Day of School, 13

Chapter 13

Day of School, 13

    As a teacher, I occasionally find myself in unprecedented situations that no amount of school or student teaching or advice from colleagues could ever prepare me for. An example of this happened during my first year of teaching, when a faulty sprinkler on the floor above mine led to my classroom, and the entire first floor of the school becoming buried under five inches of water and crumbling ceiling tiles �" a situation which we didn’t cover in my adolescent development courses in college, hadn’t been the topic of one of our countless staff meetings, nor had I previously had the intuition to ask an experienced teacher how they would handle such an event as students being attacked by falling tiles. 

Obviously, this is a pretty extreme example, and I don’t frequently find myself serving as a human shield to falling debris while I battle to swim upstream against a raging river, not in a literal sense, but I do find myself throughout the course of a year stumbling upon these peculiar moments where I’m caught like a deer in headlights.

Most of the time it’s not so catastrophic �" it can be as simple as hearing a student say something so stupid it leaves you stunned, or being asked a question that catches you off-guard, and you find yourself speechless with no earthly idea how to respond.

Do you ever wish you had an eject switch that you could hit, and it would magically transport you from where you are at that moment? And even if it took you to Antarctica, or the middle of a gunfight, or deep into the uncharted dark waters of the ocean where those crazy fish with lamps attached to their heads live - you’d still take your chances?

Which leads me to today. I’ve just been asked, by Rosa Cortez nonetheless, this:

You know what, before I tell you what she asked me, I want you to know something �" better yet, I want to reiterate and emphasize something you already know. This kid put me through hell for three years. She’s needled me, twisted me, poked and prodded, agitated and irked me to the point that I’m on edge whenever she’s around, like her mere presence haunts my existence �" okay, maybe that’s a bit extreme, but she has been a total pain in the a*s for sure. 

But something strange has happened between the end of last year and now. That kid who tortured me incessantly like she was being paid to do it, and while I don’t want to jinx it, and we’ve still had our share of moments where I’ve gone into defense mode and instinctively thrown my hands up to block things from being hurled my way �" but I dare say things have… improved between us.

She’s not the same person she was at the end of last year, when she couldn’t make it through a complete sentence without using two different forms of the F word. She’s not the girl who was more likely to give me the middle finger than she was to say good morning. Hell, it’s already October 4 and she hasn’t broken anything; human or machine. Again, and I’m literally knocking on my wooden desk right now as I say this �" she’s grown, matured even. 

She’s down to one F word every few sentences; has been exercising her varying word choice a lot more and has replaced them with slightly more appropriate and less profane forms of “s**t” and “damn”. I’ve only seen the middle finger three times this year, and it’s only been directed at me once. She even walked away from a fight during lunch �" sure, she still beat the boy up afterwards �" but she did it off school grounds, and even then, abstained from breaking any bones. She’s still a hurricane, but I think she’s off the hard stuff now �" thirteen school days clean and counting. 

Baby steps, but steps nonetheless. 

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"Can someone get a disease from giving a blowjob?" She asks.

I did that on purpose, sprang it on you with no lead-in just to prove the point - to make you feel like I do at this moment - like a deer in f*****g headlights. I mean, how does one even begin to answer a question like this? This is a seventeen-year-old kid. I’d take falling ceiling tiles right now �" I’d hit my eject switch and take my chances, and even if I ended up standing at one of the seven gates to hell, that would still be better than here. 

I know what you might be thinking �" that she’s just messing with me, trying to put me in an uncomfortable situation �" but I’ll guarantee you that you’re wrong. This is the kid who thought syphilis was “sniffilus” �" the same kid who last year with a straight face asked me how if it was cheaper to raise a kid or get an abortion, the same girl who I made the regrettable mistake of arguing with over her insistence that Canada was, as she vehemently asserted, “not a real place” and she meant it and defended it with such passion and fervor - which as I now recall was the spark that lit the match of the great “Is the sky blue?” debate of 2017. 

But long story short (probably not, if you’ve noticed by now) - she simply doesn’t know. She’s not a dumb kid, not the highest academic achiever by any stretch �" but even amid the three years of turmoil, before the hurricane kicked her habit of snorting the devil’s dandruff, she’s had these moments of great clarity and articulation when she’ll say or write something astounding �" but they were just little blips of brilliance that went away, and were usually followed by longer periods of sheer carnage and destruction. 

