The First Days of School

First full week and change

IN THE NINTH CIRCLE--I don't know. I just don't know. The mornings are getting tougher. The hours seem to have more minutes in them, and I'm encountering people in the halls who know me, but whom I don't know. Not just new teachers, either. Old students. Parents. Current students whom I mark absent, and then forget entirely that they exist later on. I stared blankly at a stack of papers for ten minutes today while eating my lunch, and then realized I hadn't touched them. I asked around and found that a lot of people were going through similar growing pains. But they're able to shrug them off, roll up their sleeves, and get back to work. Like Hamlet, I brood over them, and double their impact.

Last year's kids are swarming over me in the halls. "Oh teacher teacher, we miss you!" "Oh sir, our new English teacher is so mean!" "Oh man, could we please do some Confirmation Essays! Just one? I'm hurtin' for a fixin'!" At this, I can't help but jeer. "You were the biggest whiners in the world last year, and now you want to go back? Oh yes, I read your Facebook page! I saw the photoshop job you did on my butt. And now your dues have come! Moo ha ha ha!" At this point, they file out, sullen, abashed.

And then the new students file in. Sullen. Unabashed.

"I heard we're having a quiz today," one of them intoned irritably.

"You heard it from me,"I said. "It's on your schedule. And I wrote a reminder on the board. And I said the words as I wrote them."

"So it's true?" Sigh. "That sucks."

Two hours later, I'm in a Current Events class. The headline from Ted Koeppel's old show, circa 1979, reads, "Iranian Hostage Crisis: Day 101."

Hand raised. "I don't get it."

So I went into an old song and dance about the Iranian hostage crisis and how it hurt Carter's presidency but how Reagan capitalized on it in the first days of his presidency.

"But I don't get it."

"Well, Iran is a nation of meanies. Right now, we're trying to keep them from building a bomb."

"No, I don't get it!"

Well, what's not to get?

"What's a hostage?"

And other such events unfold. It could be worse. It has been worse, in fact. But it could be better, too. I could be just as clueless as some of them, for example. "This note says I'm an ass-face. Well, thanks! Thanks very much! I do have a sweet butt, now that you mention it."

See? Orwell was close: Knowledge is pain. Ignorance is relief.