Rookie Notes

I just found an old notebook from a class I taught in a Maximum Security Prison before the Covid pandemic. I wasn’t new to teaching inside – just to this particular facility and this group of men. It was only our second class together.

Already, I’d taught the first part of the lesson and given the writing prompt. Now the men were writing quietly for 25 minutes.

For some reason, I was incredibly anxious that night, and must have tried to calm myself by writing along with them.

Here are my notes:

When I walked in the classroom tonight, I dropped the folder of homework I collected last week. I dropped my book, twice. I knocked over my water bottle.

The men looked bemused, though a few look at me with deadpan faces. Are they thinking I’m a fool?

I obviously seem like a nervous wreck. What’s going on? The guards are friendlier and nicer here than at xxx. [I don’t name facilities in this newsletter.]

Crackling walkie talkies in the background, as always. If I were in this place I would long for privacy and quiet above all things. The guys are staring at their pages, cramped over themselves.

Not only can you hear the train rumble by, but also its whistle. Seems like a cruel tease – this train is going somewhere, leaving you behind. The trains will come through hourly, taunting with their momentum, pulling out of the station, or worse, expresses, not even bothering to stop.

One guy has a maroon t-shirt and another a maroon sweatshirt. I don’t know what the deal is – I thought they had to always be in full uniform.

Jose is young, handsome wearing just a white tee shirt with his prison-issue pants. I’ve just read a snippet of an assignment he handed in earlier tonight. In the scene, he is 11, and rough callused hands are wrapped around his neck. ‘In that moment, she made your pants unzip,’ he wrote.

WTF? Is this his mother? Is she choking him? Having sex with him? His father is in the next room, hearing nothing. The next day the father leaves the family. Jose never sees him again.

In class, Jose is affable, positive. What happened to him? What lurks there?

Again, I wonder why I am here and what I think I am doing.

One guy, Kelly, a white guy with a long yellow-white pony tail down his back, wrote, ‘you [presumably the reader – me] will go home to your soft bed, met by someone who loves you. You will say that today you did a good thing. How dare you?’

We sit under florescent lights. The walls are beige, the floor is painted black. The windows are covered with wire mesh, and the chairs and tables have numbers on them.

I steal and I steal – the scene, the stories.