Why Teach? - chapter 18

By the Friday of our first week back after spring break, my daily attendance in free fall, the students I did have present in the room pushing back, I had trouble remembering

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By the Friday of our first week back after spring break, my daily attendance in free fall, the students I did have in the room pushing back, I had trouble remembering why I’d thought teaching Othello would go so well to begin with. How could I have thought I could walk into my classroom carrying a box of 500-year-old plays like gifts and expect my students to accept them as such? “Are you for real?” Marcos had wanted to know, and, “Nah, man. I ain’t even tryna read a new book right now,” Javi said. Even Adrienne had looked up at me through her bangs with skepticism, as if trying to determine whether I was making a joke or not.

The weather was warm, verging on hot—the mercury risen much higher than the reports I had last looked at three days before had lead me to expect—and as they came into my room I found my students dressed as if for a day at the swimming pool and city basketball courts, not class. The boys wore sleeveless Nike t-shirts and AND1 shorts; the girls had donned dress code-defying halter tops, spaghetti straps, and cut-off jean shorts. Furtively and un-furtively, my students’ eyes roved the room as they caught up, settling on one another as if newly exposed arms, legs, clavicles, and cleavage, and not the books I had brought, were the long-suppressed texts we ought to be studying. Helena Ross, in particular, looked as if she had fallen into a kind of trance looking at Marcos’s rounded shoulders.

I waved my hands to settle them down, and then after I’d shared my plan for the coming weeks had to wave my hands and settle them down again. The fact that I wanted them to start reading an old play—that I wanted to use their assigned English class time to assign them a reading in English—appeared to strike a number of them as unfair—a betrayal. We did your test, was their not quite fully-articulated sentiment. And: Now this is our time. For me, the image I’d had in my mind of handing out my copies of Othello and starting to read the play in class—a triumphant scene I had first loosely sketched, then carefully filled-in brushstroke after brushstroke over the break—had become an old-world masterpiece in my mind, something fit to be displayed in a museum. My students’ first dragging their feet over the next few days, and then digging in their heels, was like seeing a splash of bright red paint thrown across it.

Too late, I remembered I needed to establish context, lay groundwork, and build anticipation—that just because I was excited didn’t mean that they would be. Springing the play on them cold was a rookie mistake. By the time I had backpedaled and started these necessary activities, I’d lost three-fourths of the class. A bitching-and-moaning coup was taking off.

“It won’t be so bad,” I said, and “If you’ll give it a chance,” but to no avail. The students who weren’t still actively protesting had slumped in their chairs. They could still be made to participate, but it would have to be coerced, and participation under duress wasn’t really participation at all. “If you’ll just pass these back,” I said, handing out the Dover copies.

“Thus do I ever make my fool my purse.”

“You are a villain.”… “And you are a… senator.”

“I hate the moor; and it is thought abroad that ‘twixt my sheets he has done my office. I know not if it be true, but for mere suspicion in that kind will do as if for surety.”

This was golden stuff, wasn’t it? All of the best lines I had looked forward to my students responding to, and they were all sullen and stony faced, as if reading the play was a punishment. They looked out the windows and slipped their phones partway from their pockets to check for messages. My attendance, after just two days, fell off from a standard ten or fifteen percent of my students missing class to thirty or forty. According to the online gradebook, students who were showing up for other parts of the school day were avoiding my room. Most dishearteningly, in my Jock section, the class I had most envisioned taking off and embracing the material, fewer than half of my students walked through the door on Friday.

It was difficult, when I thought about it from the safe remove of my apartment in the evenings, to put my finger on exactly what was going wrong. In part, I could blame the weather. Common teacherly wisdom told you that the time of the year to teach your most challenging material was the winter, when the cold and gloom made the students docile and ready learners. The spring athletic season might also be to blame. Track, baseball,, softball and girls soccer had begun, and I would soon lose students to ball diamonds, soccer pitches, and all-day track meets. But most of my athletes were fall and winter competitors: football, basketball, and volleyball players; wrestlers and swimmers. My jocks were mostly taking the spring season off, and along with this reprieve, they seemed of a mind to take the spring academic quarter off as well. Ultimately, I decided that the things that happened in my classroom really came down to me.

I resolved, over the weekend, to redouble my efforts. I would go to bed early on Sunday night and arrive Monday morning with fresh vitality. I would review the characters and events of the first two acts with my students, would teach more of the play’s vocabulary before my students came across it, and would cast roles more carefully to ensure more lively performances. I would read some of the most difficult speeches aloud myself.

But Monday arrived and my freshened vitality failed to arrive with it. And even more of my students failed to show up. Among those who did show, there was a new, malignant difficulty. The whiffs of pot I had smelled intermittently on my students before the spring break multiplied and became more pervasive in this second week back in the building. The heavy current I had smelled coming in my windows on the last day of Spring Break now seemed to have been a turning-point: the moment at which marijuana stopped being something I smelled some places, sometimes, and became something I smelled always, everywhere. I smelled it as soon as I opened my apartment door and set foot into my hallway in the Douglas building each morning; smelled it as soon as I opened the side door of the high school and entered the building. There were administrative emails about it, and confirmations from law enforcement that we were dealing with an increased level of traffic that was virtually unprecedented. A confluence of cultural forces ranging from the messaging of popular music to legalizations in nearby states to the national economic downturn had coalesced result in more product on the market and more desire for that product. The counselors emailed two and three times a day to share that So & So, and also So & So, had been caught and were suspended, please send homework to the office. The kids were smoking in their cars before school, in the stairwells, behind the dumpsters, in the bathrooms, and on the theater’s balcony. I smelled it on their persons and saw it in their averted glances, hooded lids, and the fine penmanship written into their red-written eyes.

