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High School English Teacher

Updated: Aug 26

By Steve Henn

Some days you feel like a pointless taskmaster

haranguing a gang of disaffected devotees,

late bell to late bell. Some days you wonder

if anything coming out your own mouth

makes sense. Some days you don’t want

to be here at all. You’re eyeing the clock

as the minutes float by, the students schlump

out of the room. Tic . . . tic . . . you wander

too easily off topic, too uninspired with yourself

to maintain merely a bad mood, not nearly

a healthy negativity. Some days you ask

should I be doing something else?


Other days you slog through hours of two-paragraph

responses hoping for a spark in the thinking

to fire you up, to stoke a response. It doesn’t

always happen often but it happens not never

too. One day you get an email from a former

student praising you, the best teacher

he ever had, including college too. You’re happy that

he thinks the challenge your course presented

sent him crawling up a hill of language

to another level of skill. There’s nothing much

to say back about this. Thank him,

 

What else can you do? When you drank

a lot you might’ve seen a former student

at the bar who insisted on buying you a beer,

you might’ve listened to the boozy truth

of how they honest-to-god loved you.

Your dream is to be flown across the country,

around the world even, to read your poems

to honestly interested crowds of eager

listeners, but this is what you got instead:

about 25 faces per class period, hopeful,

or bored, or angry, or sad, somewhere else

in their heads or right here, right now,

turning the light of their young and, yes,

you know it to be true, their hopeful,

their eager faces toward you.





 

Steve Henn wrote American Male, Guilty Prayer, Indiana Noble Sad Man of the Year, and two previous collections from NYQ Books. He teaches mostly seniors and sometimes creative writing at a public high school in northern Indiana. More at therealstevehenn.com.



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