LOSING MY FACULTIES(ISBN=9780812969511) 英文原版 pdf 在线 2025 epub 免费 书籍 下载

　　I am just one of those rare and probably defective people who

really enjoy the company of teenagers.

Brendan Halpin’s It Takes a Worried Man—a memoir of how he and

his family dealt with his wife’s battle against breast cancer—was

praised for its can-dor, raw humor, and riveting voice. Halpin now

turns his unique talent to an unforgettable account of the pursuit

of his true calling: teaching.

Losing My Faculties follows Halpin through teaching jobs in an

economically depressed white ethnic town, a middle-class suburb, a

last-chance truancy prevention program in the inner city, and an

ambitious college-prep urban charter school. In the same cuttingly

observant voice that marked It Takes a Worried Man, Halpin tells us

what it really means to be a teacher—the ups and downs in the

classroom, the battles with administrators and colleagues, and the

joy of doing a job that matters. Not the tale of a hero who changes

his troubled students’ lives in one year, Losing My Faculties is,

rather, the story of an all-too-fallible teacher who persists in

spite of the frustrations that have driven so many others from the

profession. After nine years of teaching, Halpin ?nds his idealism

in shreds but his sense of humor and love for his work blessedly

intact.

From the Hardcover edition.

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　　Brendan Halpin, a thirty-four-year-old high school English

teacher, is the author of the acclaimed memoir It Takes a

Worried Man. He lives in Boston with his wife, Kirsten, and

their daughter, Rowen.

　　From the Hardcover edition.

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　　1

　　In June 1990, with the aid of some creative credit card use, I go

to Taiwan on a bogus "exchange program" through my university. (My

future wife, Kirsten, and I are the first and last participants.)

The "exchange" is with some English-language institute in Taipei,

and the idea is that my university sends them recent grads to teach

for a few months, and they send students to the university's ESL

program for a few months. Of course, the real idea is that the

Chung Shan English Language Institute can put "Affiliated with Ivy

League University" on its brochures.

　　I fell into this because I worked in the International Programs

Office, and, being a senior with no ambition or clue what to do and

six months before my student loans were coming due, I decided that

spending six months in Taiwan would be a pretty cool

adventure.

　　The only downside (apart from the fact that Taiwan in the summer

is a bowl of heat, humidity, and pollution that puts even my native

Cincinnati to shame) is that I have to work at the institute

teaching English.

　　Well, maybe "teaching" is sort of a misnomer. Most of what I do

is work in the children's English classes, which they attend on

Wednesdays and Saturdays, when they only have a half day of regular

school. There is a Chinese teacher here to run the class and really

teach them stuff, and an American teacher to run language games.

It's like a very specialized, makeup-free version of clowning. I'm

good at it, but it gets old pretty quickly.

　　I also work the occasional evening teaching teenagers and adults.

Here I am the only teacher in the room, and though the syllabus has

every class planned out and it's mostly going through lame

exercises in the book, it is a version of teaching. Sometimes I

veer from the syllabus and actually talk to the students. I find

that I enjoy the teenagers the most. I don't know why this is-I

think I am just one of these rare and probably defective people who

really enjoy the company of teenagers.

　　It is July, and I have an early-evening class of all teenagers.

Years later I will still remember some of them-Julie, Jim, Kellie,

and Angle, who pronounces it "Angel" (of course, they have Chinese

names, but I never know them, which is kind of weird-it's like your

French or Spanish teacher only knowing you as Pierre or Vicente or

whatever name you adopted in high school language classes). I've

been teaching this group for about a month, and they are finally

comfortable enough to start speaking, and the lame exercise in the

book evolves into something that very nearly approximates a

conversation. Most of the students are speaking, their English is

flowing pretty well, and they're asking questions about the grammar

point and then using my answers-everything is just working really

well. I am shocked when class ends because it feels like it just

started.

　　I meet up with Kirsten, who was teaching across the hall,

and

　　prepare myself to leave the air-conditioning and step into the

lead apron of swampy heat that is Taipei in the summertime. When

the heat hits me, it's like a punch in the stomach. I've been here

a month and I'm still not used to it. I immediately start sweating

from every pore in my body, but I feel something else too.

Something strange. Something I have never felt at the end of a day

of work before.

　　I am happy and full of energy. I feel great-I'm buzzing

tremendously and talking a mile a minute as I practically run down

the street searching for some kind of cold beverage to save me from

imminent dehydration.

　　"I can't believe this!" I say to Kirsten, who is looking at me

"with stranger eyes," as one of our Chinese buddies would say. "I

feel great! You're not supposed to feel great after work! You feel

like shit, you go to happy hour to try and get happy, you don't get

happy just from work!"

　　I worked the five previous summers in an insurance company and

had a variety of jobs in college, and never, even when I watched TV

for money in my dorm as a work/study "job," did I feel this good at

the end of a day of work.

