Student Teachers
Sep 28
3 min read
By Andrea Cavedo
She is not freshly out of school, but she changes her eyeliner color almost daily, her hairstyle. She has always thought of herself as confident, idealistic, but lately, she finds herself reevaluating.
She is teaching her favorite subject, trying to get the students- her students, temporarily—to grasp the simmering tensions under America's placid Cold War surface. Coaxing them to see conflict they might otherwise miss. The teacher who is hosting her for the quarter is skeptical, but equally content to retreat to the water-stained back corner of the room to grade essays, when he isn't reading a magazine. He wishes her luck with the warm cynicism of a veteran. She ignores his smirk and thanks him, and with no greater ceremony, the class is hers.
One day, screens a film about McCarthyism. From her perch behind the host teacher's hulking metal desk, she notices two kids making out in the back of the classroom. She knows she has to stop them, but how? Her training program-taught late at night by retired district administrators instead of professorshas not addressed strategies for dealing with students tonguing in class. Having the lights off has made them bold. It would be easy to say nothing.
"Lovebirds, knock it off," she calls, face invisibly aflame in the darkness of the room, and they do, they break apart.
"Thank you," she says, nearly vibrating with relief.
She doesn't know what to make of her students. Are they good kids, or not? Can they be good? They talk about her, give each other license to pick her apart. "That shirt makes you look like a cowgirl," says a languid girl who never turns anything in, who then adds, "I like it."
"Thank you," she says, mystified. The shirt is bright teal plaid. She doesn't wear it again, just in case.
An insightful boy with impeccable grades, slighted on some tiny, throwaway class activity snarls at her, "Those glasses make you look like a mean, old granny"
"Thank you," she says. She switches to contact lenses only, even though they burn her eyes in the carly morning darkness.
One boy in the class is big and swaggy and toes a line between flirtation and harassment with her every day. "Where you from, beautiful? Look at those eyes, those baby blues, mmmMMM."
They all watch for her response to this. She does not thank him, just moves on, but never before has she so wanted to be invisible. She stops wearing makeup.
The day of the fight, she doesn't feel it coming, doesn't know yet how to sense the vibration and churn underlying their flat affect. She is mid-sentence about the Vietnam War when a quiet, round girl springs from her seat, faster than anyone could have expected, yanks another girl from a spindly desk and heaves her into the ancient filing cabinets that line one wall of the cinder-block room. She rushes towards them, and her host teacher rushes towards her, pulls her back with a fistful of nondescript blouse. For a moment, everything is shrieking sound and struggle in the glow of the overhead projector, and then it's all over, the room back to normal but for an overturned desk and some clumps of hair on the floor. The girls are gone, but so is her host teacher, escorting them down to the dean of discipline. She is all alone at the front of the room.
The swaggy boy moves up to the front row. Oh no, she thinks, not now. Her voice is caught behind her crumpled mouth. She is unsure why she is about to cry, but certain she will never recover from it if she does.
He looks up into her watery eyes and says,
"Miss, I'm right here. Teach me."
He doesn't blink. Neither does she.
'Thank you," she says.
Cavedo has taught history and government to Chicago high school students for the last decade. Her writing has appeared in Short Story Long, McSweeney's, Chestnut Review, HAD, CRAFT Literary, and others. She can be found online at www.andreacavedo.com.
