The Teacher

I got sick my first year teach­ing high school. I was tired and weak. Acid turned my stom­ach inside out. I heaved up yel­low stuff. I tried to wait it out, hop­ing I’d get well, but my con­di­tion only grew worse so I final­ly went to a doc­tor and sum­ma­rized my symp­toms. “I’m real­ly sick,” I told him. “I must have can­cer or something.”

“How long have you felt this way?”

“Since the begin­ning of the school year.”

He paused. “Tell me about teaching.”

I told the doc­tor I taught five class­es, three peri­ods of twelfth grade Eng­lish Lit, one of Com­po­si­tion, and one class of kids repeat­ing ninth grade Eng­lish because they failed it last year, thir­ty to forty kids in each class, all of whom wished like hell they were any­where else. To hold their atten­tion, I had to cre­ate three enter­tain­ing tele­vi­sion pro­grams per day, fif­teen per week, and as the star of the show, I had to deliv­er a good per­for­mance. If one of my shows fell flat, I’d lose con­trol of that class and any­thing could, and usu­al­ly did, happen.

I told him this was the first year of full racial inte­gra­tion in Vir­ginia pub­lic schools. Ten­sions ran high. In my class­es, the black kids sat on one side of the room, the whites on the oth­er. It nev­er var­ied. Noth­ing was too insignif­i­cant to pitch the school into tur­moil. Take the elec­tion of the home­com­ing queen. The stu­dent coun­cil made a mis­take in the bal­lot­ing that result­ed in an all-white court. When they dis­cov­ered their mis­take, they decid­ed that plans for the home­com­ing were too far along to fix it. This near­ly caused a riot. Being naive and stu­pid, I had vol­un­teered to be a teacher-spon­sor for the coun­cil. I forced them to fix the mis­take and con­duct a sec­ond elec­tion. A black girl made it into the court on the re-vote, defus­ing the bomb, but the par­ents of the white girl, who got bumped out the sec­ond time around, and some oth­ers, were under­stand­ably angry at me and voiced their com­plaints to the school.

“And there was Fred,” I said. At nine­teen, he was the old­est ninth grad­er in the school. Short and chunky, he combed his hair like Elvis Pres­ley, wore a black leather jack­et, and always sat in the back row. One day I slogged through a chap­ter of Silas Marn­er. The bell final­ly rang, and all the kids filed out of the room except a lit­tle guy named Lanny.

“Mis­ter Oder, didn’t you see?” Lan­ny said, his eyes wide. “Fred had a gun.”

“What?!!!!”

“Fred was play­ing with a gun and smil­ing that weird smile of his the whole class. Didn’t you see?”

“No. I didn’t see.”

I ran to the principal’s office. We sum­moned Fred. He freely admit­ted he had a gun in my class. “I didn’t mean no harm. I just brought it along in case one of em got outa line.”

We sus­pend­ed him for a week. I thought I was get­ting to him before this hap­pened. He paid atten­tion and seemed to be try­ing, but when he returned, he wouldn’t talk to me. A few weeks lat­er, he dropped out of school. I couldn’t shake the feel­ing that I’d failed him.

“And there’s Ruth!” She was a senior in Eng­lish Lit, short, slim, and perky with a cute smile. She slaved over her papers and stud­ied hard.

Then one day her smile went away; she stopped pay­ing atten­tion; and some­times tears came to her eyes. I tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t open up.

One morn­ing before class she asked me to sign a doc­u­ment. In Vir­ginia, tru­an­cy was a crim­i­nal mis­de­meanor for chil­dren eigh­teen and under. This doc­u­ment seemed to say she could quit school if her teach­ers excused her absences.

“I don’t under­stand,” I said. “Why do you want to quit? You’ll grad­u­ate in June. If you drop out, you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

Tears welled in her eyes. She showed me where two teach­ers had already signed. “Please, Mis­ter Oder.”

“Tell me why you want to quit.”

“I can’t. Please just sign it, Mis­ter Oder. Please!”

I refused to sign unless she told me what was going on.

She burst into tears and ran away. I went after her, but couldn’t find her.

She missed school for a week. I should have called her par­ents, but I allowed my tele­vi­sion shows to take pri­or­i­ty and I let it go. When she returned, she was a dif­fer­ent per­son, somber and list­less, and she wouldn’t tell me what was wrong.

A few weeks lat­er, I learned from a teacher close to Ruth’s fam­i­ly that she’d tak­en the time off to have an abor­tion. It took my breath away. Ruth was in the throes of the cri­sis of her life, and I missed it.

I told the doc­tor about the boy who had a seizure right in front of me in the court­yard. “I had no idea what to do.” And about the giant kid in the hall­way out­side my class­room, who threat­ened me when I told him to qui­et down. “If my stu­dents hadn’t stepped in, I don’t know what would have hap­pened.” And on and on.

When I paused to take a breath, the doc­tor broke in. “I’ve got good news. You don’t have can­cer,” he said. “You’re hav­ing a ner­vous breakdown.”

He pre­scribed lit­tle white pills. I took them for five days. I’d nev­er been hap­pi­er in my life. On the sixth day, I flushed the rest of them down the toi­let. I fig­ured I’d nev­er be able to quit if I kept tak­ing them. Five days turned out to be enough. The break from my cycle of stress and depres­sion put me in a much bet­ter place.

I was twen­ty-two years old that first year and too imma­ture to be a good teacher, but I grew into that job. Some­where along the line, I fig­ured out that teach­ing was not about my tele­vi­sion shows. It was about the stu­dents. I did bet­ter from there on.

I didn’t stay with it, though. Teacher’s pay start­ed out low and ramped up very slow­ly. My wife was a teacher, too, but even on dou­ble pay we wor­ried we couldn’t sup­port a fam­i­ly. We talked it through and decid­ed I’d apply to law school.

Short­ly after I mailed out my appli­ca­tions, the prin­ci­pal called me to the audi­to­ri­um over the P.A. sys­tem. I walked in to find my stu­dents assem­bled there. They ush­ered me to the front of the room and one of them read aloud their ded­i­ca­tion of the year­book to me. I’m a lit­tle blur­ry about what I said to them. All I remem­ber is strug­gling to keep it togeth­er. I hope I con­veyed how much it meant to me.

The fol­low­ing spring, I was accept­ed to law school, and with more than a lit­tle reluc­tance, I gave the coun­ty notice of my intent to resign at the end of the school year.

This deci­sion worked out well for us, but I still have my doubts. I taught for three years. Over four hun­dred stu­dents sat in my class­es. They’re in their six­ties now, and I don’t know where they are or how they fared in life. Teach­ing them was the hard­est job I ever had. I made a lot of mis­takes, but I was get­ting the hang of it when I walked away. In rare moments, I broke through and made a dif­fer­ence. Those moments were each a great gift, and because of them, forty-five years lat­er, I some­times still dream about the road not taken.