　　In my senior year of college I didn't feel very enthusiastic

about pursuing any line of work because I just assumed that work

was pain-in-the-ass drudgery that you endured until you had a few

pathetic hours of free time in which to do what you really wanted

to do. It just never occurred to me that work could be something

you actually enjoyed. And then I get this glimpse of a world that

few people are fortunate enough to know: the world in which work

doesn't suck.

　　Work, it seems, can actually be fun.

　　2

　　I       t is 1992. I live in a

tiny, mouse-infested apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, a

small city that borders Boston and Cambridge, and I am about two

months into ed school in nearby Medford. I just got through with a

year and a half of working at a computer company as a

bottom-of-the-ladder, assistant-to-an-assistant mail

sorter/photocopier/trash taker-outer. It wasn't horrible (except

for one particular day when I was taking out the lunch trash and

these bags of unused fish stock exploded all over me), but it

wasn't exactly what you'd call fulfilling, and I sure as hell never

felt great at the end of the day, so remembering my experience in

Taiwan, I decided to go to ed school. So far it's not as horrible

as everyone says. I have met some great people. Ten years later I

will still be friends with two out of the thirty of them, which is

really not a bad ratio. And we do nothing but think about teaching,

which, I will find, is something you rarely have time to do when

you are actually teaching.

　　I go to interview at the Boston public high school where I might

get placed as a student teacher. The teacher, Gordon Stevens, wants

to talk to me before he agrees to take me on, to make sure we can

work together. He asks me why I'm interested in urban education. I

give him a version of the truth-that this seems like where the real

action is in education, the front lines, that if I have any talent

for this at all, this is where I should be.

　　I do not tell him that I don't have a car and that this was the

only placement I could get to by public transportation after my

classmates snapped up all the Cambridge and Somerville

placements.

　　The whole truth is that I really can't articulate why I feel like

I want to teach here instead of in the suburbs. Certainly part of

it is feeling like I want to make a difference, like it matters

whether I go to work or not, which is something I never felt at the

computer company. I remember having a number of really incompetent

teachers (along with a handful of superstars) in high school, and I

wasn't really harmed by them-basically anybody coming out of my

small private high school started with enough advantages to be okay

one way or the other. I feel like maybe that's not the case here,

like maybe what I do could make a difference, like I would increase

my own importance by working with kids who might have their lives

changed by me. Yeah, so that's the liberal do-gooder

really-out-to-make-himself-feel-important part, which is widely

derided (unfairly, I think-isn't that kind of a win-win?).

　　I don't know. I'd like to say that I'm over that feeling

completely now, nine years into my teaching career, but I know that

one of the reasons I still love my work is that it feels

important.

　　What I don't tell Mr. Stevens, because I haven't figured it out

yet, is that I feel called to urban teaching (maybe a pretentious

word choice, but it does feel that way-like somebody's tugging me

to get into this, like I can't imagine working in a rich suburb or

a private school, even though I never set out to be the Urban

Education Warrior) not just because it will make me look big, and

not just because I want to try something hard, and not just because

it's where the action is. I want to do this because it's mine.

Because I have spent my whole life in cities, because I can't seem

to get away from the problem of how to live with people who aren't

like you (or even people who don't like you), because I was brought

up by a single parent in the city, because this is where I

live.

　　Maybe Mr. Stevens understands all this, because he tells me he

gets a good feeling from me and is looking forward to us working

together. I'm looking forward to it too.

　　Of course, I'm also terrified.

　　3

　　For the first half of the year, I'll be observing Mr. Stevens. I

will take over two of his classes in the second semester. He is

great at his job. It's not that he holds the class spellbound all

the time-that's an overrated skill usually possessed by Cult of

Personality teachers who are so in love with themselves that they

convince the students to follow suit-he just oozes competence. And

I am daunted by what it takes to achieve it. Even after what

appears to be a very successful class, he retires to his

"office"-by being in charge of purchasing office supplies, he has

scored himself a supply closet in the attic and squeezed his desk

between the boxes of chalk and paper clips, making him the only

non-administrator in the entire building who has space in which to

work when he's not teaching-and tortures himself, agonizing over

what could have gone better, what he could have done differently,

what he will do differently tomorrow. It looks like a lot of work.

I don't know if I really have it in me to do this to myself every

day.

　　Mostly I observe him with a class full of ninth-graders. One of

whom is a class clown named Trenton. He is obviously very bright,

but he's not doing his work and he mostly makes jokes about his

classmates. I write a paper about him and show it to Mr. Stevens.

He furrows his brow. He hadn't noticed half the misbehavior that I,

sitting silently in the back of the room, have recorded. Now he has

more stuff to agonize over.

　　One day I have a big cup of coffee right before class. I will

never do this again. Mr. Stevens gets the kids started on some sort

of activity and then needs to leave the room-he has to talk to

somebody about something, perhaps relating to office supplies. "Mr.

Halpin can help you while I'm out of the room," he tells the class.

