Day of School, 1

Chapter 10

Day of School, 1

I’m sitting at my desk sipping my coffee, wishing it was attached to IV drip, while I wait for my advisory students to arrive. My desk is neatly organized, my pencils are all sharpened, my stapler is full, and all my sticky notes are in a neat, multi-colored pile. By the end of today, everything will be a cluttered mess of scribbled notes, scattered books and assignments without student names written on that for some reason no one’s willing to claim ownership over. The pencils will slowly start vanishing, and my stapler will be empty within a few days even if I don’t use it - because even though I’ll argue with them all year about it, my students still think it’s a toy. But for now - there’s peace. 

One of the questions I’m always asked when I go out on dates is, “What are you like as a teacher?” And I never really know how to answer, because I’m a different teacher with every student. I’m always myself - nerdy, genuine, mostly laid back. I’m passionate, I get fired up and go all out to keep my students engaged. I’m straight forward, blunt, and I don’t sugar coat. 

But no two kids are alike, and no two relationships are the same. I’m tougher on some than others. I push some harder. I’ll do nothing but crack jokes with some of them - but am more tentative in my approach with others. I try to be whatever I think I need to be for every particular student, at any given moment. 

One thing I will say is that I definitely get to know my students better than most teachers, sometimes through their writing, which often reveals truths about students they’d never speak aloud, but mostly just through talking to them. I try to learn everything about them - their hobbies, interests, lives outside school. I don’t just see them as students, they’re people, and I let them get to know me as a person and not just as Mister Thomas. I treat them like humans, like the young adults they are because I subscribe to the belief that if a kid likes and respects you, and most importantly sees you as a human first and a teacher second, they’ll work for you, and they’ll work with you.

Every day at Roger Williams Academy starts with twenty minutes of advisory, which is sort of like homeroom - then the same students come back to me for another twenty after lunch, and while I teach ninth and tenth grade English, my advisory is all twelfth graders this year. As their advisor, my job is to look out for the academic, emotional and social well-being of my ten advisees. I’ve watched them grow up before my eyes, transforming from being mostly immature, self-absorbed and egocentric adolescents, to some still being that way, but others are damn near adults now. 

This is my fourth year with most of this group and they aren’t just my students anymore. They’re my kids. I’ve had them since day one, both as their advisor all three years, and for English when they were in ninth and tenth. We’ve seen each other at our best and worst over the years. They’ve weathered the storm with me from being a new teacher who didn’t know what the hell he was doing half the time, to now generally being competent, and knowing what I’m doing a solid eighty-ish percent of the time. When I mentioned the handful of students that I’d take a bullet for �" many of the kids at the top of that list are my advisees. Going on our fourth year together, the relationship with my advisory is different than it is with any other students. I know most of these kids almost as well as they know themselves, and they probably know more about me than they should. 

Not surprisingly, Maya is the first of my students to arrive. Unlike most of my kids who had years of growing up to do when they first came to me as ninth-graders, Maya arrived as a responsible, mature, hard-working thirteen-year-old, going on thirty. She’s an A student, likely in the running for class valedictorian, never one to miss an assignment, always follows directions and asks good questions.  She’s the type of kid that I just know is going to be successful in life no matter what she decides to do with herself after graduation. 

“Good morning, Mister Thomas,” she says politely, sounding more like the head of customer relations for a giant corporation than she does a seventeen-year-old student. She’s definitely got the disposition, intelligence and work ethic for a career like that. 

“Welcome back,” I say as she gives me a hug and we dive right into catching up. As we talk and she tells me about her summer, I hear Marky and Jadyn giggling about five doors down as they walk through the hallway. Marky freezes at the door and his face lights up when he sees me. There’ve been many students over my career that I love, and he sits at or near the top of the list. He’s the kind of kid I would have been friends with when I was his age. He’s charismatic, a natural leader and funny, but knows when to take things seriously (we’ve come a long way with that). 

He’s a powerful ally to have �" the kind of kid who when everyone is talking and chaos ensues, will stand up from his chair just seconds before all hell breaks loose and shout, “Ya’ll need to shut the f**k up.” Sometimes I still have to tell him to watch the language, but he’ll never get in trouble for it because deep down I’m thanking my lucky stars that I have him on my side. I’d go to war with this kid �" and he’s one of the few students that I’m certain I’d not only take a bullet for, but one that I can almost guarantee would take one for me. 

