Cars and Drivers
by Matt Copeland
At times it's surprising that wisdom comes to us in small
doses, at the most fortunate of moments and in the most bizarre of packages. I
had the occasion to re-learn this lesson recently in the most intriguing of
ways. Misery certainly loves company, and many of us feel the need to share our
common pain with our colleagues. Rarely though are we allowed the opportunity to
sit back and have our dissatisfaction alleviated by the words of others. British
middle-distance runner Doug Larson once said, "Wisdom is the reward you get
for a lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk" (Dormann
268).
Not too long ago I had dinner with Susan, a colleague from a high school on the
opposite end of the city. We met at a restaurant downtown, far from either of
our respective suburbs, to share our thoughts and vent some of our frustrations.
After the meal, we decided to enjoy the springtime weather and continue our chat
with a stroll through the city streets. What transpired was a tired and overly
depressing conversation about educational reform, standards, and the inherent
dangers of newly passed legislation. Then we met Leroy.
He was a short stocky man, wearing dirty corduroys and an untucked over-shirt
draped over his slumping shoulders. The stubble on his chin indicated that he
hadn't shaved in several days and he stood before us rubbing his leathery hands
together roughly. With one eye gazing lazily over a pair of broken wire-rimmed
glasses, the man inquired about our profession.
"We're both teachers," replied Susan, drawing her hand up around the
collar of her coat.
This strange new acquaintance tilted his head to one side and nodded ever so
slightly, almost as though the words were taking their time sinking into the
man's brain. At this moment, a second man, much more nicely dressed and groomed,
appeared from around the corner.
"Leroy," he exclaimed, "there you are. You got away from me
again." The second man, Jimmy, turned his attention from his companion and
addressed the two of us. "Sorry if he inconvenienced you in any way. He's a
little tired and confused after work."
"No, no," I replied, "he was just asking about our profession.
We're high school English teachers."
"Wonderful," Jimmy said, "Lord knows we need more teachers."
"And what do you do?" Susan inquired with a warm, pleasant smile upon
her face.
"Me and Leroy work down at the car wash on 42nd street."
At this Leroy came to life. His back straightened and his eyes shined with a
glow of wit and wisdom. "I dry the cars when they come out from the
wash," he said. "I get to run my hands all over them Mercedes,
Porsches, Cadillac's, BMW's, all them other fine cars. Just the other day I got
to put my hands all over a 1958 Rolls-Royce." There was a pride and
enthusiasm in Leroy's voice that made it hard to reconcile in our minds the man
speaking at the moment and the man who first approached us.
"You'll have to excuse ol' Leroy here," Jimmy said. "He takes his
job pretty serious. And for him, the job's all about the cars. Which ones he
sees, which ones he likes, which ones he graces with his towel. I guess you
could call him a bit of a car buff."
"That's right," Leroy jumped in before Jimmy had a chance to laugh at
his own crude pun, "I don't be wasting my time with just any old car. I
don't have no time for some of the trash that comes rolling down that line. A
car's gotta have style. It's gotta have grace."
"Okay Leroy, okay. These fine people don't want to be hearing your views on
the ins and the outs of the car wash business."
"To the contrary, it's quite interesting," I replied. "It's good
to see a man that cares for his work and takes it seriously."
"Oh, he takes it seriously alright. Leroy here is the fastest towel-man we
got. He might not look like much, but you should see him work. It's amazing. And
he just keeps getting faster and faster. Why, just last week he set a new record
for number of cars dried in one day. The boss was just beaming with pride. He's
always carrying on about 'constant improvement, constant improvement.' One day
poor Leroy here is just gonna up and rub his arms clean off. He'll stretch out
to dry the hood of some fancy little sports car and he'll just fall to pieces
right there on top of it."
At this all four of us let out a chuckle. Susan and I nodded knowingly with a
faint trace of a smile crossing our lips.
