There was the usual medical facility tinge of disinfectant and medication. Alongside those, Glen detected another odor. This one seemed to be the product of the fear and anxiety caused by the MRI machine. Whether in his mind or elsewhere, Glen heard a middle-aged man worrying about a newly-discovered lump in the left side of his throat. Then there was a little girl struggling to hold back the tears brought on by being forced into the mouth of the scary-looking machine. Finally, loudest of all, there was an older slightly European- sounding gentleman concerned about the cleanliness and health effects of the MRI machine.
“No doubt there’s been a fair share of filth and despair shoved into this bit of machinery.” The observation was made in the sort of calm, unemotional voice that would be used for reporting the time. The detached comment continued, “Probably not an enormous concern to the masses as they open themselves up to the unknown long-term effects of exposure to this sort of magnetic and radio wave energy.”
Glen caught himself about to respond to the voice.
His thoughts were interrupted by the nurse’s cheerfully-forced announcement as she left the room that he could get dressed. He stood near his clothes on the straight-back chrome chair in the corner of the room where he had folded them and took off the gown.
As Glen got dressed and then left the office, he took something of an inventory of his condition. Among a long list of things, the head pains were certainly something that worried him.
Perhaps the pains were simply the result of having to deal with an especially difficult group of students. Throughout his half dozen years as a teacher, Glen had welcomed the new school year and welcomed the challenges offered by new classes. He had gone as far as letting Principal Wells know that he enjoyed teaching the remedial English classes. This certainly put him in good graces with the principal who was used to teachers regularly complaining about having such classes dumped on them.
The Advanced Placement classes for college-bound students were seen as re-wards for the favored teachers. Conversely, the remedial and ESL classes were treated as suitable only for the newest teachers or those stuck at the bottom of the career rung due to some indiscretion that caused a flood of disfavor from administration to wash over them. The fact Glen requested such classes made him the object of amused reaction from other teachers.
“Mr. Davis, you are certainly a dedicated, caring educator.” Jim Fontaine, one of the oldest teachers at Roosevelt, was fond of telling Glen. The comment initially seemed to carry more than a hint of sarcasm. However, as time went on and the two got to know each other better, Glen thought he detected not simply sarcasm but perhaps some remorse over lost purpose. Glen was not sure whether this observation was valid or just a product of a desire to win the approval of his colleague.
The two usually ate lunch in Fontaine’s classroom. The time gave each of them a chance to take a breather from the focus on students and lesson plans and exams and newly-composed teaching objectives and the all-important Yearly Academic Progress used to evaluate teachers and schools.
Sitting at a long table at the back of the classroom surrounded by atlases, maps, a faux-ceramic bust ofAbraham Lincoln, and numerous volumes of the class history texts, the two shared lunch and stories of lives outside the school walls.
Jim Fontaine had been widowed many years before and never remarried. He had served two tours of duty in Vietnam. As is the case with someone who has never fought in a war, Glen had a certain curiosity regarding life as a soldier. Even after some forty years, Fontaine’s memories were clear even if he was still hesitant to resurrect them by speaking of the experience. On days when something brought the war back to the history teacher, Glen listened intently and watched the change in his friend’s face. From behind the bushy gray eyebrows badly in need of a trim, frantic anger shot out as he told of having to drag fellow soldiers from exploded landmines. The well-worn lines of his face and neck momentarily vanished as he described shooting wildly at sounds in the dark.
For his part, Glen had also done a bit of traveling beyond the United States. However, his experience had been quite a bit different than that of his friend. A few years out of college, he had taken a series of jobs teaching English abroad. The first job in an-other country was in Taegu, South Korea. The completely unfamiliar setting intrigued Glen, and he spent many hours simply wandering around the market area with the strange smells and even stranger sea creatures which resembled something from another world. The racket of the market always seemed to ring in his ears long after he had left.
The foreign language simply sounded like chatter to his ears and the only thing familiar was the occasional “Okay?” which jumped from the stream of noise. And he usually just smiled and nodded until it seemed acceptable to move on.
This life as an expatriate was appealing and led to teaching positions in Australia, Kuwait, and Japan. Living as a foreigner in these countries, Glen got used to being on display as the foreigner. It was like living in an aquarium of exotic fish.
After about 8 years, Glen took another teaching job in South Korea. This time the position was in the city of Pusan. He met Christine in the halls of the university where he was teaching English conversation to engineering students. As it happened, his future wife was taking an English conversation course in the classroom next to Glen’s office. The at-first-by-chance meeting at the canned ice coffee vending machine in the lounge became a daily routine. The two spent a great deal of time talking initially as a means of helping to improve her English and later as friends. As many of the students did, Christine had adopted an English name for her language classes. Her real name was Jin-Young. They had dated for over a year before getting had married.
