was watching me “prove” that he was right.

  “I assure you, sir, that I can teach. In fact, I think I’m a better teacher because I have battled to overcome this disability. I was a student teacher and I was very successful. Tourette’s wasn’t the problem that you say it is. In fact, it wasn’t a problem at all.”

  He remained silent. I imagined him conjuring up a vision of me in the classroom, making noises in front of twenty-five fifth-graders. He leaned closer. “The kids I’m dealing with at this school … in this community … they would beat you up if you made noises like that all day. You wouldn’t be safe here. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  I started to count backward from ten. Even though this was clearly not a school where I wanted to work, I needed a job so badly that I didn’t want to burn any bridges. It seemed obvious that I couldn’t persuade this man to hire me, given his opinions about people with Tourette syndrome.

  He summed up his feelings this way: “If you want to teach, you need to refrain from making noises during class time.”

  I stood up and brushed off my jacket. “Thank you for the interview.”

  He looked confused, like I was a guest at his home departing early. “You’re leaving?”

  “I don’t think this is the teaching position for me,” I said, trying to stay calm and upbeat. “But again, thank you for the interview. I’ll take my portfolio and not ask for any more of your time.”

  I reached for my portfolio, and he released it without objection. In my wallet, I had my folded piece of paper with highlights of the Americans with Disabilities Act printed on it. Part of me wanted to pull the paper out and recite from it, the way I sometimes did in movie theaters when managers tried to throw me out. Instead, I walked out of his office, through the reception area, and past the secretary, who, it is safe to say, was most certainly relieved to see the barking man in the dark suit depart the premises.

  Once I got to my car, I gripped the steering wheel, breathing hard. Even though I can maintain my dignity in a situation like that, the fallout with tics and twitches is about as bad as you would imagine it to be. The disappointment was overwhelming, and I started in on the self-consolation routine that was becoming as much of a constant companion as the Tourette’s itself. There would be other schools. There would be other chances.

  I reminded myself that it would be a nightmare to work at a place like that anyway. Even so, I hated the idea of just walking away as if everything were okay. The man had discriminated against me in a stupid and stereotyped way, denying me the chance to earn an honest living. He had broken the law. Furthermore, he was just the kind of person who would have to have somebody stand their ground with him before he would ever open his eyes. In the past, I had always stood my ground as much as possible when it came to defending my rights. I could have sued—should have sued—but after this encounter, it didn’t seem worth the effort.

  Just as I was about to start the car, I felt a sharp, burning pain in my neck. I loosened my tie and unbuttoned my dress shirt, then pulled down the rearview mirror so I could see what was going on. Underneath my shirt collar, my skin was bleeding from all the neck twitching.

  I couldn’t get away from that school fast enough. I turned the key in the ignition and pulled out of the parking lot, but by the time I found the main road that would lead me home, I couldn’t see. Tears blurred my vision. I pulled over to the side of the road and dropped my forehead into my hands.

  It’s over, I thought. No principal will ever look past my disability. It seemed clear that Tourette’s had finally gotten the better of me for real. It had stopped me from doing the thing I had always wanted most to do: teach kids and let them find joy in learning. For a while I just sat there, watching cars whiz by.

  By this point in the deepening summer, a thought that I’d been fighting for months was becoming more and more insistent. What if no one will hire me because I have Tourette’s? How many other principals are going to see me as merely a victim of Tourette syndrome instead of an educated and qualified teacher?

  Then I breathed deeply and felt my lungs fill with air. I told myself to erase any thought of giving up. Plenty of doors had been slammed in my face before, and things somehow always managed to work out.

  One thing at a time. Later, at home, I could figure out what to do next about finding a teaching job. For now, I just needed to drive.

  When the summer drew to a close, my camp job ran out and, with no money coming in, I was officially unemployed. I still went to interviews, but my eyes had been opened to the pitying way in which some people insisted upon viewing me. My confidence was eroding.

  Whenever I spoke on the phone with my parents, they asked how the job search was going, and the question made me cringe.

  “It’s coming along,” was my standard reply.

  That was enough information for my father, but my mother wasn’t buying it. “You know, Brad, you could come back to St. Louis,” she ventured one day.

  No sane parent wants to see his or her child crawling back home after a failed job search—my father especially had no interest in that—but Mom didn’t hesitate to hold out the opportunity to me if that was what I needed. I thanked her but emphasized that I wasn’t quitting.

  What she didn’t understand was that I personally could absolutely not use Tourette’s as an excuse. Even if I believed that it was the reason I couldn’t get a job—even if I knew for a fact that it was the reason I wasn’t being hired—I couldn’t let myself say those words out loud. That would give the reality of it too much weight.

  By that point, my quest to become a teacher was completely linked to my drive for survival. If I was going to exist with any degree of dignity and independence, then I had no choice but to prove that Tourette syndrome would never get the best of me.

