Mister Thomas, 33

Chapter 9

Mister Thomas, 33

        It’s 5:00 AM on Tuesday, September 3, 2019, and my alarm clock is screaming at me to get up for the first time in two and half months, and the thought of using a sick day on the first day of school is as tempting as opening Pandora’s Box. 

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        “It’ll be okay,” I say, looking in the rearview mirror at Leia, who is laying across the back seat of my minivan. We just left Dunkin Donuts. I wonder where she thinks she’s going �" probably off on some wild adventure like those we went on throughout the summer, but it’s her first day at doggie day care. She’s never been away from me for more than a few hours since I got her, and even though she’s always done great around other dogs, I’m nervous about how she’s going to do today. I pull into the parking lot and Leia stands up and looks around curiously. She drags me to the door and I ring the bell. 

            The door opens a crack, and in the darkness, a pale-skinned woman with huge, frizzy black hair appears, dressed in black from head to toe. Even her fingernails are painted black. She looks as though she hasn’t seen the light of day in about eleven years. She stares at me in silence like she has no clue why I could possibly be standing there, outside of a dog day care, with a dog on a leash.

            “Good morning,” I say, breaking the awkward silence, “This is Leia. It’s her first day here.” 

           “Oh,” the girl gasps, directing a peculiar, wide-eyed leer down at Leia. She opens the door wider, and I’m half-expecting her to melt as the light of day hits her. She kneels down, reaches out her hand and Leia lifts her head so she can be pet. 

“Hi Leia,” she whispers, giving her a few scratches on the chin. She might look like a whack-job, but she seems harmless enough, and Leia seems to like her, so that’s all I care about.  

“Well, thank you. Bye Leia. I love you.” Neither Leia, nor the Lurch-esque girl give me the time of day. 

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    Despite dreading the arrival of this moment since June when school ended and ushered in the glorious serenity of summer, now that I’m staring up at The Roger Williams Academy sign, a part of me is glad to be back. I love my job, and I recognize how rare it is for someone to be able to say that with a straight and honest face. I’ll even go one step further and say there isn’t a better job on this planet than teaching. 

“Good morning Mister Thomas!” An overly chipper voice pierces me, stripping me of my name. It begins. 

    “Good morning Rosie,” I say, putting on the happiest face I can muster on the first day. Walking through the nearly forgotten halls that are quiet and smell of lemon cleanser, I’m reminded of how teaching’s a beautiful racket. It still boggles my mind that I actually get to talk about two of my favorite things in the world, reading and writing, all day �" and I’d be talking about those for free even if I wasn’t teaching. Not only that, but the people I’m talking to have to listen to me, well, they’re supposed to at least, and sometimes there are magical days when they do, days when they hang on my every word as though their futures and livelihoods depend on it, and like it or not, they really do.

Other days, I get paid to listen. I’ll sit back, kick my feet up, sip a cup of coffee and I’ll have my students do all the reading, I’ll have them talk about the literature, and I’ll listen to their analysis. I’ll ask them students questions to further their thinking, tell them to “expand upon that idea” and try to get those cognitive cogs in their brains firing on all cylinders and their minds focusing on critical literary analysis. Sure, there are moments that leave me questioning whether a student is reading the same text as the rest of the class, or even living on the same planet we are, but it’s always fascinating. I’ve heard some of the wildest, most outlandish, ridiculous theories that you could possibly imagine, then five minutes later I’ve had my mind completely blown by something genius and enlightening another student says.

The choice is mine, and that’s one of the things I love the most about being a teacher. There are school guidelines and state regulations I need to follow, Common Core standards I need to address, and about sixteen people I need to answer to anytime something goes awry, but how I choose to teach my students is ultimately up to me. We can use computers, or we can go tech-free. I can decide today’s a perfect day for markers and construction paper, or that because of the rainy weather outside, it’s prime poetry time. There are so many different and creative ways to give a good lesson, and when you know what you’re doing, you show up prepared every day, get to know your students, find ways to keep them engaged, and you do the job the right way, it’s the single most gratifying thing you could imagine doing. During the school year, I’m smiling or laughing through about ninety-five percent of my day.