"And what do you do at the car wash," Susan asked Jimmy, "do you
dry the vehicles as well?"
"Oh, no ma'am," he replied, "I work on the front end of things.
It's my job to meet the customer when she pulls in, find out what type of wash
she wants, take her money, and then make sure she is satisfied when the job is
complete."
"So you approach the job from more of the 'customer service' end of
things," said Susan.
"Sure, I guess you could put it that way," he said. "We just work
at different ends of the car wash. Leroy sees mainly the cars. I see mainly the
drivers. What was it that you said you teach?"
"We teach high school English," I said. The answer seemed somehow
irrelevant and insignificant in light of the larger conversation.
"Never had much use for that in my life," Leroy retorted. "All
them writers and their stories. All those teachers preachin' about them fancy
words and phrases. Most all of it went right over my head."
I swallowed hard for us all. Leroy was the evening equivalent of the student in
class who asks, "When are we ever going to use this stuff?" Susan
smiled with her reply. It was the kind of smile that masked her true thoughts, a
gelatin coating for a bitter dose of truth and reality. "I suppose we all
find our callings in life, don't we?" she said.
"I guess that's right," Leroy answered. "We all got to find that
thing that fills our hearts and makes us feel whole."
And at that Leroy must have felt that our conversation had come to a close. He
rubbed his hands roughly together one last time and headed on down the street,
Jimmy in quick pursuit. Susan and I stood there for a moment, dumbfounded at our
own blindness and stupidity.
After Leroy everything seemed to make much more sense. What had been a tiring
and depressing conversation about the realities of teaching became the
beginnings of a realization. Our problems and frustrations were not based on
what others were doing to us; they were based in our failure to respond. Whether
he knew it or not, Leroy taught us a valuable lesson-public education is nothing
more than a carwash. Each of us has a job to do and the only way it will be done
well is if we all pull together to accomplish the task at hand. If we don't, the
system breaks down.
Susan and I soon remembered that the problems in our professional careers were
not the reform, the standards, or the legislation we both had complained about
so fervently all evening long. The problem was within ourselves. In our desire
to do at all times what is best for our students, we sometimes lose track of
also doing what is best for us. It does no good to spend our days trying to fill
the hearts and minds of our students when the reservoirs of our own hearts and
minds have withered bone dry. Complaining and finding someone else on whom to
pin the blame becomes a kind of escape for us, a way to shield ourselves from
our obligations and responsibilities. In short, we reduced ourselves to a common
pet peeve of most teachers: the "it's not my fault the dog ate my
homework" syndrome.
We lost touch with what Parker J. Palmer calls our inner-authority-the power of
our own beliefs and philosophies-and we relinquished control to an
outer-authority. As Palmer writes, "Authority is granted to people who are
perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives,
rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts. When
teachers depend on the coercive powers of law or technique, they have no
authority at all" (33).
Perhaps the time has come for public school teachers to reclaim what has been
lost. Perhaps it is time to rise up, call forth the Eric Cartman within us all,
scream at the top of our lungs, "You will respect my author-a-tie!"
and stand behind the work we do. As an individual with a graduate degree I have
a hard time admitting that I was foolish enough to forget this lesson. It took a
"towel man who never had much use" for English to remind me of the
power and authority we all have in our worlds.
Surrendering our authority over the philosophies, practices, and goals of our
classrooms will not improve the development of our students, nor will blindness
and a deaf ear to culture and community. We must strive to work together for the
benefit of students and our fellow teachers. In a semiotic sense, one group will
not endure without the help of the other; we must strive to find that vision
that will satisfy the souls of all participants.
For Leroy, fulfillment meant working with cars. For Jimmy, it was making the
drivers of those cars happy. And for Susan and me, it was being reminded of what
it means to teach.
Works Cited
Dormann, Henry O., compiler. The Speaker's Book of Quotations. New York:
Ballantine Books, 2000.
Palmer, Parker J. The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a
Teacher's
Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.