Class One: June 2, 2008, 12:40 to 1:40.
Michael Cannamela stands in the doorway of his classroom toward the end of one of Waterford High School’s dimly lit corridors, like he is waiting for a late-arriving student, only this time it’s a tardy reporter without a hall pass.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Come on in.”
All around Cannamela’s classroom are pictures and banners of mouth-watering red Ferrari sports cars. There are so many, you almost miss the pictures of the fish.
“Yes,” he laughed. “Ferraris and fish—two of my favorites.”
Cannamela is overseeing a study hall and a small group of students is huddled at the back of the classroom, presumably doing homework, but then again, it’s June.
Cannamela pulls out a chair to the side of the desk, offering me a seat in the manner he must have for dozens of students who stayed after school for extra help, that mostly likely morphed into one of those conversations where you really get to know your teacher and find out they are flesh and bone—not some red-penned grading machine.
I noticed behind him a copy of the late Jeff Buckley’s album Grace, a record that meant plenty to the high school me back in 1994.
“I was playing my students his version of ‘Hallelujah,’” he said. “It’s part of our unit on poetry.
“It’s a spectral version of a haunting song by Leonard Cohen, with lines such as, ‘All I’ve learned from love is how to shoot somebody who outdrew you.’”
Cannamela then repeated the song’s most gripping line, “Love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and broken Hallelujah.”
“Plus the song was in Shrek,” he said with a smile.
“Hallelujah” illustrated the point he wanted to make to his students: “Poetry is words sewn together.”
It’s one of the last classroom lessons he’ll impart. Cannamela is retiring this month after 35 years of teaching in the Waterford public schools.
He spent 32 years at Clark Lane Junior High and then Middle School, before spending the last four at WHS.
And come this August, Cannamela and his wife, Joan, a Clark Lane history teacher who is also retiring, will be driving the Maine coast in search of lobster rolls and ice cream.
Cannamela realized teaching was for him when he was attending elementary school in Waterford.
“I was in the sixth grade and we had to read stories to the first-graders,” he said. “It was then I realized the power of language.”
Plus, he repeated the “Internationale” of English majors: “I have no math ability.”
He studied literature at Central Connecticut State University, developed a lifelong love of Ken Kesey and Kurt Vonnegut, and began teaching in Waterford shortly after he graduated.
Cannamela said some of the books he admired as a student, such as S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, still resonate with today’s teenagers.
But today’s students, he noted, are different from yesterday’s.
“Books aren’t as important to them,” he said. “Nobody reads fiction anymore.”
Also, the manner in which teachers hold court in the classroom has changed.
“Testing is such a phenomenal part of it now,” he said. “It’s a constant pressure; sometimes I think I’ve trained them, but not educated them.”
It’s that sort of candid talk that no doubt earned him the admiration of students such as Anya McCarthy, who e-mailed him to see if he’d like to help Habitat for Humanity build homes in New Orleans.
Or this one: A former student of Cannamela’s, who is now in college, e-mailed him recently and referred to her former English teacher as her “conscience.”
This particular student was out sick during the time her professor gave a review of the class in preparation for the final exam.
The student contacted her professor shortly thereafter to see if she could get the review notes.
The professor agreed, but accidentally sent her the actual final exam.
“It was then,” Cannamela said, “she pictured me over her shoulder like Jiminy Cricket.”
The student immediately sent back the final and deleted it.
“I got one of my students to make a moral decision through literature,” Cannamela said. “My work here is done.”
Class Two: June 3, 2008, 9:15 to 9:50.
Trying to enter Clark Lane Middle School makes you appreciate what it must be like for a UPS delivery person outside a Soho walk-up.
Because the door is locked, one must push a button, wait for someone to answer, and then as a sign advises, “State your business,” after which, presumably, you are buzzed in.
Once inside, I got a visitor pass and attempted to locate Joan Cannamela’s classroom in the labyrinthine school.
All the while, a security guard eyed me and followed a few steps behind.
The guard immediately became suspicious when I took a right when I should’ve gone left, and became lost.
“Why don’t you follow me,” he said, as he escorted me to the intersection of two hallways. “Room S113 is toward the end of the hallway.”
The guard then watched me as I walked down the hall and knocked on Cannamela’s door.
After apologizing for being a tad late, I mentioned the guard’s fastidiousness with my presence.
“That’s what has changed the most in schools since I started,” she said. “It’s what happened after Columbine.”
Cannamela, a history teacher in Waterford for 38 years, said her eighth-grade classes often discuss the 1999 high school shooting in Colorado in terms of personal freedoms.
“We discuss the difference between freedom and security,” she said. “That was a pivotal moment.”
In fact, it’s most of what Cannamela has spent her career doing, pointing out pivotal moments in history and relating them to her students’ own experiences.
Cannamela said over the years her students have reacted positively to personal narratives such as Frederick Douglass’ autobiography and Night by Elie Wiesel.
“We balance in a sense of hope,” she said.
During her final few weeks in the classroom, Cannamela’s been giving lessons on America in the 1950s, as pictures of pop-culture icons from the decade adorn the walls.
Lately she’s been playing the students Chuck Berry records, and, “They like it more than they will admit.”
“I grew up in the ‘50s,” she laughed. “Maybe it is time to retire when you are teaching the decade you grew up in.”
Cannamela is a New Londoner by birth, one of three daughters.
Her father was a Navy man who died shortly after the end of World War II, leaving Cannamela’s mother to raise the children.
“My mother was a strong advocate for making it on your own,” she said. “You need to support yourself.”
Cannamela’s mother put all her daughters through college.
Cannamela, ever the history teacher, instilled the quintessential American values of self-reliance into the two daughters she had with Michael.
“Katie teaches Italian at Norwich Free Academy,” she said, “and Gabrielle is a scientist.”
Cannamela has been thinking about what it is going to be like come August and she’s not getting ready for school. For Cannamela, her decision to retire is a product of good timing, like a TV show that ends before it “jumps the shark.”
“I still feel inspired,” she said. “I’m not retiring because I’m disgruntled; I’m ending my career still energized.”