  It became clear to me then: if I were to let go of my determination, I wouldn’t have any direction left. Nor would I have any way to cope with not having a worthwhile purpose in life. If I quit now, I would be agreeing with everyone who had been telling me all summer that I was barking up the wrong trees. I had to decide whether it was the kind of tree in general—

  meaning my chosen career—that was wrong, or whether it was the location of the trees individually—meaning that I had not yet found the right school. Because I felt so strongly about being a teacher, I decided I had not yet found the right school. I’d keep barking. I was not quitting.

  DIRE … IRE … MIRE … HIRE

  IN THE MIDDLE OF MY JOB SEARCH, I moved into a new apartment with Jordan Hirschfield, a friend from St. Louis (and one of my roommates from the previous summer). I’d scouted the apartment while still working at Camp Alterman and I loved it on first sight. Located in a brand-new gated complex in a busy area of Atlanta that was perfect for young, single professionals, it was exactly the apartment I had envisioned for myself after college—we each had our own bedroom, with TV and stereo equipment in the den. As soon as we moved in, we made a joint purchase of a gas grill just like the ones people had back in St. Louis. The only missing ingredient was that little thing called a job.

  All summer now, I had been doing the job hunter’s daily hustle, sending out as many résumés with cover letters as I could find people to send them to. Some had resulted in interviews, but each of those later resulted in rejection letters. Each day I hurried out to the mailbox. If one of the envelopes I pulled out was from a school I’d interviewed at, then I made it an exercise in self-restraint not to rip it open right there on the spot. Instead I waited until I got inside. Even then, before opening the envelope I gave myself a pep talk: “If it’s another rejection, I’ll just keep interviewing. I’ll get a job soon. I won’t panic.”

  Sometimes while I stared at the sealed envelope I drifted into a brief fantasy about how I would react if I got the job. I’d imagine the joy of knowing I had finally reached my goal of being a teacher. I’d visualize the kids and my desk, the teacher�
�s lounge, and the crowded halls. But the letters were all using different words that said the same thing: they would not be extending an offer, but thanks for the interest. Even though I realized they were rejecting Tourette’s and not me, the words were still hard to take. Tourette’s was such a big part of me that you didn’t get the rest of me without the Tourette’s.

  Before too long, the drumbeat of serial rejection began to take its toll, and I began to use more and more energy fighting panic. Even though I worked every contact I could possibly find, the hiring season was ending and interviews were drying up. Time was running out. I queried various school district administrators, but they told me to just wait for a call, wait for more openings to come available. The days began melting into an endless blur of CHiPs reruns, and as each new day came it was harder and harder to get off the couch.

  Meanwhile, my constant companion was very present. Old tics I hadn’t seen since junior high reemerged as if they’d never left. I chomped my teeth together violently as my head twitched from side to side. My head sometimes shook so hard that Jordan said it looked like it might fly off. Sometimes I slammed my head back with such force that my neck was in a constant state of soreness, and the pain became more intense with every jerk and tic.

  My usual tics were also coming faster and louder, wearing out my body and sapping my strength. I knew it was important to keep my spirits up throughout the job search process, but the overwhelming physical exhaustion caused by the tics just didn’t leave me with any resources to meet the task. Despite my determination to remain positive, I began sliding backward.

  When I first moved to Atlanta, I had a very active social life and spent most of my free time with friends. We went out a few nights a week. Now I rarely left the apartment. It was so much easier to just stay home and not have to answer a lot of depressing questions about how the ol’ job hunt was going. Besides, my tics were never as bad at home as they were out in public, and I needed as much time away from them as I could get.

  By late August I was as discouraged as I had ever been. Diane, my stepmother, visited me in my new apartment and tried to give me some confidence. I tried to take Diane’s encouragement—and the kind words of all my friends—to heart, but it was tough. Recently she recalled the situation: “No one was willing to risk hiring a teacher with Tourette syndrome, and Brad was so discouraged. Despite the glowing recommendations he presented, he kept having doors close in his face.”

  Later, after Diane had left and I was alone with my thoughts again, I decided I had to come up with some sort of plan. I realized that I might need to consider starting off as a substitute teacher, just to get into the schools. That way, at least people would see what I could do in a classroom. But then I thought some more. Would the barrier to that route be any different? If the people who did the hiring actually believed I wouldn’t be fit as a full-time teacher, would they be any more inclined to give me access to the same students, just because I was dubbed a “substitute” teacher instead?

  No matter how I reasoned it out, the same answer kept coming back: I am a teacher. I was born for this. I have to teach. I am not going to let anything stop me.

  The late Joseph Campbell, a great teacher and mythologist, described a phenomenon that is often found in stories of life-or-death struggles. It is the moment when the hero finds himself or herself inside what Campbell called the “Innermost Cave.” The Innermost Cave is that point in a long and arduous journey or battle when all the hero’s resources are exhausted. Even the inner resources of self-confidence become useless. Inside this Innermost Cave, the hero will either fall into despair and be defeated, and the journey will end, or he or she will spontaneously develop some new ability and survive to fight another day.