But our relationship is mostly built on insulting each other. 

“Yo Cue Ball,” Marky says, his patented smile stretched across his face, “You get a new haircut?”

            “All of them, actually. And don’t be jealous, Markus. It still looks better than that dead squirrel on your head,” I say, starting the year off mellow and light, but continuing the war of words layered with love. It’ll get progressively more wounding as the year goes on. Marky hates when other teachers call him by his full name, but I’ve been doing it for years and it’s an affectionate part of our constant banter. 

“Damn Thomas, why didn’t you spend the summer working on some new jokes?” Then there’s Jadyn, Marky’s side kick, who over the years has been the source of more than a handful of the gray hairs on my chin. 

    “At least I didn’t have to spend my summer at school,” I fire back �" a joke I wouldn’t make with many other students, but I know Jadyn can take it. Jadyn failed math last year and had to attend summer school. He almost failed English too, and might have stayed back, but I advocated for him and convinced Mister DeCosta, the 11th and 12th grade English teacher, to give him a D for the year after he busted his a*s last quarter. Jadyn’s a good kid. He’s friendly, gets in petty trouble but never for anything serious �" and even though he’s among the more intelligent kids in the senior class, education is way down at the bottom of his list of priorities. I’m hoping to see that change this year because he definitely has the ability to do well and I want to see him succeed. 

    Alessandro arrives next and gives me a casual nod and a “Sup Thomas?” as he comes in. This is his second year at Roger Williams, the only one I haven’t had since ninth grade, and he’s a nice kid but last year I struggled to build a relationship with him until the end of the year when he heard I used to skateboard. Sometimes you have to really work for it �" other times it’s as simple as having one little thing in common. 

    Arianna, Jasmin, and Ava, the inseparable gossip girls of Roger Williams Academy all show up together and smother me with hugs and instantly bombard me with a dozen questions each about my dating life. Boy do I have stories for them. 

“Are you dating yet?” “Did you meet someone?” “You didn’t get back together with Elaine, did you?” The questions hit me like a firing squad. When I broke up with Elaine in January, all of my advisory knew about it (because I warned them that I might be on edge. It was my way of apologizing in advance if I snapped over seemingly nothing), and no three showed a greater interest than they did. I don’t know if I was trying to teach them about the importance of being open and vulnerable when you are struggling through tough times, or if I simply needed someone to vent to �" but I will say this, having them to talk to definitely made those dark times a little brighter. For now, I promise them I’ll fill them in on everything as soon as the rest of the class gets here. 

Christian arrives right after them, “Big Papi” as I call him because he’s a big Dominican kid who looks and sounds like a carbon copy of Boston Red Sox legend David Ortiz. We spend the next two minutes doing our secret handshake that’s years in the making, and despite not having done it for two months, we both remember all seven-hundred steps, and finish strong with a fist bump, then the big teddy bear hugs me right after. 

“Where’s my book?” I ask him after we break our embrace, laying my serious “teacher eyes” on him. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t lying when he told me he returned it, when he swore on his mother’s life �" but sometimes you have to check twice with kids. They’ll swear one day; on their mother, on their grandfather’s grave, on god, and everything that’s holy �" but then lo and behold it’s in the bottom of their backpacks, or it miraculously appears out of nowhere. 

“I told you, I left it on your desk. I swear,” he says. His words ring with truth. I guess we’ll chalk it up to one of life’s great mysteries. I won’t bring it up again. 

Zeke, one of my absolute favorite students, comes in next. He has the energy of a buzz saw and is just about the nicest, goofiest kid you’ll ever meet. Sometimes his goofiness borders on excessive and I have to say things like “Zeke, stop drawing mustaches in Sharpie on your face” or “Zeke, stop sticking paper clips in your ears” but I love the kid. He comes to my class at the end of every day and helps me put chairs up, plugs in my ChromeBooks, cleans up without being asked, and sometimes just hangs out with me until I head home. 

He’s had a tough upbringing, his mother died when he was six, doesn’t know his father, and he lives with his grandparents, one of whom has had cancer for over a year and is slowly dying. That’s led to issues with attendance in the past �" but despite all of that, he always does his best every day and there’s always a smile on his face. He’s not the most academically gifted kid in the world, but he’s the kind of kid you desperately root for and want to guide towards success in life.

