Tomorrow Times 3
Mensa means idiot in Mexican Spanish, an irony I learned from 28 sets of laughing, bilingual lips. My sophomore students would soon make flashcards for Greek roots and realize that soph- means knowledge or wisdom (my student Sophia flexed), but they’d also learn about mor-, so we were back to moron. That included me, who taught only lower classmen because I feared failing to ignite the A.P. scores of seniors above the minimum needed for credit at state universities like my own alma mater. Semi-trucks shook our classroom as drivers took illegal short cuts down the street named for a 1930s Polish mayor, who died from a bullet meant for FDR. Frosted windows could not mute the humming of neighborhood women pushing shopping carts, often piled with folded laundry and a toddler perched regally atop like a modern Velasquez doll-princess from the 1600s Spanish court.
A bilingual placard outside my door announced Classroom, then Aula, the formal Spanish translation, but many of my students’ parents had grown up in Mexico. Salón meant classroom to them, and aula was closer to the word for cage. Bars shadowed only the windows on the west side of my classroom, where we looked out past a gangway to a brick office building. The beach view, I called it, trying to joke with students sitting on that end, but when the class cracked up, I realized beach sounded like bitch said with a Latinx accent.
I rarely gave detentions, despite the pad of blue slips issued to all teachers listing common infractions like “Phone”, “Dress Code”, and one with a chilling typo: “Chewing GuN.” A detention I should have received was “Eating.” One day when I was battling morning sickness, I confiscated a student’s half-eaten pack of Sour Patch Kids, then gobbled it secretly, crouched down behind the podium.
I’d stand at that same podium during Covid 17 years later, fumbling hybrid tech. Once I mistakenly placed two masked students sitting physically in my classroom into a virtual breakout box with only each other. The Purell dispenser on the wall made a whining sound after each pump of foam, reminding me of the cheesy scene-change refrain on old Batman re-runs.
Medieval monks had memory palaces to store their thoughts and histories, but my 20 years of teaching are crammed into a mental classroom on the city’s Southwest Side. The carpet has been replaced twice during my time (one bore a stain from my vanilla latte), a chalk board scraped away and covered by a shiny whiteboard. Students whirl through, like a soccer player who answered only to Pony Boy and could be coaxed into completing all his class work if he was allowed to view new Naruto anime episodes during Thursday homeroom. Pony Boy is now a teacher. Or Araceli, a young woman who worked weekends at a beauty salon, sweeping up dark curls of hair, in part to buy her immigrant mother a dozen roses for Mother’s Day.
Sometimes we summoned ghosts purposefully to the room, like Banquo, whose surprising, bloody appearance at dinner made the student-actors giggle, and Hamlet’s father, whom we were all surprised to learn was Shakespeare’s favorite role to play. Minecraft swords leaned in the corner of my chilly room, along with purple and plastic daggers to assist us in our battles. One brilliant student who had written about being raised by a teen mother memorized Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” soliloquy, then turned it into an unlikely fight scene with a plastic sword. Hearing my student spit out each syllable of the desolate monologue, I remembered my own dismal sophomore year at a huge suburban high school, and wished I’d transformed doubt and shame to swashbuckling fury.
One spring weekend day in March, a student who was a wordsmith died from a bullet in his best-friend’s car. The year before in English, he had taught our class vocabulary: promiscuous for Curley’s wife in Of Mice and Men (he’d seen it on Ally McBeal) and peerless (a pro football fan, he admired Peerless Price). The tall, skinny young man had also written a poem in response to Pablo Neruda called Ode to the Other Side of the Pillow, extolling the virtues of cooler fabric that awaited every sleeper. My student listened closely, somehow even when turned around and conversing with classmates. One of his other teachers told me that after she’d written a reminder on the board followed by several exclamation marks, this student had pointed out that excessive punctuation was “a feeble way to express yourself.” The last time I saw my student alive was on the school’s second floor outside a computer lab that no longer exists. The room was locked, and he needed the notebook that he had left inside. I opened the door with my key, and as he went in, my student riffed: “It was extricated from me, it was extracted, I mean extra-curric-ulic-ulated.” I expected to discuss many more things with him – to have time for a word hereafter.
