This is my submission to the 2020 Valentine's Day contest. Please take a second to vote if you enjoy reading it. I've already enjoyed reading some of the submissions and look forward to reading more entries. Good luck to all the authors.
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I almost felt like I didn't belong the first few weeks. Many of the faces were only a handful of years younger than me. Some made my nearly beardless face look almost adolescent. I needed two weeks to grow a poor excuse for a five o'clock shadow. I was right out of college, a first-year teacher at a regional public high school. Two English teachers had retired unexpectedly the previous year and the district had only been able to hire a single replacement. I was that lucky new hire.
The small towns the district served were agricultural communities until the early nineteenth century. When nearby cities and larger towns industrialized in the years before the Civil War, farming the poor, rocky soil became less attractive than working in a factory. Farms went to weed, then scrub, eventually second growth forest. Farmers abandoned the fields for the factories and gradually sold off their farms in small parcels. Some old farmhouses, a few old barns, and an apple orchard were all that remained of the area's agricultural heritage.
The families in the district were mostly middle class to affluent. Few worked locally. Most commuted to two mid-sized cities a short commute away. There were some families that lived in the district only because they had roots going back generations, in many cases to colonial times, and already owned property.
Because the school was still short an English teacher, the entire department was over-loaded. Each teacher in the department had to take on an extra class. My extra course was an honors English literature class. I had one for juniors and another for seniors. Doesn't sound like much? It meant 200 more lesson plans, 25 more homework assignments to review many nights, six more books to read or reread, 150 more papers to read and grade, and 25 more grades to track, calculate, and report.
The honors students were more of a classroom management problem than other classes. Not because they were necessarily a behavior problem, though they weren't immune to causing mischief. Because they were bright, they constantly found ways to be challenging. Some assigned readings for the honors courses were considered somewhat controversial. They were intentionally selected to provoke thought and discussion. The goal was to develop critical thinking skills, a skill that would serve students for their entire lives as they dealt with a rapidly and constantly changing world.
Despite the serious nature of some of the topics, humor could sometimes be injected into classroom discussion. I encouraged it, to a point, by injecting the occasional humorous observation about the assigned reading. I had a handful of class-clown candidates among my charges, mostly among the honors students. Quick with a quip or an observation sure to result in howls of laughter. I had one senior girl with a talent for double-entendre. She took delight in embarrassing more modest female classmates, sometimes getting male classmates snickering and squirming in their seats. I tried to maintain some semblance of classroom decorum without sucking the fun out of the room.
It was sometimes difficult to keep a straight face. And there were times when I couldn't avoid laughing. Occasionally even when a comment was inappropriate. I didn't often have to tamp things down to maintain control, but it did happen a few times. Sometimes, I'd have a brief after-class discussion with a student to point out a comment had gone too far and there would be consequences if it happened again. Because of my approach, I developed a reputation as that most rare of creatures in a public high school, a challenging and demanding teacher that made learning fun. And was willing to display a sense of humor in class.
About halfway through the first quarter, the teacher's lounge began falling silent when I entered in the morning before classes began. I found being a somewhat frequent topic of discussion in the teacher's lounge a little unnerving. Eventually I learned several teachers with significantly more experience had been confronted by some of my students. Students who wanted to know why they couldn't make class fun like I did. Often the criticisms weren't fair. How do you make a joke about precalculus? Or the English Reformation? Lincoln was known for humor but there was nothing funny about slavery or the American Civil War.
Colleagues overheard students talking about me in the cafeteria or in the hallway between classes. I was aghast when one of my colleagues grinningly told me he overheard a senior cheerleader tell her girlfriend she'd fuck me in a heartbeat. My classes usually remained as serious and focused as any other. But colleagues whose classrooms were near mine could hear spirited participation that was absent from their classroom. And occasional laughter emanating from my classroom. See the smiles and energy of students leaving my classes. It became apparent my growing popularity with the student body bred a mix of admiration and jealously among my colleagues. Fortunately, the jealousy didn't breed animosity. My new colleagues seemed to like me. I tried to attribute my popularity to being closer to the students age than any of my colleagues. Most of them didn't buy it.
The principal, Dr. Sheila Purcell, sat in on a couple of my classes to observe after hearing some colleagues talking about me. I expected the students to more reserved in front of the principal. That was the case in my remedial English class. The junior honors English class got engaged in a spirited discussion about why George sacrificed so much for Lennie, then killed him rather let the mob capture him. She smiled at me when she left to return to her office.
My first review was positive. Dr. Purcell and my department head were pleased with my first quarter results and ecstatic with the feedback they collected. I don't know how, but Dr. Purcell seemed to know the scuttlebutt about everything in her school, including the cheerleader that claimed she wouldn't hesitate to have sex with me. When she reviewed a statistical analysis of my students' first quarter performance, she noted my students' grades were trending slightly higher than the expected distribution but nothing that suggested I was being too generous. She told me to keep doing what I was doing.
The first parent-teacher conferences were held in mid-October, just before the end of the first quarter. Most were what might be expected. I was very careful not to disparage any student. I confined my feedback strictly to academic performance. A few parents were annoyed that I didn't have effusive for praise their brilliant progeny. Some listened respectfully, sometimes wearing worried expressions. Other times a smile because their child was doing better than in past years. Some engaged with questions about the curriculum and expectations. Some just listened to my comments and went on their way. Each night one or two didn't show up for a scheduled appointment.
Only one meeting stood out. Charity Teagarden, a freshman, was from a family that had first settled in the area when it was still a British colony. I knew that only because I read a brief history of the area before accepting the job. Her family figured significantly in the area's historical narrative. The small historic district that straddled two of the towns was called Teagarden. Teagarden Common, a large multi-use park with a lakeside beach shared by the same two towns, was donated by the family before the Great Depression. There was a Teagarden Road. Teagardens had been politically prominent in the past.