“What’s up ya’ll?” Zeke roars. Volume control is definitely something we need to work on this year. “Be honest Thomas, you missed me, right?” 

“Nah, I was hoping we’d be able to find another school that would take you, but they all said you were too much of a pain in the a*s, so I guess I’m stuck with you again.” 

“That hurts, man,” he says, holding his hand over his heart and clenching his fist. Nine of my ten students are in their seats as the first bell rings at eight. There’s only one face missing, that of Rosa Cortez.

Before I tell you about Rosa Cortez, let me just be real with you about something. Every teacher has their favorite students. It’s just human nature �" hell, I could rank my top twenty right now. It’s not always the smartest kids that top the list, or the goody-two-shoes, or the ones who raise their hand and never get in trouble - sometimes you just connect with a kid over something, or you can always make the other laugh or smile, or they are the kind of kid who turns in every assignment and even if it’s not perfect work, you know they did their absolute best. 

But just as every teacher has favorites, we all have kids we don’t like. We try so hard to like them all, and show them how much we care and we do everything we can to not treat them differently than anyone else. We try to remember that at the end of the day they’re just kids �" selfish and dumb like we all were at that age, like I definitely was, and that their actions are rarely intended to be malicious and that so much of their behavior is a product of situations that are beyond the realm of their own control.

But no matter how hard we try, no matter how much we remind ourselves that it’s ridiculous and immature �" downright unethical and wrong of us; it’s a plain and simple fact that we aren’t robots; we’re humans �" and like humans, there are times in life when you simply, for some reason or another, just don’t like someone. And I don’t like Rosa Cortez. 

You know what? Since we’re being real, and because I’m officially back in teacher mode and will be spewing the same rhetoric to my students over the course of the year, lines like, “Be more specific about your thought process” and “explain your metacognition” or my famous shout of “Word choice, word choice, word choice!” let me get serious and specific here about how I really feel about Rosa. She’s the bane of my teacherly existence, the source of more turmoil in the four years I’ve had her as a student than all the rest combined, the root cause of the straggly strands of gray that have salted my beard �" and the very reason I’m glad I went bald in my twenties because if I hadn’t, she would have driven me to pull every single god damn hair out of my head. 

Remember the story about Joel Magner? That kid was a domestic house cat compared to this ferocious lioness. Here’s a highlight reel of my five greatest Rosa Cortez encounters:

5. December 21, 2017: Rosa tells me she “… hopes me and my family die in a fire…” over Christmas break. 

4. March 16, 2018: After getting an F on a test, Rosa draws the letters “uck you Thomas” next to her grade and hands the paper back to me before giving me the middle finger. 

3. June 19, 2019: Rosa knocks not one, not two, but three ChromeBooks off of three different desks in an attempt to get her pen off the floor. 

2. June 23, 2019: On the last day of school, Rosa tells me she hopes I get “Sniffalus” �" and it takes me a few days to realize they learned about STDs in health class, and she mean syphilis. 

1. September 4, 2016: The first day I ever met Rosa, after sending her to the dean’s office for punching another student in the face and giving him a bloody nose, Rosa calls me, “Fuckface Thomas” then tells me to “eat s**t and die” and she gives me the first of many middle fingers I’d see during our time together, and leaves the room, but not before kicking a desk and knocking the first of many ChromeBooks she would knock off desks over our three years together. 

Needless to say, our relationship didn’t exactly start off on the best terms �" but unlike other students that I’ve had rocky encounters with, maybe not to the extreme of Rosa Cortez which was a god damn meteoric collision �" with Rosa, I’ve never been able to rebound. 

If you think I’m an a*****e for talking that way about one of my students �" sorry, not sorry. I’ve tried so hard to like her - believe me I have. I’ve used every strategy, every approach from tough love to cool teacher to parent meetings to full staff meetings �" anything and everything to get through to this kid, but every time I think we’ve made a sliver of progress, she does something that sends us right back to where we started, and I’m thoroughly convinced she not only knows how much she tortures me �" but that she actually relishes the thought of it. 

