Why Teach? - chapter 1

This was a little after eleven o’clock, the night of the funeral, Davis, Garret, and me alone at a table at the back of the High Plains Oasis.

“You guys are good shits,” Davis said, his elbows collapsing beneath him.

“Well,” I said.

“Really good shits,” he said, and then he put his head down among the half-killed bottles and empty glasses and began to snore.

“That one of the new ones from your department?” Garret asked. He had been looking off toward the floor where a group of underage girls with black-markered X’s on their hands had been dancing, so I glanced there.

“No.” He redirected my gaze with a nod of his head. “Over at that table with the grade school teachers. Looking this way.”

I looked across the bar. “It is.” She wore a critical expression on her face, as if, though new to the district, she already knew who Garret was. I held up my hand.

“She’s not bad,” my friend said. “You should hit that.”

“A kid just died,” I said.

Garret shrugged, rounded his finger in the air. “Circle of life.” Then: “Heads-up, she’s coming over. Looks like she’s gonna try and shoot her shot.”

I looked. She was, indeed, navigating between the tables and chairs on her way toward us.

“Well,” I said. I pushed my glass back and forth between my fingers.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hello,” Garret responded.

“I’m sorry, could I—” she touched the back of a chair and looked across the table at me. “I was wondering if I could ask you some questions? About our department?”

Before I could answer, an abrupt sound—a burst of  air escaping from behind Davis’s larynx—startled us all. His head rose partway up out of the wreckage of his arms, then returned to the table.

Garret stood up. “I’m gonna mosey,” he said.   

I rose, too, and offered my hand across the table. “I’m William. Mr. Able.”

“Lauren,” she said. “Ms. West.”

Under normal circumstances, the beginning of the school year six full weeks behind us in August, these introductions should have already taken place, but the high school’s English department and the district’s administration hadn’t been getting along for the last three or four semesters—had been at one another’s throats, really—and before this year’s first department meeting the veteran teachers in my department had been warned against speaking with the incoming new teachers. At that meeting our first-years had been chaperoned in by a trio of the principals from math, science, and social studies, and the annual “stand up and introduce yourself” portion of the meeting had been omitted. I had only seen Lauren West a few times since, and we had never spoken.

She gestured toward the loosened tie I was still wearing from the day’s memorial services. “I didn’t know him. Did you have him in class?” Him was Bryce. Half the people at the bar had been at the funeral, and the whole school had been in mourning for a week.

“As a junior,” I said. “But I met him when he was eight.” I nodded toward Davis. “That’s his older brother.”

A look of misgiving overtook Lauren’s face. “I’m so sorry. Should I—”

I shrugged away her concern. “It’s fine. I answer questions for a living. What do you want to know?”

She shook her head. “No—”

Having been a first-year teacher myself only three years before—and having taken part in other conversations with other first-years several times since—I felt I might be able to intuit the nature of her questions. “It’s not the kids,” I said. “The kids are just kids. You can’t blame them. And it’s not their parents. A lot of them are actually pretty good, or can’t help being bad. It’s the admins. The admins and the legislators.”

Lauren started to stand. “Maybe I—”

“No, hold on.” I motioned for her to sit back down. I’d spent the morning at the church and the rest of the day at Davis’s parents’ house while his mother had worn a brittle smile and Davis and his father and several of their near and distant relations had drunken themselves to numbness and obliteration. The opportunity to dish on the awfulness of the school Lauren and I both worked at now rose up as a welcome reprieve. “It’s a terrible place,” I said. “It’s where educational dreams go to die. You shouldn’t stick around if you can help it. You should just put in your two or three years and move on to get a better job somewhere else.” This was typically what promising young teachers from out of town did when they moved to Plains City: got enough experience to not be a ‘new’ teacher anymore, then moved on to better paying jobs elsewhere in suburbs where the kids were easier to work with. Though I’d only glimpsed her a handful of times, it seemed to me that Lauren West was a promising young teacher in this mold.

Her eyes steadied on me. “Are you planning to go somewhere else?”

“This is my last year. After this I’m going to grad school, or law school, maybe. I haven’t decided yet.”

Her brow creased and I saw the beginnings of a teacherly scowl. She put her hands down on the table and began to push herself up. “I can see that you’re… bereaved. I’ll let you—”

“Hold up.” I pointed to Davis, whose shoulders were now rising and falling in steady rhythm. “Do me a favor and sit with this guy. Just for a minute. I’ll come back and talk to you. Two minutes. I can tell you what you need to know.”

She looked dubiously from me to Davis, then back to me. She lowered herself back down to the table. “I’ll be right back,” I said. “Promise.”