It wasn’t just the usual suspects. It was also the preps and the jocks, the socs and greasers, the theater kids, band kids, and choir. Activity heads and coaches tried to clamp-down—they threatened removal from their teams—but the club kids who smoked were casual members, and membership on the spring sports didn’t carry the same weight with the kids that the fall and winter ones did. Kids didn’t mind being cut from baseball or track.

On the Thursday of the second week back from the break, attendance in my first-block class hit a new low: eleven students from my roster of twenty-nine. While it was tempting to blame the warm weather and the epidemic of smoking pot, I couldn’t help but recall my meeting with Mrs. Hirsche first semester and worry that it was The Bard, and that in trying to teach Shakespeare I had carried my Crusade for the Teaching of Real Literature a bridge too far. Perhaps the Head of Literacy had been right, and they couldn’t do it. Perhaps the stripped-down worksheet-and-short-passage curriculum the administration was implementing was more appropriate for these seventeen-year-old students.

On the following Monday, I received and email from Mrs. Kines, the school’s head counselor.

Mr. Able,

We’ve noticed an above-average number of students have begun failing your English 11 course. As a reminder, the target-goal for all core classes is to keep failure and hold rates below 10%, and you are currently running 22. Do you have plans to work with these students? We in the counseling office would be happy to work with you. Please let us know.

Glancing to the top, I saw that not only Mr. Russel and Mr. Avery, but also Mrs. Hirsche and Mr. Backus were cc’d.

The next day I was ready to finish the play and put the whole experience behind me. I showed up before school and put Act V vocab words and definitions on the board. The warning bell rang, and my students began arriving, then kept coming in. Contrary to the recent trend, the room was more than three-quarters full when the bell rang to start class. Then another student walked in. And another. With better than eighty percent of my students in the room, I would need to catch a number of them up on the first four acts of the play before I could begin with the fifth. Five minutes after the bell there were only three empty seats, and I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember who usually occupied them. I would have to go to my computer to look over my electronic roster. As I did so, I half-listened to the jawing in the room, picking up an undercurrent of… what? Anger? Antipathy? It was hard to say. My students who liked one another often expressed their affection by talking trash. But no—these were students who never spoke to one another—who almost never spoke at all—who were hissing at one another now. Something had happened—an exchange over the weekend. A quantity of money had been traded for a supply of product, and the product had been found to be lacking. Drugs, I figured. Pot, I hoped. “Easy, son,” Marcos said, and Edgar Contreras, from the corner of the room, spat back a string of Spanish.

“I’ll lay your bitch-ass out,” Marcos returned, and I didn’t have any choice but to dial the tone of my voice up to ‘disciplinary’ and call out to him.

“Marcos,” I said. “Hallway.”

“This fool,” I heard Javi say as I followed my disgruntled Marcos out of the room. While I was first concerned he was referring to me, my glance caught Javi jerking his thumb toward the room’s back. Now I had a dilemma. My intuition told me I should stay and prevent whatever was about to escalate between Javi and Edgar from escalating, but Marcos was already in the hallway and I was partway out the door following him. I had made a strong commitment to talking to Marcos in the hall; I didn’t want to reverse myself.

I shut the door.

“Marcos,” I said, and I was relieved to see the big junior’s face soften. He had always been reasonable—was secretly a much better student than most of his peers—and I thought I might hear him explain something, that I might say my little piece, and that we could move back into the room. But the volume in my room came up—there was shouting and the scrape of chair legs on the other side of the door—and I found myself frozen. It wasn’t my own impulse so much as the warning look in Marcos’s eyes that moved me back into my room.

Inside, half the class was standing and most all of the desks had been displaced. Javi and Edgar occupied an empty space in the middle, the former prancing back and forth hollering his taunts, the latter with his fists and forearms up near his cheeks in a way that gave the impression he’d had some boxing training. Javi danced back, danced in, and said, “Fight me, then!” When Edgar stepped forward a moment later and the two collided, there was an almost fake quality to the exchange, as if they were cartoon characters, or playactors. WWF-style imitation wrestlers. Edgar, who had always seemed small, seemed to explode and become larger. Javi expanded and then crumpled like a sheet of loose-leaf paper around him, falling backward to the ground. I wasn’t sure, when he hit the floor, that the whole thing wasn’t a farce, like when I had been in school and my friends and I had pretended to slap one another, but really only connected with our own free palms.

It was the sounds my students made—the sickening Ohhhhh and the low expletives—and the way so many of them turned to look away—that told me something was really wrong.

“I tol’ ’im not to fuck with me,” Edgar said as he brushed passed me. “I ain’t done nuthin’.” He dropped a pair of my own classroom scissors to the floor on his way out, a painter’s broad red stroke of blood fanning out from one of their blades.

“Somebody call the nurse,” I said, kneeling above Javi without knowing how I had gotten there. I touched his elbow, tried to move his arm away to see how bad the cut was, saw that his shirt was already soaked. “Somebody call 911,” I said, my voice rising. “Anybody. Use your cell phones.”

Peter Shull is a Midwestern novelist and educator. His novel Why Teach? is currently being serialized on Substack and will be published on March 4th, 2025. If you enjoyed this piece, please consider liking, sharing a comment, or subscribing!