Exactly ten years ago, I drove across town for an interview at a local charter school. I met with the Chief Executive Officer, an unconventional thirty-four year old with hair sprouting everywhere from his head, a tuft of hair hugging his bottom lip. I was in awe of this individual. The man was barely one year my senior and he was already the head of a burgeoning educational enterprise.
Before sitting for the interview, the CEO took me on a tour of the premises. As we traipsed through the corridors, I was struck by the sight of students who wore beige and red uniforms, and of teachers exercising strict control over the behavior of their students. These guys were doing something different and it was working, I thought. By the time we’d reached the CEO’s office I was smitten with the place. More so because I was desperate to escape from my current school, a “high-needs” institution located a few blocks away from my old house on the opposite end of town.
He interviewed me for forty-five minutes. By the end I was settled and sort of leaning back against chair, confident that I’d passed the first of four tests — I would be required to teach a math class to sixth graders and interview with two principals. The CEO gave me notice of the final question, and I braced myself for the asking.
“What is the one big thing that you want to achieve in your time here at the school?” asked the CEO.
My mind reverted back to my first debrief with my current principal in the previous fall. We were sitting across from each other in her office when she threatened to fire me after one formal observation of my performance. My breathing abruptly halted. I’d never been threatened with termination two months into my tenure at a job before. Moreover, the country was still mired in an economic quagmire. The employment market was tighter than the strings of a violin, leaving ten percent of the eligible working population scratching and clawing for any job that they could find. I didn’t want to become one of those people, especially as a recently fired black male teacher.
“I really want to become an indispensable member of a team,” I said. “I want to be that person that my co-workers can’t imagine working without. That’s always been a big goal of mine since I entered the workforce. To be thought of in that way.”
When I got the call from the CEO a few weeks after the conclusion of the interview, I literally jumped into the air. I was heading to my dream school, in addition to securing backup just in case my principal decided to pull the trigger on me at the end of the year. I’d accomplished all of this as a black man in a terrible economy. I was able to relax in response to this certainty, and this led to an improvement in my teaching performance.
On May 15, 2010, I retrieved a folded note from my mailbox. My first and last name was inscribed on the top flap. I flipped it open and read: “Congratulations on your successful completion of your first year as a professional teacher!”
I read the note a couple more times so that it could sink in. Within the span of a few months my principal had gone from threatening my extermination to offering the ultimate reaffirmation. It was big of her to make such a drastic transition.
I mouth the word, wow. Once again, I’d defied the odds and done the improbable. It was an arc that I was familiar with. I start slow out of the blocks and fall behind everyone else. While I’m running I develop an understanding of what is taking place in front of me, before kicking it into high gear in an effort to run everyone else down. I don’t always arrive at the finish line in first place, but I’ll put forth a respectable showing. That’s what life comes down to, right? Earning and offering respect. I earned my respect from the principal in the end.
****
Buoyed by my unlikely success at the previous school, I stepped through the doors of the charter school on July 19, 2010 with an audacious goal: To become Colorado Teacher of the Year. But as was the case with all of the new hires, I would have to first prove that I belonged. No problem, I thought. I’m ready to work for this. This would be the start of something foundational and enduring. This time, I was going to fly out of the blocks like the world’s fastest track athlete and run ahead of the pack at the beginning. There wasn’t anything that I wasn’t willing to do make sure that I started my tenure off right.
I did work as hard as I could during the next three weeks. The CEO knew it, my new principal certainly knew it. Even my sworn enemy at the time, the vice principal, — she’d stared holes into my back when she first caught a glimpse of me — knew it too. Despite all of that, I was called into the principal’s office on a Monday afternoon in August. The CEO sat across the table from me and insulted my intelligence before pushing a resignation letter across the table. I reached for the letter, signed my name on the line at the bottom of the page, and then fled from the office.
That same afternoon, after telling my mother about what happened an hour before, she suggested that I call my old school and ask them for my old job back.
I frowned at her and said, “Why would I want to do that? It’s only been a few months since I left that school for this one. If I crawl back to them and ask for my job back they will laugh in my face. I won’t do that.”
“What are you going to do then?” she said. “You can’t go for very long without a job.”