A Chicano rap song was finishing as I moved off into the bar. It ended, and in his booth, DJ Saucedo put on an old George Strait ballad, causing a tidal shift in the comings and goings on the dance floor. I was caught in the flow of the younger and more ethnically rich group flowing out, then brought up short by a button-hooking finger at the vanguard of the denim-clad crowd flowing in.

“You’re…” the pointing woman in front of me said, but she couldn’t seem to place me.

I searched her face. “Your daughter’s teacher,” I said at last. “Adrienne.”

“My daughter’s teacher,” she said, snapping her fingers as if she had arrived at the conclusion on her own. She turned to address the man—big, burly, mustachioed—who, his hands on her hips, held her up marionette-style from behind. “This is Mr…”

“Able,” I supplied.

“Mr. Able.” Her smile was radiant. “He’s Adrienne’s…”

“English teacher.”

Adrienne’s mother—Ms. Gallegos—stared at me for a four- or five-count, then nodded and repeated my last two words. She twisted back to face her handler. “See how young he is? Adrienne loves him.” She maneuvered back around to stage-whisper this piece of intelligence to me. “Adrienne loves you. And I would never miss your class.” She reached up to pat my cheek.

I never knew how to respond to compliments like these. “I appreciate that,” I said.

“Let’s go,” her handler said, hauling her back in. Her shirt rose as he hefted her, high enough to expose her midsection and one pink, satiny cup of her bra. His hand roved in for a squeeze as they passed, and I remembered Adrienne’s beginning-of-the-year essay on the topic of adversity: how she had written about her parents’ divorce and her experience watching her mother try to pass herself off as a teenager with a series of men Adrienne described variously as “old bums, pervs, and freaks.” Then they were passed.

I acknowledged a number of acquaintances who propriety required me to acknowledge along the next twenty-yard stretch of my journey, a few of my parents’ friends, and a number of peers and colleagues closer to my own age, and then at the bar I saw and pretended not to see Jim Morris, Jr, the most junior partner at the downtown law firm that bore his surname twice and my own only once: Morris, Able, & Morris. But my pretending came to no avail—he had seen me, and called out, “Will, come grab a drink, man!” He held aloft his glass and indicated the open seat beside his own.

That there should be an open seat beside him on a night as busy as this one was a fact that spoke for itself. I shook my head and pointed to the bathroom, holding up my wrist and pointing my thumb over my shoulder to supply the rest of what he needed to know.

He grinned wolfishly, reading more into my gesturing than there was to read. “Git ‘er done, man,” he called to me. “Another time.”

Lauren West didn’t look pleased when I arrived back at the table where my friend was sleeping. “Did you want to—” I started to ask.

“The students don’t have anywhere to go,” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

“You said I should put in my two or three years and leave. That’s not fair to the kids. They can’t just get up and go.”

My first impulse was to argue: the students certainly could go if they wanted. They could go by graduating, as many did, or go by dropping out, as did many others. But I checked this impulse. Lauren was gathering herself, getting ready to leave. It occurred to me she was still new and idealistic. A person who had, presumably, grown up wanting to teach. She had been cut off from the veteran teachers in our department by the draconian actions of our administration and was uninitiated and untutored, as of yet, in the bleak and mordant ways teachers regularly spoke to one another when students weren’t around. I held up my hands and motioned for her to stay.

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m bereaved. And I’m tired. And some of what I said was gallows humor.” I tried to smile. “You said you had a question. Some questions. Ask me. Let me try to help.”

She looked as if she knew that doing so was a bad idea, and then sat back down anyway. “It’s about the ‘no books’ thing.”

“That’s a good question to ask.”

“We’re not allowed to teach them?”

“We’re not supposed to.”

“But some people do?”

“It’s kind of a form of… nonviolent resistance. The district doesn’t want us to teach some things, and sometimes we teach those things anyway.”

She looked at me skeptically. “At the beginning of the year, we new teachers were told that we were only supposed to teach district-approved and district-supplied materials, and that if we didn’t we could get fired.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “That’s accurate.”

“And that they fired people last year for teaching material—books—that they weren’t supposed to teach.”

“Elizabeth Gray and Sarah Teller. Both first-years. They were non-renewed.”

“So first-year teachers can’t teach books, but more established and tenured teachers can?”

I shook my head. “They can fire tenured teachers. It’s just more difficult. They have to go through due process.”

“And you’re tenured?”

I shook my head again. “I’m starting my fourth year. You have to have finished four to be tenured.”