After meeting Christine, Glen realized the excitement that comes from being an outsider was gone. They had come to the United States, and the couple had settled in the Northern California city of Santa Rosa, and Glen took a job teaching at Theodore Roosevelt High School.
While teaching hadn’t been a joy to him every day, he did have moments of satisfaction from the job. Although it sounded a bit cliché, there were still times when Glen thought he saw a light of genuine comprehension come on in a student’s eyes, and it was satisfying to know that his efforts had helped make that possible. Of course, it was all the other moments which sometimes frustrated him and made teaching seem a ridiculous, waste of time. In particular, Glen found himself struggling lately with discipline or as the newer materials renamed it in typically sensitive, politically correct, and completely unclear fashion – “classroom management”. While he knew this need to boost the discipline in his classroom could spring from a failure on his part to spend enough time establishing the rules in his class, Glen also knew the comment he had gotten from Fontaine might be more at the heart of the problem.
One afternoon as Glen was describing a particularly difficult day, the older teacher had simply observed, “You want them to like you too much.”
“Of course, I want them to like me! I mean I don’t want to come to class everyday thinking no one wants me there.” Glen had responded with the first thing that popped into his mind.
Fontaine had chuckled and said some-thing about how his view would change after a few more years of experience. But Glen didn’t accept that his relative inexperience was the sole cause of the difficulties. He believed that today’s students came to class with something of a chip on their shoulders. There was none of the respect or perhaps fear that he remembered from his school days. Glen was constantly amazed at some of the things he heard students say. In his day, he could not imagine saying “shit” or “fuck” if there was even the possibility of a teacher within hearing distance. Now students said those things to his face. And the threat of calling parents seemed to carry little if any weight.
In the past, telling students their parents would be called typically brought a sober look to their faces and served to at least temporarily correct behavior problems.
The last time Glen had informed a student that his par
ents would be called, the “management strategy” had motivated the student in question to respond with “Do whatever the fuck you want” as he quickly exited the classroom to the laughter of his classmates. To punctuate the student’s response, when Glen had followed through with a phone call that evening, the mother of the student cut him off with “Isn’t that your job? Why are you calling me?” It’s difficult to argue with parental wisdom like that.
Fourth period, the class from 11:20 to 12:15, was the primary source of Glen’s difficulties. Until this year, Junior English had been his favorite level, but this group of students had certainly changed that. In the past, he had discovered juniors to be typically docile like a middle child in a family. Most of the attention and accolades for students was targeted to those behind and ahead of the juniors. They had yet to enjoy the excitement that comes from being a senior and nearing graduation. Juniors were also beyond the energy that comes from being a freshman and entering new school environment. Sophomores, on the other hand, kept some of the enthusiasm of freshmen and had yet to slide into the junior phase of apparent weariness with everything around them.
This was exactly the type of student for whom Glen had become a teacher. The idea that he could be the teacher who managed to ignite the spark of curiosity and under-standing in a previously apathetic student was a big part of why he had become a teacher. Glen liked to think that he had indeed been that teacher to many of his students. However, since the beginning of this year, fourth period junior English had provided no such experiences. Instead, the students in this class had provided only frustration and conflict.
It may have been a bit unfair to place all thirty-two students in fourth period junior English under the umbrella of difficult cases. However, classes are similar to people. Each has a distinct personality of its own. Glen was constantly amazed at how a lesson that had gone so well and engaged students in one class could be met with indifference or outright rejection in another class. The difference lies in personality. A variety of factors shape a class’s personality such as time of day, location on school grounds, as well as arrangement, colors and decoration of the classroom. But the two most influential factors in class personality seemed to be dominant personality types of students and the personality of the teacher.
As usual, this school year had begun on a hopeful note. Glen always found himself optimistically looking forward to facing fresh classes.
The initial staff meeting on Monday morning prior to the first week of school had gone as expected. Glen and Jim Fontaine sat together at the end of one table in the school auditorium and offered smiles and greetings to fellow teachers. While everyone appeared cheerful and positive, it appeared to Glen that a number of them were simply going through the motions with no other goal than to put in their time until retirement. The pair also quietly commented on the probable longevity of several new teachers.
They had agreed on the futures of all the rookie teachers save one, Linda Gleeson. She was a thirty-ish, energetic, and personable woman who had returned to college to earn a mathematics teaching credential after leaving a position with a well-known computer company. Glen thought that she would not survive the shock of discovering that the classroom did not offer the same quiet logical calm that came from working with technology in a lab.
“Miss Gleeson will be a Christmas casualty.” Glen had commented meaning that she would not return for the second semester following the winter break.
“You are wrong, my friend.” Fontaine responded. “I see some hint of intestinal fortitude in that one. I think you are being too hard on her. She appears to have a gen-uine desire to help others.”
“And you are a dirty old man! Is intestinal fortitude code for nice legs?”
