When I became a school administrator several years ago, friends urged me to put the “prince” back in principal. We all chuckled, thinking of the countless egomaniacal windbags we had known as principals I noted aloud that I could also put the “pal” back in principal. More knowing chuckles. After all, teachers know that one of the paybacks for teaching well is a version of affection, maybe a popularity that none of us ever had in high school.
Given my distate for caste systems (explicit or subtle), the notion of being a pal is probably more resonant in my work than being a prince. Now in the first third of my tenth year in my fifth school, I have come to realize that the work is more like “ministering” (from administer) or what I believe to be ministering. But what do I really know about ministering since, as my mother likes to remark, I am just part of the great “unchurched?”
Whether we accept it or not, school and schooling involve pain and discomfort, and my work with students, parents, and teachers has become a way of making sense of struggle. The struggle, all too often, is with another person; I wish, of course, that my “ministry” involved genuine struggles with uncomfortable ideas and concepts. Instead, I find myself engaged in conversations about physical and emotional discomfort. There’s the boy who can’t get over the girl and the break-up. There’s the girl who must be accepted to her first choice college and won’t consider any others. Or what? There are the mothers, so plentiful, who cannot stand to see or hear of any discomfort for any of their progeny. Or anyone else’s progeny, for that matter.
The volume and infectiousness of this reality used to drain me, and, sometimes, it still does. There was little left at the end of a day for anyone else and certainly not for a writing life. And so I allowed my writing life to wither at, what was for me, the apex of my writing life: a stint at an artists’ colony. I succumbed to a voice that asked these questions. What would a principal have to say? Where would this one find the time to hear his own voice? Who would want to read anything written by a principal, a bureaucrat, an apparatchik, a paperpusher?
Truth is for me that my work conjures short stories, monologues and prose, not poetry. It elicits rants and expulsions. Administering, as I know it, is prosaic and Sisyphean. And it’s absurd — absurd like Carl Hiaasen’s world is absurd, like Tom Perrotta’s world is absurd, like Tom Wolfe’s worlds are absurd like Rick Moody’s work is absurd (at least in The Diviners). The other truth for me is that administering has become more satisfying. There are the nearly undetectable moments in my office when the mother, who has lost her husband, pats her son on the knee and said she is so proud that he has come so far, then turns away, dabbing at tears. I could write about that; I know. But if she knew I was writing about her, would my ministry remain intact?