“But I hear you’re teaching material from the off-curriculum list. Trickster tales to you juniors? And some of Chaucer to your seniors? And I heard Mrs. Rosenbaum and Mrs. Dennison teach a lot of material from off-curriculum. And Valerie Stephens, too. They’re teaching A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Emily Dickinson and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”

Lauren West was like an honors student who’d been misplaced in a regular class. I could answer her questions, but it was hard to know where to start. “It’s kind of complicated…” I began.

“I’m not a stupid person.”

“I’m just trying to think how to explain. Part of it is that some of the veteran teachers are kind of… grandfathered in. We were teaching the old curriculum when the new one was introduced, and there were some agreements about a transitional period.”

By the expression on her face, I could tell that she didn’t find this answer either sufficient or fair.

“And part of it has to do with history. Mrs. Rosenbaum and Mrs. Dennison have been in the building a long time. Parents in the community like them. Their oldest kids had them, and they want their younger ones to have them, too. They’ve been named Teachers of the Year.”

“That doesn’t account for you and Ms. Stephens.”

“Valerie and I get students to pass the test. If the admins get rid of us, they run the risk of replacing us with teachers who can’t get kids to pass.”

This seemed to compute for Lauren West, if only grudgingly. “So if I fall in line and get my kids to pass the state tests this spring, then maybe I can teach real books next year?”

I winced. “I’m not sure that’s exactly the case.”

“Where do you guys get the books? They told me we don’t have any in the building.”

“We have a big closet’s worth. It’s by the stairs in the English wing.”

“And they don’t lock it?”

I dug in my pocket and pulled out my keyring. “Some of us have keys. We go in after school when no one is around.”

“Where’d you get the—”

“The janitors.” I grinned at the memory. “We just told them we needed new copies a few weeks after the admins changed the locks the last time.”

“So if I wanted a set of books, you could get me one?”

“Or you could just ask a janitor. Most of them will let you in.”

I peered down at what was left in the bottom of my glass, tried to decide if I wanted another drink or not. A weight came down on my shoulder, and when I looked up, Adrienne Gallegos’s mother was teetering above me. Beer sloshed from the bottle in her hand, landing in my lap, and when she spoke, it was in the manner of a sports fan calling from ten yards away instead of a parent standing with her hand on my shoulder. “I’ll tell Adrienne I saw you. There’s nobody like you, Mr. Able!”

Her handler grunted his own sentiment and reeled Adrienne’s mother back in. Lauren West cocked an eye at me. “Former student?”

“Mother of a current. Having a hard time of it.”

She nodded and a moment passed. Davis surprised us with another of his abrupt snores.

“What was he like?”

I looked at my slumbering friend. “Davis? He’s a good guy. Played football, has a degree in business—”

Lauren shook her head. “The brother. The kid who… is no longer with us.”

Even if Davis was out cold, I could never speak freely about Bryce with him so near. “He was really special. Kind of important.” The words stung for their truth and insufficiency, and my vision began to blur. I decided against another drink. I was ready to be done for the night. “Do you want to go see it? The spot?”

“The spot?”

“The spot where he rolled. It’s a couple miles from here. We could drive.”

She drew back at this suggestion, and her expression, which had been sympathetic a moment before, shifted to something harder and disapproving. “We work together. Nothing romantic is going to happen between us.”

“I didn’t think it was,” I said, recognizing how false I might sound. “I just thought you might want to see it. I drive out there a lot. Every night.”

She scrutinized me, as if trying to discern whether or not I was an honest person, and I tipped back like a student in my chair to show my indifference to her judgement. “You’re right, I’m in mourning,” I said when she didn’t seem to reach any conclusion. I tipped forward to return the chair’s legs to the floor. “You should get out of here. Go see your friends.” I stood and nodded across the bar. Then, abruptly feeling I’d perhaps been too callous, I leaned forward and lowered my voice. “You can come by my room at the school anytime. I know what it’s like to be a new teacher, and that it’s not an easy building to find help in. I can help you if you need it. I need to get out of here now, though.”

She looked as if she might say something else, then—offer an argument or defense or some criticism—but a glance at Davis seemed to persuade her now wasn’t the time or place. “I’m sorry about your friend’s brother,” she said, and she stood and walked back across the bar.

Garret said he could get Davis home, and I paid my tab and left the Oasis ten minutes later, finding myself in the wind-blown warmth of a late-September night. My car was parked in one of the front rows of the lot; I backed it out and drove it the four blocks to the familiar stoplight on Main where a right turn would get me home to my building and a left would carry me out over the train tracks, across the bridge, and to River Road, the two-lane stretch of asphalt running parallel to the Arkansas I had already driven perhaps twelve hundred times in my life. I turned left, and the street lights thinned out and the glow of the stars brightened as the city receded behind me. A couple miles down River Road I encountered a line of old cars and caught sight of a low yellow glow: the dying light of a high school river party at one of the half-dozen flat places where the kids, as I and my friends had when we were students, had stolen a truckload of wooden pallets from behind the local Kroger to light a bonfire for a river party. I slowed as I passed, saw a dozen or so kids celebrating after the midnight curfew and risking trouble when the sheriffs made their rounds. The spot I was looking for was another half-mile along, at a banked turn. I pulled over onto the side of the road when I reached it, got out, and found the ruts.

