Why Teach? - chapter 8

I woke up that night, and the next, with my heart racing, but didn’t realize I had entered a new, subbasement-level lowness until I walked into the high school on Monday morning. Neither the sight of my students nor the crescendoing chorus of ’Mornings, ’Morning Mr. Ables, and Hey Ables would lift me out of my torpor. The fabric seemed torn. It wasn’t only that stories didn’t matter, but that nothing did. I wasn’t only wasting my own time, but my students’. My father’s oft-repeated claim that the public schools were little more than holding pens for the children of real working people leapt forward in my mind: I was a babysitter.

By the time I made it to my classroom, I had begun to understand how much worse my situation had become. That it was fucked—that I was fucked—perhaps irredeemably so. When my first-block section of jock English began coming in, I knew that whatever insulating membrane I had formerly worn that had allowed me to move through the world and interact with its people had slipped loose of my skin and was gone. I wouldn’t get through the day without being bruised, cut, torn, abraded. My students, on the other hand, seemed well-sleeved. They touched one another and smiled, laughed. Spoke loudly. Dropped their bags heavily beside their desks’ legs and scraped their chairs’ feet against the floor. Javi, who had by turns lifted me up and driven me to frustration since the middle of August, bounded in as if he wasn’t just well-sleeved, but more free from the constraints of gravity than most other people. “What’s good Mr. A?” he wanted to know when he landed beside my desk.

“Good morning, Javi,” I returned, and he started in on the topic of discussion we had left off on at the end of the previous week.

“So you gonna be at the game on Friday night, or what?”

The game was the annual rivalry game between Plains City and Dodge. The school, over the previous weekend, had been filled with banners and signs exhorting our football players to “Beat the Demons” and “Crush DCHS!”

I had copies I knew I had made the previous week but couldn’t find, objectives on my board to update. My class would start in less than two minutes. “I’m not sure yet,” I said. Then, when he opened his mouth and looked to say something more: “Actually, I’m pretty sure I can’t make it.” I stood and stepped away from my desk. Another day, a previous day, I might have put off his invitation with something disarming or funny. Alluded to fictitious romantic plans or expressed a desire to avoid seeing my football players suffer an embarrassing defeat—Dodge City was, at the time, undefeated, with six wins, while our Chargers, after six outings, were balanced tenuously at five hundred. I found the copies I had made on the back counter, found that I didn’t want to use them. Saw that there was a stack of Mrs. Hirsche’s district-approved test prep materials beside them. I picked these up as the bell rang and turned around. The rest of my students were at their desks, but Javi was still standing where I had left him. The close scrutiny of his gaze, I thought, might have impressed his science teacher.

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I meant, by the stiff and laconic manner I adopted over the next several days, to convey to my students my state of lowness—that I was worn down, didn’t have it, whatever it was. That they should be quieter and more obedient. I didn’t say outright that they owed me—that they ought to behave better since I had been so patient and forbearing with them up to this point in the year—but that’s how I felt… but this isn’t how a classroom works, of course. The students aren’t there to forbear, only to be borne. Perhaps sensing my desire to invert this arrangement, they acted out.

Premier among my problems was the fact of the upcoming weekend’s rivalry game against Dodge City. I had come to realize, in my brief tenure as a teacher, that some school events—homecoming week, the fall musical, the Dodge City game, and Prom—were more important than me and the class I taught. Rather than resist these interruptions to the academic schedule, I had learned I was better off ceding the ground and leaning into the festivities. I had taken to wearing old “vintage” school shirts from my own days before big football games, analyzing lyrics from key songs during the musical’s ‘show week,’ teaching boys how to tie half- and full-Windsor tie knots before homecoming, and demonstrating “ancient” eight- and ten-year-old dance moves before the Prom. Of all the annual traditions, the Dodge game was far and away the most important. Not only the cheerleaders and dance team, but all of the student organizations hung banners around the school, the student council organized a slate of “theme” dress-up days, and, in addition to the usual Friday afternoon pep rally before the game, there was a Thursday night bonfire attended by a large swath of the community. Music was played in the halls during passing periods, teachers were encouraged to join the students in dressing up for the theme days, and by Friday, a day the band marched through the halls before the beginning of the first class, the pitch of student excitement had been driven to such a fervor I would be better off showing slasher movies or slaughtering animals in my classroom than trying to teach.

It was fair of my students to expect, if not my full and active participation during this annual ritual, then at least my good-natured, open-handed looking the other way. But I found that parts inside of me that had formerly been flexible were now rigid, that their mirth and high spiritedness were too much to bear. Faced with their twinkling-eyed roguishness and merriment—their lassitude—I felt my lips draw thin. I glowered at them, was short in my comments, and assigned extra homework. I raised my voice and yelled. I had, more than once in the course of the week, the awful feeling of having pulled the rug out from under my students and, before returning it, taken a shit in its center. It seemed by the middle of the week that not just the metaphorical atmosphere of my classroom but also the physical space had become dimmer.