I’ll give her this, as I stand here, still speechless and at an absolute loss for words, she’s been better this year. She’s reading what she’s been assigned, turning in most of her assignments, and has turned into a solid C student �" and on the one assignment that she did get a failing grade on, she didn’t hand it back to me with the words “F**k you Thomas” written on it. Baby steps. 

I’ve been telling you all of this as a stall tactic. It’s called task avoidance and my students do it constantly when they don’t want to do something. Sometimes they’ll fake sick, or ask to go to the nurse or the bathroom, or they’ll put their head down or just stare off into space for about an hour like the rest of the word doesn’t exist to them �" but one of the simplest and most effective strategies is to keep talking, which is what I’m doing. But eventually you have to do something when you find yourself in situations like these. 

Not yet, though. I need a moment. I can’t just go jumping wildly into this. I need to prepare myself first - mentally, physically, emotionally. If you were paying attention early, you’d know that I have a few rules that I follow when I’m interacting with my students. You may remember: Sex? What’s that? Never heard of it. No, I’ve never done the sex before. I know nothing about it. Plain and simply it’s just something you avoid discussing. Ignorance to these issues can be your best friend. But if you paid close attention and did some close, critical reading, you’d know that I said there was an exception to that rule; a caveat if you will, one that has led to some awkward, uncomfortable encounters over the years. 

Of course, the safe move is to send her off to someone else, a science teacher or a health teacher, maybe the guidance counselor �" hell, even the janitor Mister Rigman might be a better choice than me considering the tumultuous history between Rosa and I - but I’m a teacher. I get paid to educate kids about things they don’t know, and right now, despite my every inkling to send her packing, it’s my job to teach Rosa Cortez about safe-sex practices. Well, let’s leave that to Mister Thomas, de-facto health and sex-education teacher. Here goes nothing. 

“What?” I snort. Sorry, I have to buy more time. 

“Can someone get a disease from sucking dick?” She asks, varying her word choice, but for once to my appalment. I take a deep breath, tell myself it’s time to educate. 

“Well, Rosa, I won’t even ask why you want to know,” I say, because I don’t for the life of me want to know, “but let’s try using language that’s a little more appropriate.” 

“Like what?” She asks. I sigh. Educate, I tell myself. 

“How about saying, “Can someone catch a sexually transmitted disease from performing oral sex?”” 

“Okay. Can they?” She asks, her eyes wide and curious. I don’t know what to do or say at this moment other than to just give her an honest answer. 

“Yes, Rosa. They can.” 

“No cap?” She asks. 

“No cap,” I sigh. She stares at me, straight-faced and serious, but then she starts giggling so hard her face goes red. She smiles, for once not at the idea or execution of causing bodily harm to someone. She laughs at me, points her finger, laughs herself to the point that I’m afraid she might keel over. 

“’I’m just f*****g with you, Thomas,” she says, taking a moment to breath before resuming a giggle-fit that seems like it might never end. I shake my head, sigh and put on a serious face, even though I’m cracking up inside. It’s one of the things you have to do is a teacher �" learn to laugh along the way. She starts walking away. 

“Watch the language, Rosa Cortez,” I say. It slips right out and by the time I realize it, it’s too late �" and I watch as she freezes right next to the door. A loud horn blares signaling the storm to come as she turns to face me, and the rain pitter-patters on the roof as the dark clouds roll in. Her eyes turn dark, her usual scowling frown returns, and I’m afraid I’ve just catapulted us back into a state of constant turmoil.

“My bad,” she shrugs, and she turns around and walks away. I told you earlier that I find myself in these moments throughout the year �" a paralyzed deer frozen by headlights - that’s how I feel right now. She didn’t throw anything. She didn’t yell and scream. She didn’t break anything. She didn’t even give me her trademark middle finger. 

“Yo Thomas,” her voice returns, startling the ever-living s**t out of me and my arms almost go up to shield myself. “Have a good weekend. I want to hear about your date on Monday.” 

“You… too…” And suddenly in the moment I realize what’s happening. Yes, she’s matured and she’s grown and she’s changed �" and maybe I was wrong when I was certain she was ignorant to the fact that oral sex and can lead to venereal diseases (though there’s a chance it was a serious question masked by a joke, kids do that sometimes), but it doesn’t matter because maybe I’ve finally found it… the glue, the bonding agent between Rosa and I… well, probably not - but it might be just enough to keep the storm at bay.