THE TEACHER

By Charles Deemer

 

From The Colorado Quarterly, Summer 1969

 

            If I were a menial clerk, to whose gloom a Dostoevski or a Melville could give cosmic importance, then readily would I win your understanding. We are in an age the sensibilities of which are riveted to the absurd and what, after all, is more absurd than filling a ledger book with numerals, sorting out dead letters, filing away last year's purchase orders or pulling a lever in a factory? If I made my livelihood in so dreary a fashion, you would accept my gloom as being inevitable, deem it significant, and find in it an occasional metaphor for your own misgivings, whatever your employment; you would offer me understanding, empathy, sympathy, at least something more meaningful than what you now offer me, which is flattering but undue praise, or what usually is called "a good press." Were my life filled with physical danger and pain, were mine the life of a hunter, a mountain climber or a boxer, I then would be judged to be a kind of existential hero, for my temperament is naturally introspective. Would that I were a revolutionary, for Christ's sake! But in fact I am a high school teacher, a teacher of the physical sciences, and though compliments, even admiration, periodically come my way, they are presented not with understanding nor with respect but out of social necessity, in precisely the way one might admire the wife of an alcoholic: what she puts up with -- it's heroic!

            I am a teacher today for the sturdy reason that it is too late for me to become anything else. There are those among you who wou1d disagree, finding out that I am only forty-three and could pass for much younger. I have no inclination to argue the point. While being well aware that some lives may begin at forty, I present as historical fact that mine began at twenty-three, in 1945, when I returned from the war, as they say, to accept a teaching position at Pasadena High School. Suffice it to add that I've been at the school ever since. 

            But this--my seniority, so to speak--is not among my complaints. P.H.S. is a damn good plant, to use the compliment in vogue. Physical science teachers, more than teachers of the humanities, must have well-equipped laboratories at their and their students' disposal, and the taxpayers of Pasadena, generously aware of the scientific age in which we live, never hesitate to pass the bond issues which help to keep my laboratory modern. In fact, I rather suspect that the day is not too far distant when the better high schools in the country, P.H.S. among them, will add a simple nuclear reactor to the growing list of teaching aids a science teacher needs in order to do his job. The district in which I work is most attentive to my professional needs; I register no complaints. 

            What then is my claim to gloom? My friend and colleague Paul Finley has a theory about this, several theories as a matter of fact, but I find none convincing. Nonetheless I am recording a few of them here since, as a scientist, I know that my perceptual equipment (and my reasoning ability with it) is necessarily prejudiced, or at least not inclusive of all points of view from which the cause, and possibly even the remedy, of my gloom could be found. At worst Finley's theories are an amusement worth considering; at best one of them may hold the kernel of an explanation, though I personally fail to find it. 

            Finley, who teaches psychology, is an occasional colleague in revelry as well, this variety of camaraderie reserved from such special occasions as will arise during the Christmas holidays and final exam week. In brief, three or four times during the academic year Finley and I go out and get tanked up together, and the habit--and over a span of ten years it has become a habit--has made Finley and me intimate friends. We are, in fact, an inseparable pair on campus, whether we are found in the cafeteria or in the faculty smoking lounge: Ray Bowles and Paul Finley, the manifesto duo. I cherish our relationship a great deal, which may explain why I meet Finley's theories about my gloom with passive resistance. I would do nothing to rupture our friendship. 

            "Damn it, Ray. Get a woman!" Finley will exclaim periodically. When I let him know who I'm presently dating, he'll add impatiently, thinking himself misunderstood, "A wife! You know what I mean." 

            Depending on my mood I may shrug or, more rarely, counter his concern with an aggressive reply of my own, such as claiming the usual and accepted virtues of bachelorhood, my freedom, To a long-married man like Finley, the defense can be formidable. To myself, however, it is no more than theatre, a sham. An habitual shrug is the most accurate gesture of my feelings on the matter, for I find no special virtue in living alone, save the negative virtue that there are moments when to be alone may be the least of evils. My shunning of the altar follows quite another rationale: marriage has a way of begetting children. To have children! Fatherhood, to be frank, is a responsibility I am not prepared to accept. In my later years, when the facts of biological deterioration leave me senile, I may be quick to fool Finley and the rest of my colleagues who, to put it politely, "wonder about me." 

            I should hasten to point out that I am no misogamist, however near misogamy the attitude above brings me (but it is fatherhood alone I am avoiding). I date frequently, as much as three or four times a month, and have in my stable of female acquaintances, if I may be crude about it, a few whose interests do not stray beyond the bed sheets; so my frustrations are seldom physical. I rather think the erotic aspect of life is greatly over-exaggerated anyway. Certainly in my own experience, the erotic appetites only become maddening when left long unsatisfied. And here the resolution that most readily comes to mind is the one I practice. To date I've been fortunate enough to be able to indulge in the adult play my system requires without breaking any hearts hell-bent on leading me to the altar and the maternity ward. 