Then, on Thursday, I had the displeasure of hearing the click of heels and seeing our test-prep czar, Mrs. Hirsche, step into my darkened space.

My students were midway through a practice quiz—I had noted the beginning and ending times of their allowance on the board—and I stalked the aisles between their rows of desks emptily until it expired. They put their pencils down, and then I used my overhead projector to shine the correct answers on the board and go over right and wrong answers until she left. Likely, I had earned less than half of the box checks I usually accrued during a walk-through; possibly there would be a consequence for this. I watched my email for the rest of the day, though, and nothing came of it.

On Friday, a morning my students would have, any other year, been euphoric and rambunctious—full of piss and verve—my jock English class came in looking wan and meek. The timeworn mammalian commonplace they should have evoked was that of a bull in a china shop; instead they brought to mind a loyal old dog too often kicked. I knew I had broken their trust, that I should apologize, crack some jokes, ask them about their readiness—but I only lifted my stack of test-prep passages, three rotations-worth, and asked them to get out their paper, pencils, and pens.

Of the class’s members, Javi was the hardest student to watch as we worked our way through these practices. The key to the class—a student not unlike Bryce, it occurred to me now—my relationship with him was the one I had worked the hardest in the course of the year to develop. In my state of dead-battery torpor, it was Javi I had most worried about bridling and leading the class in revolt against me. Instead, he had seemed to read my mood more quickly than his peers and match it by sinking into his own state of despondency. Now when he addressed me at the end of class it was with a voice so quiet that, had I not looked up, I would never have guessed its belonging to him.

“Hey Able,” he said, his eyes large. “You gonna—I mean, are you coming to the game tonight, or what?”

In one of those moments a teacher can have, everything I knew about him from everything he had said and written and done in my class, from the introductory speech he had given to the personal reflections he had written to the jokes he had told and the tone he had told them in came into my mind at once. That his dad was gone, his older brother, occasionally in trouble for either using or selling drugs, moved away, his sister married to a guy he didn’t like. That he lived alone in a trailer with his “moms,” singular, and despised the three men he was most closely related to but wasn’t sure he wouldn’t end up much like them. That I, in conjunction with some of the coaches on the team, had come to fill an important, lacking, male role in his life. That he had come, in some small ways, to depend on me.

All of this I intuited dimly, but didn’t understand. The class was almost over—the bell about to ring—and he had taken me by surprise.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I—”

“It’s okay,” he said, shaking his head in a manner that suggested the contrary. “You do you.”

He turned at the same time the bell rang. I tried to call him back, but it was too late. He was gone.

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Over the course of the next several hours my understanding caught up with my intuition. I was important to Javi, to half the boys on my roster, really, beyond the simple fact that I taught them English lessons and entered their grades in the online grade book. What’s more, I was an adult, while they were children. I had an obligation to them and might, I realized, benefit on a soul-level from fulfilling it. Outside it was a quintessential fall afternoon, neither cold nor warm but somewhere crisp and in-between. I understood that, as much as I wanted to, I wouldn’t do myself any favors passing another weekend alone in my apartment, or going out to Kemper’s or the Oasis with Garret. A late-October football game, an away game in Dodge City with a meditative hour’s worth of driving on either side, could be just the thing to break me out of my rut and maybe help me to get some traditionally scheduled sleep. And showing up unexpectedly—as a surprise—might be meaningful to Javi, Marcos, and my other guys on the team. It might warrant their forgiving me for how awful I’d been in the course of the week.

I decided to eat a sandwich and stay awake after school, leaving for Dodge sometime after five in order to arrive and be seen in the stands during the pregame warm-ups, but the pull of my couch and force of my recent habit proved too much to overcome. Lying down for what I thought might be a brief respite for my eyes—a fifteen-minute catnap—I awoke at half-past six, too late to make the drive to Dodge before the game’s seven o’clock kickoff. I pulled on the same Plains City blue button-up I’d worn earlier in the day, anyway, sans necktie, swapped the slacks I had slept in for a pair of jeans, and flamingoed on a pair of brown loafers beside my front door. It was six-forty when I got into my car, forty-five after when I crossed over the dried-up Arkansas on the west bridge to get to the bypass, and ten ‘til seven when Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian” hit its chorus on my car radio just as I hit the onramp for highway 58, breaking free of Plains City’s field of gravity. I switched on the radio and spun the dial until I found the game, just in time to hear Ted Matthews, the voice of the Chargers, finish announcing the starting lineups and listen to the Red Demon Marching Band’s brassy interpretation of the national anthem.