I make my way to the end of the hall, flip the lightswitch and gaze at the twenty empty desks in my classroom, my bookshelves lined with hundreds of novels,  Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King Jr., Edgar Allan Poe, Nelson Mandella, and Anne Frank posters adorning my walls - and everything is as perfect and beautiful as I remember leaving it. I take three steps in, and I glance down at the familiar red stain on my carpet and swallow hard as I remember… 

The choice is mine - a grievous and haunting reality that makes me legally, morally, and personally liable for every move and decision of about a hundred teenagers between the hours of 8:00 AM and 3:00 PM each school day, this time because my future and livelihood in every way depends on it. And because they’re teenagers, and we were all teenagers once and did the same dumb s**t back in our day that these kids do now (even if their s**t seems downright weird and unrelatable at times), it has its share of days where everything melts down and I feel like Dante, scouring my way through the darkest, deepest circles of hell, except instead of having wise Virgil to guide me, I’m stuck with some idiot kid standing there giving me useless, hindering advice that makes the situation exponentially worse - or a new teacher who doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing. It’s always a new teacher.

And I’d hate those days, if not for the fact that the choice is mine. You know what? If this were a piece of student writing, I’d praise its intentional use of repetition to emphasize a point. I’d even write that on the top of their assignment in my big red pen next to a giant A+ and a, “Great job (insert student name here)!” 

But I digress (as so often my students would tell you I do) - because I’m the weaver of my own fate, master of my own destiny, author to my own novel, and subscribe to the belief that as a teacher one of your most important jobs is to “fake it till you make it” �" whenever an uncharacteristically clueless Virgil appears, and things start to go to hell in a handbasket, and I find myself standing face to face with a situation that compels me to abandon all hope �" even as we cross The River Styx and false-Virgil plots against me, leads me astray and abandons me half way to traverse the realms of fire and brimstone alone...

�" even then, there’s always ways for me to find so many positives in a day because the choice is mine. Okay, maybe now it’s a little excessive, but you get the picture.

I can let those days bog me down and lash out at the world or my students, curse that wretched day back when I was twenty-six and decided to quit my cushy government job to go back to school to become a teacher �" or I can remember that was one of the greatest days of my life, and I can turn them into teachable moments. I can sit down with my students, rehash the events and make sure everyone learns something, real life lessons, from our journey through hell, then we laugh it off. I can have a great heart-to-heart with a student where I praise them for the recent improvement in their effort or their hard work. I can make calls home to parents and guardians for no other reason than to shower them with praise over how well their child is doing in class. I can even spend time inventing a new secret handshake with a student that’s so complex, so complicated that there’s no chance in hell either of us will remember every step, but we practice it, and it becomes something that only the two of us share, and we suddenly bond over that one simple, awesome thing. 

There are so many things I can do so that no matter what circle of hell I spend part or most of the day in, I can almost always find my way out into the light again when I leave the building. Every day as a teacher is a beautiful, eye-opening experience and I’m lucky enough to be starting my fourth year as the 9th and 10th grade English Language Arts teacher at Roger Williams Academy in Providence, Rhode Island. I can’t imagine teaching at any other school, or doing anything else with my life.

Well, aside from writing. That’s what I really want to do with my life. With the next chapter, and maybe that’s where I’m heading someday, but this chapter’s good, the best of my life, and I’m not in a rush to finish it. I see it differently every day because it’s still being written, and some days I think I’m living a beautiful epic poem, other days an eerie gothic horror, or a sappy high school romance �" sometimes even a bone chilling true-crime where I’m the protagonist in search of the origin of the mysterious blood splatter on my classroom floor.

    But I love every second of it �" because Mrs. Cadenazzi, “Mrs. Cad” as I affectionately called her, had this miraculous power, a dual ignition switch, capable of simultaneously sparking two flames. She not only inspired me to one day become a novelist, but she’s the reason I’m a teacher, and what I learned from her those moons ago continues to inspire me to be the educator I am. She was exactly for me what I want to be for my students. Their match. Their fuel. The caretaker of whatever their fire.