Exasperated, I said, “I’m going to go and lay down for a while,” I said. “I need to think about things. Is that okay with you?”
I spent most of the next few days in bed. I didn’t eat very much at all during that time, just allowed the despair resulting from the abrupt firing to sink its talons into me. My stomach sunk toward the front of my spine. I was hollow. It felt like all of my vital organs had been excised from my body with a rusty fish hook. By the third day I was paralyzed while listening to cars as they rumbled by, sinking further into a dangerous depression.
Sensing the danger that I was in, my momma knocked frantically on my bedroom door and said, “Eze! Are you all right.”
I let my head loll to the left side. “I’m fine momma.” I let out a sigh.
The doorknob twisted and in walked my mother through the doorway. Dad was not too far behind. I was given a pep talk by both of my parents before being pulled out of the bed by my arms.
My parents escorted me over to the desktop computer. They made me promise not to slink underneath my bedcovers after they left.
I was having flash backs to the termination while cycling through web pages. Unhealed wounds were being picked at and bloodied with each return to the scene of the crime. When my anger began to overflow I started thinking of bad ways to get revenge on the man who threw me out on the street as if I was garbage.
I let myself give up on ever becoming a teacher again. Though it was the right choice to put teaching behind me, I did mourn the loss of a career as if I were experiencing a death. It was the death of a career: I’d spent over eighteen months in school and internships, and survived the most harrowing year of my professional life before being affirmed as an effective teacher. And then my career and livelihood were taken from me so suddenly, leaving me with nothing to take from the experience except for the debt and inappropriate thoughts. So many of my inappropriate thoughts were directed at the CEO. I’d search online for all of negative articles I could find about charter schools, and then gobble them up like I would mini candy bars. I couldn’t stop myself from wishing for him and his school to fail.
It was a death of innocence too: The CEO had insisted that my firing was not about race. It was an unprompted denial which led to my becoming certain that the firing was very much about the color of my skin. It was the first time that I could explicitly recall losing a job because I was black. Knowing this changed me profoundly. In my mind I felt like I’d aged ten years over the span of an actual year.
The death of innocence spurred me to write, simple journaling at a rate of about once a week at the beginning because I didn’t think I had enough in me to write an essay or a book that a stranger would read. In between writing sessions, I was collecting the materials that I needed to apply for graduate school.
I kept including journal entries in my virtual binder while in the midst of completing my graduate studies at Regis University, although at a decreased frequency since I was so busy with trying to prove the CEO wrong. I excelled in all subjects, but I took particular pride in passing graduate school finance and accounting courses, since they’d required the application of mathematical theories and concepts.
A short time after I graduated into a six-month long stint of unemployment, bad thoughts began creeping into my psyche like venomous spiders. I started talking to myself, often fretting aloud about my unfortunate fate. Anxiety led to obsessive peeling of the skin along my cuticles. I’d go to the local gym and lift heavy weights to catch a break from the constant worrying. However, soon after arriving home from the gym, taking a shower, and sitting before the computer, I’d let out a heavy sigh because I knew I would have to start searching for the needle in the haystack, the perfect job for me.
When the rejection threatened to swallow me whole, I decided to step up my writing to reemerge from the despair. I began by printing copies of my entries and I pored over them, before combining them into a somewhat cohesive whole. Journal entries became chapters, and as I continued writing my memoirs I recalled details which had previously eluded me.
I finally found employment at the hospital on June 10, 2013. In the ensuing first few months, I was bounced around the hospital a few times before finding a home in the laboratory’s client services division. Eighteen months into my tenure as a client services representative, I knew that I’d become an indispensable member of a team. Take that Mr. CEO.
During the summer of 2015, I started writing twice a day during the weekdays — early morning before breakfast and after I finished eating my lunch — and for hours on the weekends. I’ve combined my daily writing regimen with weekly visits to church and twice-a-week group class workouts at the local gym. Church, group exercise classes, and writing have helped to keep my spirit cleansed of inappropriate thoughts for more than five years. I’ve been able to complete first drafts on two books, gain a promotion at work, and become a top writer on Medium.com over that span.
I’m looking forward to a having a lovely 2020, free of inappropriate and self-defeating thoughts.
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