“Ms. Landon would be so shocked
if she came back and saw this class.”
The bland, observational tone
used for this statement did nothing to prevent my impulse to burst into
tears. I had to look up to reply to the kid
who felt it so necessary that I had this information.
“Go back to your group, Chris.”
He shrugged. The “group” consisted of four sophomores who were
supposed to be analyzing the murder of Curley’s wife in Of Mice and Men, but who were instead openly texting and listlessly
kicking one another under the desks.
The bell rang and I tried to
rally, but as they say, out of the mouths of babes and idiots comes the
truth. It had only been three weeks
since Ms. Landon had gone on maternity leave, and I felt swallowed whole by the
great apathy and derision of the American teenager.
My 8th hour class was
a little better. The fact that they
were a little rougher around the edges meant that they had a little less of
that impenetrable hard gloss. There were
a few boys who got into yelling matches and scared me to death, but they also
perked up noticeably when we started discussing the inevitability of death, and
contributed to some actual discussions.
Interestingly, they were the
group I’d been specifically warned about.
Ms. Landon had run through a roster with me before she left, and several
teachers who passed by us in the lounge nodded knowingly.
“Dan Nowen,” she pronounced, “is
a problem.”
She had reported him to be drug
tested multiple times, and each time was met with negative results. He talked back and generally caused a
ruckus. At the time, I wasn’t all that
worried. The troubled kids were
sometimes the easiest for me to wrangle.
Brooding and angry can sometimes be softened by kindness; jaded and
entitled not so much.
Dan Nowen was lanky and slouchy,
with a cartoony, half-asleep smile. He
met my eyes squarely as he slid into his seat.
He lingered as he left the class
on my first day. “So you’re going to be
here til the end of the year?” His body
angled into the classroom as if he was doing me a favor.
I smiled back at him. “Yep.”
His eyes slid from my eyes down
to my chest and stayed there.
“Sweet.” And then was out the
door.
I stood there for a few
minutes. The noise of the kids swarming
the halls swelled and then ebbed away. I
should have said something. And then the bell rang.
The next unit I began asked the
kids to take a scene from the book and pull out themes, motifs, characters,
motivations, and other literary devices.
Then, they had to find a song they liked that connected in some way. By assigning a few pages to each kid, we
created a literary soundtrack.
I introduced the project to an
unexpected burst of enthusiasm from the eighth hour class.
“This is actually pretty good,”
pronounced one kid without irony.
“Well, I thought so,” I
smiled. “When I’ve done it before, it’s
been lots of fun.”
The long-limbed blonde girl who
perpetually texted actually smiled back at me.
“This is way cooler than anything Ms. Landon ever did.”
I beamed inwardly.
Dan raised his head from his
desk and lazily murmured, “Bet you do a lot of things better than Ms. Landon.” And then I thought he winked, but I wasn’t
sure.
The class erupted in
tittering.
“Dan!” I stammered.
“What?” he feigned
innocence. “What’s wrong?”
“You can’t say things like that.”
“I just said you do a lot of
things better. Like better assignments,
better grading, better pencils, you know. ” His crooked smile widened.
The class laughed louder. I mentally clawed the air.
“Ok, well, you guys know that I
want to treat you like adults. Dan, you
need to act like an adult.”
He shrugged. “I still don’t see what was so bad,” and
widened his eyes in incredulity. The
class laughed even louder and I strained to raise my voice above them.
I resolved, then, to keep a
tighter rein on my classes. The effect
was generally little to no change. I asked a few teachers what they did to keep
order.
Mr.
Benton pulled out his ham and cheese sandwich and unwrapped it noisily. “You just gotta give ‘em the look,” he chewed
seriously, looking over his little round glasses at me.
Mrs.
Walsh was a famous “cell phone Nazi” who could catch kids texting when no one
else could; even the kids acknowledged it.
“Don’t ever be their friend,” she
wagged her finger earnestly. “If they
hate you, you’re doing a good job.”
I nodded vigorously.
Next Wednesday, the class began
presenting their song projects. Things
went well for the first half of the period, until Nicole Bromlin stopped in the
middle of hers, distracted by something.
All eyes followed her to Dan, who was slowly making more and more of an
exaggerated scene.
His fingers intertwined with each other, and his eyes were
fixed on me with a smirk. The other kids
started laughing.
I slammed the book down on my
desk. “Dan, what are you doing?”
He paused for dramatic effect.
“Undressing
you.” His eyes were locked with mine.
There
wasn’t any noise.
I
felt like you do when you’re on the toilet and you thought you locked the door
but you didn’t and then the door bangs open and it’s someone you work with and
sit next to and talk to about the weather, and there you are with your shirt
bunched above your waist and your faded underwear around your ankles. And by the time you know it’s happening, it’s
already happened.
I
clenched the back of my desk chair and physically shook myself.
“I’m writing you up.”
The bell rang.
I
watched the other teachers come in and out of the English office in a sort of
numbness. I looked down at the pink
write-up slip below my pen. Little
blanks for “Offense” and subsequent ones for “1st, 2nd,
or 3rd.” How would I describe
it? “Used hands to make a rude gesture…”
but his hands weren’t the part that was rude.
“Said out loud that he was undressing me.” The instant I wrote it I pictured handing it
to one of the deans. I felt my face
burning and crumpled the little slip of paper. I
tried to picture one of the other teachers writing a similar note and shuddered. Pictured some kid making comments that
graphic to one of the staid, balding men or the stocky, panty-hosed women…and
then looked down at my own body --- It
was really my fault, after all.
Never
would have happened if I had managed properly in the first place. And really, it wasn’t that big of a deal. Maybe I’d just let this time go, and change
my whole approach, change it so no kid would ever say anything like that to me.
I read the write-ups of several
of the songs that kids had presented that day.
I hadn’t paid much attention to Nicole Bromlin’s, in light of the
interruption, and I pulled hers to the top of the pile. She had one of the most climactic scenes in
the story, when Lennie accidentally kills Curley’s wife. It’s a heartbreaking scene, where we see
Lennie unwittingly begin the chain of events that will lead to his own death,
and it’s initiated by the unnamed Curley’s wife flirting with the slow-witted
Lennie. The entire class had a similar
reaction to the self-absorbed woman who crushes the dreams of the main
characters – she got what was coming to her.
But Nicole had a different view.
“It’s never ok to kill,” wrote
Nicole with an endearing seriousness, “and it doesn’t matter what the cause
was. Everyone blames Curley’s wife and
thinks she got what she deserved, but it’s not her fault she’s a woman, and you
can’t blame her for having soft hair that Lennie wanted to touch. She has lots of faults, but Lennie would have
just ended up killing someone else if not her.
The question is why he’s left alone if he really can’t tell when he’s
going to kill something. He’s already
murdered several animals. Someone should
have been more careful. He shouldn’t be
on the loose if he’s that stupid.”
I put down the paper, and pulled
another pink write-up slip out of my bag.
“Made inappropriate comments regarding my body,” I wrote, and slid it
into the dean’s mailbox.
I received a note back from the
pink write-up slip, informing me that Dan had received several days of lunch
detention. When he didn’t show up for class that Monday,
I figured maybe he was mad and ditched my class. When he wasn’t in class for two more days, I
asked around, and found out that he was, in fact, suspended for five school
days.
He had stolen a teacher’s credit
card. From there, he had taken it, not to
buy large electronics to sell on Ebay, but to buy clothes and fast food at the
mall just a few miles from the school.
He had spent $3000 on it in one day.
When asked to sign the credit card slips, he had neatly penned, “Mrs.
Sander’s son.”
He really was that stupid.
