Teaching The Ninth

“I’m not in a hurry.” He looked at me, leaning his chin on his
hand, and in fact he seemed amazingly settled in. Just a few minutes
ago, Allan had seemed to put him on edge, but there was no trace of
that left. Had his moods always shifted so fast?
“How have I been.” There seemed to be nothing to do but try to
answer; I had invited him here, hadn’t I? Presumably it wasn’t just for
aimless chit-chat. “Well, teaching the ninth grade is no pushover. I
really don’t know how Augusta’s managed to keep going for twenty
years. She says the first year’s the hardest – that better be true. Wasn’t
it hard when you started your job?” He nodded. “About once a month
I was afraid the whole thing was just going to fall apart on me. Like I
was going to have to go in there and say Okay, I admit it, I can’t do it, I
don’t have what it takes. But you know. You have to face the next day
even when you can’t. You know what I mean – don’t you?”
“Yes.” It was his hair that threw me off – I kept having to
remind myself that he must be able to deal with little kids’ feelings,
and if so that must mean I could still talk to him. His voice was kinder
than he looked.
“George, why did you cut your hair off?”
“I guess because I was broke. It began to seem crazy spending
all that money on haircuts. This way I can do it myself. And, you
know, I got used to it.”
“Is that really all there is to it?”
He gave me his one-sided smile, which I was sure was not the
smile I recalled. “We were talking about you, remember?”
“Oh, all right. But it’ll be your turn later on. Anyway, it was a
really long year. In the spring my favorite student got busted for
smoking pot in the boys’ john, suspended for a week, after that he
never turned anything in and flunked the final marking period. It just
killed me to have to give him an F. That was just one thing that
happened. Kids have tough lives – you find out after a while.
Especially from what they write. Some of their families are so screwed
up – and what the hell can you do about it? I hate that. Feeling
helpless.”
“Yeah,” George said, scanning the table top as if he were
reading it. “There was this kid this year at the day care center, a
preschooler – according to the teacher, he knew way too much about
sex, after a while she figured there had to be something bad going on
in his life. Thank God it wasn’t in my room. It was an awful situation,
as soon as she tried to talk about it with his parents they started