the characters in Kafka’s novels, the world seems mysterious and unfriendly,
and it becomes very difficult to achieve things.
— Macmillan Online Dictionary http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/Kafkaesque
When I was searching for one word to describe my manifold, multiplied, and manipulated and manipulating experiences as a public school teacher, one word came to mind:
Kafkaesque.
Franz Kafka was a morbid writer of the late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds. He was a melancholy man, one who has inspired a doomed respect among literary scholars, existentialist, nihilist, and atheist thinkers, and intellectuals in general. His fan based include sullen German people, hard and down on their luck types who revel in their inherited sense of failure, or who celebrate the frustrating emptiness of an existence which refused to be dismissed as arbitrary and meaningless. The human heart evermore refuses to believe in a world without purpose, but Kafka was the type who would resist the loud protests of his heart with all of his weakened might. He seemed to delight in depicted an empty, hostile, contrary world, as if the despair of "never making it. and knowing that you will never make it, yet you still try to make it" could be funny. To many critics, it is a compelling, horrific rant, kind of like looking at the ghastly, gaunt portrait of Cosmo Kramer from Seinfeld, minus the entertainment value.
As a freshman in high school, I first chanced on a copy of Kafka's novel The Castle, a novel which resisted any real comprehension for me. Admittedly, I have read and learned more about Kafka than I ever received from reading his work. To call his Weltanshauung "dim" is a naive understatement. The worlds he describes, characters trapped in difficult circumstances, held to answer for issues, conflicts, and problems under their responsibility, yet which they neither cause nor can cure.
My varied and harried experience as a public school teacher reminds me very much so of the character and challenges which met and overcome Kafka's protesting protagonists.
I cannot say that I have ever visited a castle where I was trying to meet the master of the keep, and from the moment I entered the township, I was in violation of the keep. Yet many schools seem to operate according to the principle that the teacher is always off behind, misunderstanding, and mistaken. I felt that way almost every day during my student teaching days, and also my first year teaching in Los Angeles Unified.
There were definitely many days, however, when I wished that I was a bug when I woke up, so that I would not have to contend with the certain dread of students unprepared, of administrators unsupportive, and parents unaccommodating. Did I neglect to mention the teachers both uncaring and unaccountable, including my first mentor teacher, who was supposed to help me clear my credential, but spent more time making excuses and not being present to observe my class?
There were those administrators, too, who would accuse me of things that I did not do, of parents who believed whatever their children told them when they came home and recounted terrible things that I had never done. I certainly felt like I was being judged constantly, held to answer for high crimes, misdemeanors, mistakes and missteps which I could never have foretold or been forewarned. One of the more experienced teachers admitted to me that she routinely visited a counselor to pour out her woes about teaching in an inner city school, how she would start up from bed in the middle night, covered in a cold sweat, panicking about the lesson which she was supposed to prepare and present the next week.
Like the whimsical and ideal main character in Amerika (Yes, "America with K"), I expected the world of public education to be an idyllic, productive place, where I could take students to new extremes and vistas, to open their minds to all that they could be. Fantasy describes much of the ideas and notions that occupy the neophyte teacher's mind. If he can survive student teaching and the first year teaching on his own without a mentor or a university supervisor, then perhaps he can drag along for another ten or fifteen years in the troubled urban schools, believing still that the white, rich, elite schools on the other side of the railroad tracks will be better. Alas, the Kafakesque nightmare of public education is worse where there is more money, more parental involvement, more lawsuits, more pandering and bickering, more back-biting and gossip against capable teachers who simply raise the ire of well-connected parents.
If there is any word which best describes the trials and tribulations of a teacher in the public school system, "Kafkaesque" is the mot juste.