Davis and I hadn’t become friends until we were juniors at PCHS. Members of two rival friend groups from the two rival middle schools in town, our separate groups had come together that fall to pull a prank on the Thursday night eve of a more important rivalry—our football team’s rivalry with the Dodge City Red Demons, an hour’s drive to the east. We had decorated a trio of eight-by-ten particle boards with some choice obscene slogans, packed a few cans of spray paint in case we should find occasion use them, and purchased a number of cheap, frilly women’s undergarments to decorate some of the well-known cowboy statues near the DCHS stadium. We’d done our painting on a slab of concrete in Davis’s back yard, and departed in our short caravan of second-hand Fords and Chevys a little after nine o’clock. It was after midnight when we returned; the raid was a rousing success. Since the next morning was a day off of school—there were fall teacher inservices—we’d celebrated in Davis’s basement with a couple of cases of Coors and a pint of peppermint schnapps. When I awoke on the couch in front of the TV there the next morning, I found eight-year-old Bryce sitting beside me playing Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64.

Davis and I became better friends in the years that followed—we ultimately roomed together in the dorms as freshmen and shared a house for three years while we earned our degrees—and so it was fair for him to think I had attended the funeral in support of him. But Bryce had been almost like a brother to me, too—I hadn’t had my own little brother—and Bryce had been my student, one of my first, maybe my most important. I owed him, in a way I couldn’t have explained to his brother or Lauren West, a complex debt of gratitude. Because the second-grade kid I had hoisted on my shoulders in the stands at that Friday night’s game against Dodge City my junior year, the kid I taught a shot fake with a basketball in his driveway, had grown to be big, a man-sized junior with facial hair like his brother who could, like his brother, buy alcohol at the Vietnamese liquor store on 4th Street. Bigger than Davis had been in high school, even, and Davis had been enormous, an all-conference linebacker before Bryce had made his way to being all-state.

While I knew him and knew that he wasn’t mean, Bryce often came across that way, and could clearly be… aggressive. He had a mouth that, as his father and mother’s son—and as Davis’s little brother—largely ran unfiltered. A student in Mr. Charter’s Junior English class during my first year in the building, he had taken umbrage at a few assertions the 60-year-old man had made about Bryce’s performance in his class and fired back a number of expletives in return, punctuating his thoughts with a thrown copy of the book they were reading that struck Mr. Charter’s head, resulting in an injury that took the man out of the building for two days and required, on the superficial level of his scalp, six stitches.

As major an infraction as it was, it was technically his first, and Bryce was, as a junior, already an integral part of the school football team’s defensive unit. He took a two-day suspension from class, rode the bench for the first half of the game that Friday night, and was switched out of Mr. Charter’s English class to be placed in my own.

This was a coincidence.

The counselors, I don’t think, had any knowledge of my previous relationship with Bryce Davis. They had put him into my room because there had been no other open section of junior English that hour, and emailed to let me know it was happening the morning before he showed up. The class was tough. A “low” section loaded with known behavior-issue juniors and students on the principals’ “graduation watch list.” A few of the boys—jocks, wanna-bes, and would-be gangsters—made some noise when Bryce walked in, and Stephani Campbell, a held-back senior wearing a court-assigned electronic ankle bracelet, raised her eyes to meet his as if the two might have had some history, or perhaps future. The bell rang, the class’s volume rose, and “This ought to be good,” I heard one of my worst-offenders say.

I said “Good morning,” and none of my students quieted or said anything to me in response. Then I said—I don’t remember what I said. Something that was clearly inadequate and ineffectual. The kid who had thought things ought to be good leaned forward to swipe Bryce’s elbow and get his attention, and I watched Bryce’s face turn red as he tore his arm away. Bryce brought both of his hands down on the top of his desk, and, in a moment, had everyone in the room’s attention in a way I, in the course of the semester, had never had. “Everybody shut up,” he said. “Mr. Able is trying to teach.”

The class quieted down.