Principal Barbara Wells smiled with little warmth as she entered the auditorium. She had been in the principal of the Roosevelt for three years, and her job had not always been secure. Wells had gotten some attention with her appointment to the position as not only one of the few female principals in the district but as the youngest. Of course, this attention was not always of the positive sort, and Wells seemed to be on constant guard against criticism whether warranted or otherwise. This perceived need to be forever vigilant against possible improprieties had clearly taken a toll on the principal. Her face carried the lines left from hours of scowling, and her thoughts were dominated by tactics for defeating those who sought to undermine her.
The meeting had started with the usual pep talk about having a good year and helping students acquire the tools needed for future success. Glen had heard the same speech or a very similar version a number of times before, but never had it struck him as less inspirational and more perfunctory than at this meeting. Glen’s impression that the speech might as well have been a reading of the phone book was confirmed by a look around the auditor-ium at teachers balancing checkbooks, reading news-papers, doing crossword puzzles, or simply staring blankly ahead. As Fontaine had noted long ago, teachers make the worst audiences. The lack of attention and disrespect which they bemoan in their classes is on display tenfold in every staff meeting.
Following the less-than-engaging words from Principal Wells, the heads of the various depart-ments were introduced. Terry Larson, the Ichabod Crane lookalike, had returned to his role as head of the English department. It was a duty that Larson appeared to take very seriously and to his mind gave him an elevated place of importance among the school faculty. Next on the agenda was the introduction of a new secretary and three new teachers.
Glen chuckled as he saw Fontaine make a show of sitting up quickly and straightening his tie at the mention of Linda Gleeson. Glen had to admit she was attractive even if he believed she would not long survive the classroom experience.
By 10:30, the teachers were dismissed to go their classrooms and begin the process of getting organized for the upcoming school year.
On his way out of the auditorium, Glen found himself standing next to Terry Larson as they waited for the doorway to clear of others. While the two had never had a direct conflict, Glen had always felt some tension between the two. This may have been his imagination or possibly a result of Glen’s failure to display what Larson felt was the proper level of respect due to him. Glen smiled to himself at the awkwardness of the moment and then turned to greet Larson.
“Ready for another year in the trenches, Terry?”
“Oh, Mr. Davis, hello.” Larson responded with clearly contrived surprise. “I am sure we have all been preparing over the summer for a great year! In fact, I have some ideas I want to share with the teachers as soon as possible. I will be scheduling a meeting in the next few days. Please check your box for the memo.”
“Sounds great.” Glen managed to say in such a way that Larson was unsure whether it was meant sincerely or sarcastically.
Glen headed into the school courtyard which served as a hub to the spokes of buildings housing the class-rooms. The building directly across from the auditorium contained Room 46, his classroom. He made his way down the quiet hallway toward his room noticing the strong smell of cleanser and nicely polished floors.
At the end of the hall in the same faded green coveralls that he seemed to have been wearing since Glen had met him over six years ago was Tim Peck, the school’s janitor. Peck was mopping the already clean floor for the second time that day.
“The place looks great, Tim.” Glen’s voice seemed to startle the janitor who was lost in concentration.
“Oh, thanks, Mr. Davis. Welcome back.” No matter how many times Glen asked him to call him by his first name, Tim continued to address him as “Mr. Davis”.
Glen was happy to see that his compliment about the school’s appearance obviously pleased the janitor. There appeared to be a straightening of the tall black man who often seemed to be stooping. Glen noticed Tim watching closely as he unlocked the classroom door. As he entered, the janitor shifted his position so that he could see the teacher’s expression.
Glen was very surprised by what
he saw. Rather than the scarred, unsteady, wooden box of a desk that had served him for six years, Glen found a beautiful dark mahogany roll top desk placed in the front corner of the room so he could work at the desk while at the same time monitoring students.
Glen was startled and momentarily speechless. Finally, he turned to face the grinning janitor and asked, How…where did you get this?”
“It’s been gatherin’ dust in the back of the work-shop for longer’n I been here. Nobody usin’ it so I figgered you might wanna have it, Mr. Davis”
“Tim, it’s great. I don’t know what to say.”
The janitor just shook his head and smiled as he walked slowly out of the room.
Glen found himself approaching the desk with almost a sense of awe. It really was a beautiful piece of furniture. The dark shiny wood was almost black but with a hint of red and reflected his image as he stood gazing at the desk with a wide grin which made his youthful face look even younger. The wood was cool to Glen’s touch. After he noticed he had left a smudge on the surface of the roll top’s hood, Glen buffed it out with the sleeve of his shirt. He reached down to open it with the two shiny brass handles at the lip between roll top and the top of the desk. With almost no effort at all, the desk opened.
A strong musky smell of oil and dust and mothballs and something else sprang from inside into Glen’s face. The odor made him gag. As he fought to regain his breath, he staggered back from the desk a few steps. Glen waved his hand as a fan to disburse the odor for a moment before realizing the smell was already gone.
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