The Gypsy Diaspora of Befuddled East-Coasters

The out-of-work teacher prepared her job application materials, contemplating the precious perfection and insufferably superior attitudes she expected to encounter at the alternative school designed to broaden the minds of pre-teens. If the last school where she had suffered through four fifths of a year of curiously combined appreciation and humiliation was any example of private school general attitudes, then she was right. So her preparations were meticulous but her attitude was bad. As she drove the five mintues to the school, she tried to improve upon it, forcing a smile into the rear-view mirror and thinking positive, friendly thoughts toward the institution where so many innocents spent their adolescence bieng happily intellectually stimulated beyond the wildest nightmares of even senior-high students in the local public schools, and where dedicated teachers loved their angelic pupils like their own fingers and toes.

She had taught at one of these places before and had become one of these adults whose tiny world revolved around creating tiny worlds for her students' tiny worlds to intellectually revolve around until . . . And she admitted to herself, not for the first time, that she still loved students but despised other teachers and, most especially, school administrators. Despised them. 

On that five-minute drive, while applying tingly-minty "nutmeg" lipstick, she contemplated the pure hell of teaching in public schools but discovered, to her great surprise, that she preferred it to the high and strange expectations of the far-better private school world. It struck her as odd that any sane person could prefer public school, but then again . . . On the one hand, you have the frustration of being by far the best, most organized and least burnt-out teacher in a pathetic piece-of-shit institution with no money and crappy facilities, where the children are bent on humiliating their teachers daily. Then, on the other hand, in a private school, her intellect, training, and creativity would allow her to execute her job perfectly, and with impeccable cooperation from bright and eager students, but the looming expectation of somehow falling short of a strictly adhered-to and utterly mysterious code of operational ethics and thus being shunnned by parents and teachers alike as some kind of horrifying she-wolf predator, that sort of ruined it.  She knew this because it had happened numerous times.

Like once, she had been reprimanded and forced to confusedly apologize to a schoolyard bully whom she had remanded to the authority of the office personell, but whom she had become angry with and, though she hadn't actually yelled at or touched the child, she had got "red in the face," in the words of her furious supervisor. This redness of face, apparently, was utterly unacceptable to private school people, whose collective toleration for violent-seeming skin tone was very very low indeed. Then, another time, she had sent a child who was screaming and crying with an ear infection to the office for appropriate treatment, but he was sent back to the classroom in the same screaming and crying state. She gave him an "alieve" painkiller. Not being a registered nurse, this sort of mercy is technically illegal, and so she was sent packing. The child's pain and suffering not-withstanding, apparently. No one could just sweep it under ther rug and leave well enough alone? Well, the kid gleefully ratted her out on the playground, expressing his gratitude for it to various pop-eyed adults, who took direct action. So no, it seemed not.

Public school born and bred, her demeanor was seen as excitingly "edgy" by some. A product of an east-coast-roofing-family dad cum intellectual rogue and sentimental Kennedy-worshiper and a neurotically tough mom raised with brothers and pain, her direct manner and charmlessly intelligent conversational grace befuddled many young Santa Fe parents who had never heard a voice raised in anger, nor seen a color that wasn't a pretty desert hue. "Edgy?" thought she, many times after the incident where she had been titteringly and warningly called "edgy." "Edgy?" And now, years after that confusing educational and employment tsunami, she concluded that "edgy" was just a word these west-coast people had for her people: the displaced gypsy diaspora of befuddled east-coasters who have traveled too much to belong anywhere anymore.