This

　　is my first big moment, my first moment as a "teacher," and I am

paralyzed-I wasn't prepared to actually interact with the kids when

I left the house this morning! I'm just the Watcher! I watch, and

record, and imagine fearfully how I might deal with Trenton or his

classmates in every situation of every class. I can certainly

handle the activity, but I hardly know these kids' names! What will

I do if they misbehave? What do they think of me? Who do they think

I am? I know when I was in high school, I probably would have been

instinctively contemptuous of somebody lurking in the back of the

room, and I probably would have tried to torture that person, just

out of that killer instinct that packs of adolescents possess. (At

my private high school we didn't have student teachers-they just

threw the twenty-three-year-olds with no experience right into the

classroom as full-fledged teachers. We did savage some of them.)

What if their relatively calm behavior arises only out of their

respect for Mr. Stevens? Will this room turn into a scene out of

the first half of Lean on Me, before Morgan Freeman starts carrying

a bat and Showing Those Tough Kids Who's Boss?

　　Trenton is having trouble with the exercise, and he calls me over

for help. I get right up next to his desk and begin to

explain-"Well, you see how the adjective goes here," or some such

thing, and Trenton interrupts me. "I'm sorry, man, I don't mean to

disrespect you, but you got that nasty Student Teacher

Breath."

　　The class breaks up. I have no idea what to say. I am not yet

secure enough to laugh at a joke like this. I probably try to

pretend like I'm laughing, when of course I am horrified, so it

probably comes out all fake, he-heh. Whatever it is, I do nothing

to save the situation except for not getting angry. Have I passed

some kind of test, or failed it? Or both? I never get a chance to

find out. Mr. Stevens returns, order is restored, and the class

ends soon afterward.

　　Nine years later I see Trenton at the ice cream parlor in my

neighborhood. He looks at me without a trace of recognition, but I

know him immediately.

　　4

　　A       t the beginning of the

second semester the classes change, so the class of Mr. Stevens'

that I will be in charge of is a group of twenty-seven

tenth-graders. It is a writing class. I will be able to read and

comment meaningfully on all of their papers because I have only two

classes. I have no idea how I might manage to do that if I were

teaching five classes of this size, which is what all the real

teachers here are doing. For the first few days Mr. Stevens is in

charge, and we are meeting in a science room with long tables and

tall stools, only there aren't twenty-seven stools, so some kids

are sitting on the heater over by the window, while others are on

the floor. Somehow Mr. Stevens engineers a switch, and we end up in

a French classroom that can just barely fit everyone.

　　On my first day of actually teaching this class without Mr.

Stevens present, I get my big Test of the Student Teacher, which I

fail miserably. I turn around to write something on the board, and

somebody, somewhere (well, I know exactly which table it comes

from, but since my back was turned, I do know enough to know I

can't point the finger without enduring a twenty-minute debate

about how I didn't see and I can't possibly be so unfair as to

accuse someone without evidence), throws a piece of chalk. It

explodes on the pipe that runs across the ceiling, making a really

spectacular noise and showering dust all over the floor.　　

　　From the Hardcover edition.

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媒体评论

　　Comic, profane, honest and thought-provoking...an irreverent,

heartbreaking, dumbfoundingly funny book about love, fear and

perseverance.

　　The Arizona Republic

　　Traumatic, touching and shockingly funny... Bottom line: Man at

his best. People

　　Raw, undisciplined, and frequently very funny.Boston Sunday

Globe

　　If it takes a worried man to write a book like this, then Mr.

Halpins disquietude is our decided gain. With admirable vigilance

against self-pity, the unflagging knowledge that he is not, at the

end of the day, the one who is sick, and the comical contortions of

a man trying to avoid the maudlin and trite, Brendan Halpin has

written a work that is both genuinely moving and

frequentlysurprisingly frequentlyhilarious, a beautiful portrait of

the dark, unlovely rollick of adulthood.

　　David Rakoff, author of Fraud

　　From the Hardcover edition. -- Review

书籍介绍

I am just one of those rare and probably defective people who really enjoy the company of teenagers.

Brendan Halpin’s It Takes a Worried Man —a memoir of how he and his family dealt with his wife’s battle against breast cancer—was praised for its can-dor, raw humor, and riveting voice. Halpin now turns his unique talent to an unforgettable account of the pursuit of his true calling: teaching.

Losing My Faculties follows Halpin through teaching jobs in an economically depressed white ethnic town, a middle-class suburb, a last-chance truancy prevention program in the inner city, and an ambitious college-prep urban charter school. In the same cuttingly observant voice that marked It Takes a Worried Man , Halpin tells us what it really means to be a teacher—the ups and downs in the classroom, the battles with administrators and colleagues, and the joy of doing a job that matters. Not the tale of a hero who changes his troubled students’ lives in one year, Losing My Faculties is, rather, the story of an all-too-fallible teacher who persists in spite of the frustrations that have driven so many others from the profession. After nine years of teaching, Halpin finds his idealism in shreds but his sense of humor and love for his work blessedly intact.

From the Hardcover edition.