But no matter what �" even if a part of me is crossing my fingers in hopes that she’s moved way across the country, or is locked up in some detention center and I’ll never see her again, and even if she gives me absolute hell over the next year, she’s still one of my kids. That means I won’t give up on her no matter what she does. I’ll try to like her and I’ll treat her just like I do everyone else. I’ll still try to build a connection even if it’s in vain, and I’ll do just about anything for her �" just short of taking a bullet because there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of that happening. 

Sitting here, drinking my coffee and looking at nine faces I know and love, and hoping it stays that way, dark clouds appear outside of the windows and strafe across the skies. Thunder rumbles, booms so loud it’s deafening. Fierce winds pound against the trembling building and the sky breaks and it starts raining �" not just a drizzle, but an absolute wash-out downpour �" but it’s all in my mind. The sun shines through the windows, but I sense the storm is coming. 

At 8:01, Rosa Cortez arrives with all the charm, all the fury and unpredictability of a hurricane on cocaine. I blink slowly as she stands at the door, hoping for a moment that when I open my eyes she’ll be gone. But when I open them, her gaze meets mine, and I know I’m looking into the eye of the storm.

“Welcome back, Rosa,” I say nervously, fearing even those words could set into motion a chain reaction of catastrophic proportions �" and remembering that it was Rosa Cortez who was the catalyst of the great “Is the sky blue?” debate of 2017 that led to a fight that ended in three suspensions, a broken nose, blood on the floor, and police officers in the building �" and a permanent red stain on my carpet that no amount of cleaning products or deep scrubbing will ever get out -  a date which no doubt belongs enshrined amongst her other top five gems, but I can’t decide right now which one it trumps. 

“Hey,” she says casually as she walks into the room. She takes her headphones out, puts her backpack on the floor and takes a seat in the back row, all without breaking anything, to my pleasant surprise. 

“How was your summer?” I ask tentatively, afraid that as the words come out of me, they might awaken the beast within her. 

“Same old s**t,” she shrugs. A nervous smile stretches across my face as I nod my head and breathe a sigh of relief. I’m not the kind of teacher who makes a big deal over swearing �" definitely not with Rosa Cortez, not over the word s**t, and even more so, especially with not my seniors. They’re inner cities kids, practically grown ups now and it’s just part of the vernacular and doesn’t mean the same thing it might mean in a different district, and if I freaked out on every student who swears, I’d find myself a guppy in a sea of sharks, and if I kicked every student out of class for saying a word like s**t, I’d find myself lecturing to an empty room. My lax policy also affords me the luxury of letting one “slip” every now and then without looking like a hypocrite. 

Sure, I’d love to see them get better at code-switching and if it were any student aside from Rosa Cortez, I’d roar my patented shout of “Language, [first, last name]!” just to remind them of where they are - but with Rosa, if nothing ends up broken, if there isn’t blood, and she doesn’t vocalize death-wishes or threaten extreme acts of violence against anyone �" she can get away with almost anything. I want to say it’s because I try so hard to make a connection with her, but it’s mostly just keeping the peace. It isn’t worth the headache. That reminds me, I should refill the ibuprofen in my desk. 

I look around the room, all ten of my kids around me �" even Rosa Cortez, and that’s all it takes. I’m home. I’m back to being a teacher again, back to alarms blaring at the a*s crack of dawn - back to the traffic, and the daily grind �" the grading, the meetings, the parent phone calls, dreaded conferences with them when I have to scour the depths to find something positive to say about all of them; back to being surrounding my sneezing kids who don’t cover their mouths when they cough, some who STILL DON’T WASH THEIR HANDS WHEN THEY COME OUT OF THE BATHROOM, and make an absolute mess of the class and steal my books and can’t follow simple directions. 

But I’m not a schmuck, because no matter what summer me says, the positives of the job will always outweigh the negatives. Summer me isn’t dead �" he’s just lying dormant for the next nine and a half months, but the sun shall shine on him once more. 

 I love what I do. I have the best job in the world. I go all out every day, I bust my a*s and I do it right, and at the end of the day I go home and I’m almost always happy. I feel fulfilled, knowing that I’m doing the one thing that I know I’m meant to be doing right now in this chapter of my life. And maybe the day will come when I write a best-selling novel and then I’ll leave it all behind. But for now, I couldn’t be happier to be at this exact spot at 8:02 AM on Tuesday, September 8, 2019: A day I’m praying will not find its way onto Rosa Cortez’s highlight reel.

