A few days ago, I heard Stand by R.E.M. It came out in 1988. It gave me a center-point to hold on to in a stupidly difficult year.
In 1988, Beeville ISD hired me to teach 7th grade English at Thomas Jefferson Junior High School. They had recently changed the mascot from the Devils to the Jets because of the “satanic” overtones of the Devils. It was my first teaching job. I had been unable to find an English position in the Austin area, despite multiple interviews. I figure now that I was a crappy interviewer due to my tendency to mumble, talk fast when nervous, over-intellectualize simple questions and to look everywhere but at the person asking the questions. Or maybe something completely different: I didn’t know then which was all that mattered. Beeville needed an English teacher and I got hired. We moved to Beeville, Texas and I had my first classroom. It was a mistake from the start. Within the first few weeks, I had lost control, even if I had not realized it yet then. Although I figured it out pretty fast, but by the time I did it was too late. The seventh graders ate me alive. For the rest of the year I felt completely lost and unbalanced. It was sad. REM’s Stand (as well as David Wagoneer’s poem Lost, which I had taped to my desk) helped by reminding me to think about where I was amidst the chaos of my life that year. We moved back to Austin at the end of the school year.
This post has its origins in a “prompt” from a friend who asked that we write to memories elicited by various songs.
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