When I got it into my head that it would be a Good Idea to become a school principal and I started looking around for a place to do it, a kindly colleague got me an interview for an assistant principal position at a big middle school in Northwest Washington, DC, the wine-and-Audi part of town. I looked up the school online and typed up some notes about its test scores and demographics and extracurricular offerings, prepared a few smart-sounding questions, placed the notes and a clean copy of my resume in a new manila folder, and showed up at the school one morning, clean-shaven, the knot of a red necktie pushing up against my jugular veins.
The school was a red brick building with the requisite flagpole and clearly marked places for visitor parking. Though it was midmorning on a schoolday, everything was very quiet, more like a pandemic-days office building than a school. No kids. Just inside the main entrance was a security station with a couple of uniformed guards and a metal detector. I told the guards I was there for an interview with Principal So-and-So, and after one of them made a call to confirm the veracity of my claim, they politely instructed me to empty my pockets and walk through the metal detector holding my manila folder. I triggered no alarms, gathered up my belongings and stepped into the quietest, cleanest hallway in which I’ve ever stood: wide and empty and stretching on for what seemed like miles, the linoleum floor gleaming like glass.
No kids.
“Down the hallway to the left,” the guard told me.
I thanked him and began walking. My footsteps echoed. On either side of me were rows of undecorated lockers and closed doors, out of which came no noise. At even intervals other wide empty hallways cut away perpendicularly from this hallway, equally clean and quiet and lined with their own lockers and closed doors, which made me think of that great and somehow terrifying short story by Borges about how the universe is an infinite library of interconnected, identical rooms, each lined with identical bookshelves with the same number of identical books on each of the shelves, which is what happens when you prepare for being a school principal by majoring in Comparative Literature.
Finally I reached a door marked SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION. Beside it was a glass enclosed trophy case. I paused to take a look: Atop the trophies stood tiny gilded people carrying footballs and debating at podiums, great determination etched into their miniature faces. They did not look like kids.
Inside the administration office I encountered the first living person I had seen since the security guards, a middle-aged woman typing away at a computer. I told her my name and that I was there for an interview with Principal So and So. She looked at me for a split second while her hands continued typing at the computer and then looked back at her computer and told me to take a seat. I sat on one of two cushioned chairs, holding in my hands my folder with the typed up notes and smart-sounding questions and resume, the knot of the necktie pushing into my jugulars.
Now seemed like a good time to really focus on what I was going to say, how I would represent all my experience and degrees and passion for equipping future generations for success. But what I thought about instead was the last time I had sat in the anteroom of a principal’s office at a middle school. I was 12. Over the previous weeks my friends and I had been having great fun during recess splattering yogurt from our lunchbags across the wall of a little storage shed on the edge of the field. The activity was a combination of shot put and Jackson Pollock art-making, and we each were developing our own yogurt-splattering technique. Some days we’d come out and the yogurt splats from the previous day would still be there, crusty and faded, and we’d splatter on another compositional layer; other days the wall would be wiped clean and we’d have a fresh canvas to work with. It didn’t occur to us that an actual person was having to clean up after us, or how that person might have felt about such a task, until one day when I came out of my trademark spin-and-splatter move to find an angry teacher staring at me, fists on his hips. He’d set up a sting operation, had been lurking on the other side of the shed, and now I had been the unfortunate soul caught in the act. He gave me an earful as he marched me away from my scattering friends, into the principal’s office, where I sat across from an oversized 8th grader with a moustache and ripped heavy metal garb who was rolling a quarter over his knuckles, from one side of his hand to the other. I don’t know how long I sat there, my stomach knotted with fear that the principal would yell at me or call my parents or have me arrested for vandalism. I had never been sent to the principal’s office before. I watched that quarter roll across the knuckles of the moustached kid across from me, sinking lower and lower into my chair.
“He’ll see you now,” the middle-aged woman said, indicating a door to my left, and I was back in DC, a manila folder in my lap. I opened the door not into a principal’s office but a small, clean conference room with a rectangular table. There was a large TV monitor mounted high on one wall and a window on another. At the head of the table sat a white man in his 60’s, and to his left a shiny-faced white man in a suit who could’ve passed for a congressional intern and an older black woman that clearly wanted to be anywhere but here. They each had a copy of my resume in front of them. Neither held pens. The white man in his 60’s introduced himself as Principal So and So, and had his two colleagues introduce themselves as Assistant Principals So-and-Sos, then told me to take a seat, and without any fanfare made some comments about my resume being “unusual,” seeing how I’d taught abroad and then taken those two years off to be a writer and then worked with a non-profit called the Academy for the Love of Learning in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He asked me a couple of questions about the work I had done with the Academy, and I tried to explain how we’d invited teachers into experiential workshops so that they could reconnect with their love of learning. He blinked a couple of times and moved on to other topics that I no longer recall, because all I remember was trying to figure out why the two assistant principals, who hadn’t spoken except to introduce themselves, kept looking over my head.
Atop the trophies stood tiny gilded people carrying footballs and debating at podiums, great determination etched into their miniature faces. They did not look like kids.
Finally, when the principal took a moment to look down at my resume, I turned and saw that the two assistant principals were watching the TV monitor above me. It was split into four screens, projecting grainy closed circuit camera footage of the hallways. Which were empty. The assistant principals kept their eyes on them all the same.
I turned back to the principal and it dawned on me then that the only reason I had been invited to this interview was out of a professional courtesy to my colleague, and these people would be more likely to fill that assistant principal position with one those tiny gilded statues from the trophy case than hire me. By now the principal had reached that part of the interview where he asked me if I had any questions for him. Since now there was nothing to lose, I set aside my smart-sounding questions and asked something I had really been wondering about, which was what they thought about the fact that the schools in DC were so segregated by income and race, the one question you are not supposed to ask when you are applying to be a middle manager in a public school system, given that school segregation supposedly ended when those nine black kids courageously walked past those screaming white racist parents into an all-white school in Arkansas in 1957. The two assistant principals looked at me then, eyebrows raised. The principal leaned back in his chair, and said it was true, many of the schools in DC did have “homogenous” student populations, and then slid his way into a series of bureaucratic phrases about every child deserving to learn and accommodating needs of different socioeconomics. I blinked a couple times as he spoke. I’d never heard someone use the word “homogenous” in this context before. Such a gentle, passive word. Like “homogenized.”
Like milk.
Soon enough I was back in the hallway—still empty, still clean, still silent save my footsteps. I walked straight-backed, aware now that I was on camera, past the closed doors and lockers, past the security guards who wished me well, into the parking lot and to the door of my car. I tossed the manila folder onto the front seat. Loosened my tie. The whole interview, soup to nuts, had taken less than 25 minutes. Somewhere in that building, behind those closed door, there were kids. Kids with yogurt in their lunchbags, I hope.
Terrific, Seth. Perhaps this isn’t entirely your intention, but you’ve captured something about the sterility of our schools, and this is teaching something for sure.
"I looked up the school online and typed up some notes about its test scores and demographics and extracurricular offerings, prepared a few smart-sounding questions, placed the notes and a clean copy of my resume in a new manila folder, and showed up at the school one morning, clean-shaven, the knot of a red necktie pushing up against my jugular veins."
This is a great sentence.