  I was deep inside my Innermost Cave, and I knew it was time for me to take a giant and aggressive leap forward in my social marketing skills. Whether or not it felt natural for me to sell myself to strangers, I had to do it and do it better than I ever had before. And to be successful at that, I needed to make some sort of new push unlike anything I’d done so far—because somehow I had to find a principal who was willing to take a chance on hiring me. That was all there was to it.

  I knew my principal was out there. I just hadn’t found him or her yet.

  The next morning I got up especially early. My new resolve had filled me with an inordinate amount of energy. Instead of moving from the bed to the couch and making another rerun marathon out of the day—and instead of obsessing over my unemployment—I resolved to drive around and make impromptu visits to a new list of schools over the course of a single day. At each one, I would walk in smiling, greet anyone who would talk to me, introduce myself, and drop off as many résumés as I could. Despite my depressed state, I knew I could muster up enough energy for a plan like this if I made the entire effort in a single, long burn.

  When it came time to saddle up for the day, I put on the old pin-striped suit, printed out a map of all the schools from the computer, then grabbed a stack of freshly printed résumés and took off. Inside the car, I cranked up the air and pointed the vents at my face, the usual routine in my quest to avoid looking sweaty in front of a future boss. This morning it felt especially right to appear at my best. The first stop on the long route was a large elementary school in a nice suburban area. I spoke with the secretary in the main office, who smiled and told me that the principal was unavailable. She gave me a second professional smile, took my résumé, and wished me luck. Strike one.

  I got back in my car and looked on the map for the next school. As I’ve mentioned before, metro Atlanta is not an easy city for a newcomer to figure out. Many streets have the same name even though they are entirely different roads. There are over fifty streets called Peachtree-something. Many streets end abruptly and then inexplicably resume a half mile later. Other streets change names, sometimes every few blocks.

  I couldn’t help thinking about my mother’s invitation to return to St. Louis, but I repeated to myself that it could never be an option. Over the years I had met too many people with Tourette’s who had given up on their lives. Their plights made me determined never to let myself get to that point, because I strongly suspected that if I failed to break into the teaching profession now, then this same failure would set off a series of defeats that would eventually become my downfall. I was reminded once again of my initial experience with the Tourette syndrome support group meeting and the sad lives those people had all fallen into. The thought gave me enough resolve to finish my plan for the day.

  In that cheerful frame of mind, I arrived at the next school on the list. Again I spoke with a secretary, gave her my résumé, and smiled back when she informed me that the principal was unavailable.

  When I arrived home in the middle of the afternoon, I’d visited twenty schools. Who says manic outbursts aren’t useful? Exhausted, I went inside, peeled off my suit, and chugged down a glass of water. What a day. Just as I was about to fall into bed for a nap, the phone rang. The man on the line asked if I was still looking for a teaching position.

  “Yes, I am,” I said, trying not to sound too eager.

  “I’m Jim Ovbey,” he went on. “I’m the principal at Mountain View Elementary. We were wondering if you could come in for an interview today.”

  Hmmm … Oh, let’s see. Could I?

  I remained heavy on the professionalism and light on the desperation while we set up an appointment for four thirty that afternoon. Then he handed the phone to the assistant principal, Hilarie Straka, and she gave me directions.

  My heart was racing when I hung up. Handing out those résumés was a great idea, I thought. Even though I had not gone to that particular school, the school community was so well connected that résumés were floated around right and left, and names of likely candidates were exchanged like cheers at a sporting event. Someone I had seen earlier might even have put in a good word for me. I put my suit back on, grabbed my portfolio, and headed back into the summer heat and the rush-hour traf
fic.

  What I didn’t know then was that Jim Ovbey was more than a little concerned about the barking sounds I had made on the phone. I apparently was barking so loudly and so frequently that Jim had problems concentrating on our conversation.

  “All the time I wondered what it would be like to have a man like Brad working with us,” Jim said later. “Would we, and the children and their parents, be strong enough to work with him?”

  At the time, Mountain View Elementary had six self-contained classes for children with learning disabilities.

  “We had told those children time after time that they could do anything they wanted to do or be anything they wanted to be,” Jim continued. “And, as Hilarie, my assistant principal, said, ‘If we are going to talk the talk, then we’d better walk the walk.’”

  All of this was unknown to me when I arrived at Mountain View, finding the school perched on a hill at a busy intersection. The school was in Cobb County, a suburban district that families moved into because of the strong reputation of the schools. On that afternoon, the parking lot was empty because it was a few days before teachers had to report. A week after that, the kids would arrive to begin the new school year.

  From the outside, Mountain View didn’t seem much different from many of the other elementary schools I had visited. It was square, brown, and unremarkable. But inside, I noticed that the office had a clean, crisp appearance. Despite the inexpensive wicker furniture, someone with a sense of style had given the space a nice decorator’s touch. Classical music played softly in the hallway, and from somewhere came the soothing chirps of parakeets.

  Then I met Jim and Hilarie, both casually dressed and waiting for me. As soon as we entered Jim’s office, I felt more comfortable than I had at any of the other schools. They asked me a lot of the standard questions about teaching and about what kind of position I wanted.