So it was that Bryce Davis, penetrator of opposing lines, ransacker of backfields, flattener of quarterbacks, and bane of offensive coordinators across the region, became, in my classroom, not only my unbidden enforcer, but also my biggest cheerleader and best student. When I read passages out loud, Bryce clapped his hands and hollered for me to read more. When I lectured, he sat up straight on the edge of his seat and took notes. When he left, he called “Thanks Mr. A” and took to high-fiving and fist-bumping me on his way out. Over the course of the next month, most of the other boys, and some of the girls—even Stephani Campbell—took to doing the same.

By the end of the semester, I had developed a reputation. I could appeal to and reach jocks in the same way Ms. Stephens appealed to our musical and artistic students, the way Mrs. Dennison reached the more math-and-science-inclined kids, and Mrs. Rosenbaum inspired our most high-flying gifted and honors students. And I wasn’t bad with the angry or disaffected kids at the school, either. Leaning into my new reputation, I made analogies comparing long passages to “easy weights” and short, dense texts to “heavy lifting.” I taught some “tough guy” poetry, and when it came time to write in class, employed a stopwatch, exhorting my students to exceed their personal bests of one paragraph, half a page, a page and a half. I wasn’t like one of those movie teachers—I wasn’t staying long hours after school, taking kids under my wing to tutor them, or crying when they failed. And certainly the behavior improvements were incremental, the reading still faulty, the writing still filled with basic grammar, capitalization, and spelling errors. But I was running my class, and kids were learning. At the semester break a number of coach Stuckey’s varsity baseball players and coach Arroyo’s wrestlers were transferred into my sections. The next fall I was assigned all of the football team’s junior starters and both co-captains of the volleyball team.

Bryce had paid attention in my class—he had paid attention to me. I had said things and he’d valued them—accepted them—because I had said them, because they were important to me. I wondered now, not for the first time standing beside Old River Road in the last week, if there was anything I could have done that might have saved his life: offered some other lesson, assigned him a key text. If he’d had me as his teacher senior year instead of Mrs. Dennison, might he have become less reckless, more prudent? Might he have lived?

But it was almost certainly a mistake to attribute myself so much influence. My stronger sense was that my ability to effect positive change in his life had hit its limit; that he was an 18-year-old kid growing up and playing football in Plains City, Kansas, his father and mother’s son, Davis’s little brother, product of Plains City, America in the late 20th and early 21st century. If any of my lessons, or Mr. Charter’s, or Mrs. Dennison’s had had any real impact, they wouldn’t have been felt until after at least a few years had passed, after some of that thick skin of adolescent rage and defiance had been sloughed off.

I bent to pick up and handle a shard of broken plastic the color of his truck’s blue body. The night was cooling and I smelled wood fire on the breeze. By the alchemy of some physical and psychic transubstantiation, I recalled one of my own high-speed trips down the road behind me that Bryce had so recently departed from: Garret, a cheerleader named Krista Lacy, and I getting Krista’s black Nissan Maxima up to a hundred and twelve miles an hour on a Thursday night after a week of working on a US history presentation together, Krista holding the wheel steady and braking expertly despite the half-bottle of strawberry Boone’s Farm she’d downed.

I walked further away from the road, down a narrow trail through the waist-high sagebrush into the sandier soil at the riverbed’s edge, where I was visited by another memory, this one from the honors section of English 11 I had been enrolled in during my own junior year: Mrs. Unger reciting Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” to my class from the front of the room while my peers and I followed along in our books. The effortless rhythm of the words; the way this river-poem had felt ocean-deep. Soul-deep. After she had finished her reading, Mrs. Unger had turned to draw a picture of a forking river on the board, populating its banks with simple illustrations of people, animals, docks, and houses. She had explained that We not only live by rivers, but We live by rivers.

In his poem, Hughes wrote of the Euphrates, the Congo, the Nile, and the Mississippi, the massive waterways of our world, the watery roads of human history. Not for the first time standing at my own riverbed’s edge, I tried to imagine them: the Nile feeding the aqueducts of the pharaohs, the Congo pulsing like an artery from deep in the heart of Africa. In the deep blue of my western Kansas night, I thought about the Mississippi, especially, that longest, broadest river in the country where I lived. The river Twain had written about. What relation could it or these other rivers have to me, Bryce, my current students, or the river we knew? What commonality could be shared in the tributaries of these branching family trees?

I stepped down into the soft, sandy bottom of the Arkansas. In his poem, Hughes suggested a connection between river-depth and soul-depth. What depth could my soul have? How deep could the souls of my people be? On the western half of Kansas, the Arkansas was dry.

Peter Shull is a Midwestern novelist and educator. His novel Why Teach? is currently being serialized on Substack and will be released in physical and e-reader versions in February, 2025. His short stories, poetry, and essays can be found here.

Art credit, all sketches: Maurice Olin