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While I’m as real and genuine with my kids as I can be without risk of losing my job, there are obviously certain elements in my life that I can never discuss with them, not if I want to keep teaching. I’m telling my students about my summer, speaking of those glorious and cherished moments as if they’re memories from a lifetime ago, but I have to be careful. 

I’m not saying I’m Charlie Sheen, or Jay Gatsby, or the drummer in an 80s hair band. My life isn’t all sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but I’m not sitting at home and falling asleep to Jeopardy, or going to book clubs every night either (only Tuesdays) -  I’ve had experiences this summer my students couldn’t even fathom and there are things about me they wouldn’t believe in a million years if I told them. 

     To my kids, I’m Mister Thomas, English teacher and certified super nerd. In their eyes, I’m the guy who can go three months into the school year without wearing the same tie twice, and has at least three theme ties for each major holiday. I’m the guy who gets excited whenever a student accidentally says something beautifully alliterative, who brags about how many poetry books he owns, who geeks out whenever Harry Potter is mentioned in class, and who every time someone watches a movie that was inspired by book, feels compelled to tell them that the book was better. If you ask them, I’m an upstanding, law-abiding member of society, and they think my life revolves around little more than teaching and reading books �" and I work hard to keep it that way. 

There are areas I never tread, lines I’ll never cross �" rules even, about what I can and can’t say around them, and what I will and won’t discuss, developed and cultivated, defined and refined over the course of three years of toeing the line then having to back away from addressing life’s most uncomfortable elements with students. Let’s take a look at the list: 

1. Never, under any circumstances admit to still doing anything illegal in your life. Drinking is acceptable, but you always have to downplay the level of your drunkenness in stories. You never confess to having more than “a few” drinks. You can admit to some of the dumber mistakes you made in your youth, illegal or otherwise, but even then, there’s a line you can’t cross. Students need to see you as a human. You aren’t a saint, but it’s important that they see you as a law-abiding citizen.  

2. Know who can and can’t be trusted. If you hear a kid is constantly spreading rumors or telling lies and embellishments or getting into other people’s business, proceed with caution and be wary of what you say because things can get misconstrued sometimes and there’s nothing worse than having to answer a “What did you mean when you said…?” email from your boss at 3:15 on a Friday afternoon.

3. Know who can and can’t take a joke. This can be tricky. Sometimes students hide behind masks of smiles and laughs, but if you sense you’ve started crossing a line, back off before the tears start streaming.

4. Sex? What’s that? Never heard of it. No, I’ve never done the sex before. No, I don’t want to hear anything about unfamiliar this thing you call sex. I know nothing about it. Plain and simply it’s just something you avoid discussing. Ignorance to these issues can be your best friend. There is one exception to this one though, a painful caveat that’s led to more than a few horror stories over the years, but let’s hope that doesn’t come up again. 

5. The cardinal rule and by far the most important of them all: Always report safety concerns no matter how you feel about a student and no matter how much trouble they’ll get in, or the fact that they might hate you forever. If a student is at risk against someone else or themselves, no matter what, ALWAYS REPORT. Sometimes it’s nothing, but I never want to experience a time when it is and I don’t speak up. And eventually, if you don’t give up on the relationship the student will forgive you. Kids hold grudges, but eventually they’ll learn you care for them, and maybe they’ll even understand why you had to it and you’ll teach them one of the most valuable life lessons that you can’t possibly be taught in a classroom - a lesson about how you do what it takes to protect the people you love no matter the cost.

Of course, there are other situations that arise where brevity or silence is my best option - but like I said, I’m real with them, an open book, because they need to know that just like them, I’m a human being. Sure, sometimes I have to tone things down, maybe fudge the truth a little or replace the truth with symbols, metaphors and euphemisms �" but still, they probably know more about me and my life than they should. 

I’m shuffling through my date night stories from the summer, looking for one that I can tell them, a funny one that’s going to start this year off the right way. It’s not that I can’t think of one, it’s that I can’t narrow it down to just one. I’ve had some experiences over the last couple months that when I’ve reflected upon later, as my kids would say, I have literally LOLed about. 

Then as I gaze at my audience who are anxiously awaiting a story, my eye meets Hurricane Rosa, and I remember that she said “same old s**t” when she came in earlier, and I know which one to tell them. It was one of my earlier dates this summer. Danielle, 29...