The game, as described by Ted Matthews, began well enough for our side. Jeremy Ledesma received the kickoff in the middle of the end zone and ran it out to the thirty-two. Two runs and a pass play earned us two first downs and twenty-eight yards; a Red Demon offsides penalty netted us five more. A minute and thirty-eight seconds into the game and we had first and ten on Dodge’s thirty-five yard line. Then things started to come apart.

Vinny Cruz, our starting center, came off the field for a play. Ryan Sellers, his sophomore replacement, muffed the hike, and Harrison Thompson, our senior quarterback, lost eight yards scrambling after he’d recovered the ball. Kade Wright was stuffed on his next two consecutive running attempts, and then a Dodge City player named Ricky Lathers picked off a pass attempt from Thompson to Jaime Delgado that Ted Matthews called both “rushed” and “ill-advised.”

Dodge only needed three plays of their own to cover seventy yards and get into our end zone after that. When Ledesma dropped the next kickoff and Dodge’s Silvares recovered, I reached forward to shut the radio off.

I could turn around. I was on pace to get to the game sometime late in the second quarter, anyway. It would be almost halftime by the time I had navigated the parking lot, the ticket entrance, and the visitor-side bleachers to find a seat. The way things were going the game could be out of hand by the beginning of the third quarter, and I might save my students some embarrassment if I wasn’t there to watch. And if I turned around, I could be home by eight. I didn’t want to pass another night out at the Plains City bars with Garret, but I could pick up take-out and rent a movie. It had been a while since I’d been to the rental place.

My headlights lit on a bright green sign. Dodge was twenty-one miles ahead. Greensburg forty-eight. Wichita one hundred and one. “—brings the chargers within eleven,” said Ted Matthews when I switched the radio back on. “If the defense can get a stop on the next drive, here, we could really have a game to watch.”

And we did get a stop. Archer, the Demon’s Division-1 bound halfback, coughed up the ball as he tried to run through Carter Rios, our right tackle, and Marcos Dominguez came down on top of it. Harrison ran the ball himself on two of the next five plays, handed off to Kade twice for positive yardage, and then threw a screen pass to Quentin Early, who broke free and ran a third of the length of the field to bring the game within five. The extra point was good.

I sat up in my seat and cracked my neck. “Six minutes to go in the second. We could be watching something really special,” Ted Matthews told his radio audience.

But we weren’t watching something special. Or at least we Chargers fans weren’t. Time seemed to slow as Dodge scored not once, not twice, but three times in the next three and a half minutes. Ted described the Plains City players as sitting down on their helmets, the coaches as looking to the sky for answers—and there were still two minutes left in the nightmarish second quarter. I rolled past the gas stations, taco trucks, and Boot Hill Museum billboards on the outskirts of Dodge. Plains City went three and out and punted again, Dodge’s Velasquez returning it fifty-two yards to the Plains City thirty-three. I turned the radio off and passed a stone-chiseled sign welcoming motorists to the Wild West. Just beyond it, a green sign announced that Greensburg was twenty-seven miles away, Wichita eighty. Davis popped into my mind. On Friday nights in college he’d often still be sleeping at this hour, getting ready for a big night out. Or we’d be out already, chicken wings and pitchers of beer for dinner, music he’d picked out and paid for with a half-roll of quarters playing on a juke box.

I had slowed to the city speed limit and was looking for a good place to turn around when a big, boxy ambulance came alive in a parking lot to my right, its lights flashing operating room white and prairie fire red. I pulled over to let it pass me, and as it sped up I accelerated, too, until I was close enough behind to see the dents in its rear bumper and the angel’s wing pattern where the EMTs’ hands had brushed the dust away from its rear doors. I tailed it for the length of Wyatt Earp Boulevard and then we were heading out of town. See Y’all Again Real Soon, the sign said. “The hell out of Dodge,” I muttered, something few but those of us who live in Western Kansas ever get to say and mean. Greensburg was twenty-three miles away; Wichita seventy-six. The ambulance slowed, wheeling off down a dirt road to the right toward a farmer who’d suffered a stroke, or a rancher having a heart attack. There was something going on somewhere behind my own sternum; something growing and gathering momentum. I swerved around the ambulance as it turned, slingshotting beyond its left brake light, leaving both Dodge City and Plains City behind to go to Wichita, a place where I had a friend.

Peter Shull is a Midwestern novelist and high school English teacher. His novel Why Teach?, currently being serialized on Substack, will be published in e-reader and paperback editions in early 2025. His essays, poems, and short stories can be found at lower midlist.