            At times Finley pursues the nature of my love-life with such dedication that I wonder whether he is looking for the source of my gloom or personal titillation. I shrug without comment in such instances, until the matter is dropped. Then, as if to clarify his motives, Finley will offer another of his theories, something more dry and reasonable, just to make sure I haven't misunderstood him. "Ray, get out of the physical sciences. Where do they lead but to more bombs? Men on the moon? For what? It's another potential cause of war, little else. With a couple years of night courses you could choose your field in the humanities. Damn it, Ray, that's where we really need good men today!" 

            I have been aware for some time now that it is impossible to talk about science with someone who sees in every scientist an emotionless, bomb-producing engineer, and it is distressing to learn how popular this vision is among teachers of the humanities. That science is rich in creativity, in emotion, in introspection, and indeed in all things human is a demonstrable fact, yet one Finley meets with sarcasm and straying attention. His mind is made up: the root of the world's evil is science, the humanities its salvation. So when Finley takes this route to explain my gloom, what can I do but shrug once again, until the matter is dropped? 

            "You won't admit it," he may go on, growing excited. "You have gloom and guilt written all over your face. I know the look well, believe me. It's Oppenheimer's look. Sure, he has more reason to feel guilty that you do, Ray, but what you must realize is that all of you are in it together. All scientists share the guilt of the bomb. Damn it, even the science teachers share it, even the science teachers!" 

"Why just the science teachers?" I think of returning. "Why not teachers, period? Look at the kids you face every day. Don't you ever wonder what you're doing to them? For God's sake, Finley, they'll listen to you as though you were Jesus Christ himself." 

But I do not defend myself. There is little point in doing so, not against Finley. And actually I can sympathize somewhat with the source of his feeling, if not with its delineation. The humanities have been forgotten in the industrial world's charge for cancer cures and the moon. They remain ill-funded, ill-staffed and ill-flattered. They end up (English Departments, for some reason, in particular) getting too many women whose reason for entering the profession is a failure in college to achieve matrimony, the higher goal. Finley has every right to be bitter. 

At the same time, no one has a right to be wrong. Although I let Finley have his say, I make it clear enough that I do not agree with him. If he's inordinately persistent, he may turn to still another analysis of my gloom, and this final analysis is apt to be the most scientific of all. "You're not eating right, Ray!" In response, I hold out my arms, a gesture reading, "Here I am; do I look under-fed?" We laugh at last and, if time permits, regain our composure over beer. During the latter excursion I inevitably get gloomy all over again. Very gloomy indeed. 

What Finley does not understand, nor you if you think one must be a menial clerk in order to suffer, is that the teaching profession may well be the most gloomy on earth. Whoever does not understand this, who does not feel it, either is ignorant or knows more than I do. My scientific bent demands that I allow for the possibility of my own error. I do so, but not without first presenting my case. 

Let mc try to suggest the nature of my gloom by giving you a random page from my calendar. We begin on a weekday evening; a Wednesday, say, and a Wednesday on which I have papers to grade. My last class of the day, General Physics, is at two-thirty, which gets me home by four. After a few relaxing beers I fix dinner, something plentiful enough to fill my substantial appetite, simple enough to throw together on the run: most often it's a variety of stew. The dinner dishes go into the sink, and I move into the study to correct papers. The apartment I rent is one I like to think of as a Southern California beast, though in rational moments I realize that any good-sized city would have something of the same. Yet every man has his whim, and mine is to imagine that modem monstrosities such as the one in which I reside are evolutionary misfits risen from sewage-infested waters and nurtured on poisonous gases. My apartment, in a building which from a distance resembles a box of shredded wheat, is one of sixty in the unit, number thirty-one to be exact, which with arithmetic rigor puts me upstairs at one end. The decor of which I am a part is, in a somewhat bastardized approximation, tropical. "Sea Breeze Manor," the name appearing over the entrance into the building, perhaps suggests the mood this decor hopes to elicit. We have no authentic sea breezes, being some sixty miles from the coast, but we do have an extraordinarily large swimming pool. Also a courtyard filled with cactus plants, piped-in Hawaiian music, palm trees which glitter, after sunset, with the red, green, and blue lights of the Christmas season, and maids dressed in kimonos who provide complete room service. My apartment has two bedrooms, one of which I've converted into a study. (This suggests more imagination than I lay claim to: in fact, I did nothing more than to move in a desk and bookcase and to scoot the bed against the wall). I have more space than I need, including a large living room, a generous bathroom, and a kitchen-dining room combination which features, near the entrance into the living room, a compact but quite functional bar. 

I am not terribly fond of my apartment but in a way I do not completely apprehend, it has grown on me. I do not, for instance, associate the home environment with my frequent gloom for the reason that I am not home most of the time and when I am, I am preoccupied with correcting papers or preparing lessons. Although I have lived in "Sea Breeze Manor" for five years, I have yet to use the swimming pool. I also have refused enough invitations to social gatherings within the building that I no longer receive them. In other words, I pay my rent and receive a bed, a study, and maid service. It is all I ask. There was a period of several years during which I threatened to move out of this tropical Disneyland, but for one reason or another I remained and now I no longer threaten to leave. When I say I am living in a modern monstrosity, I know full well that I shall be living in one tomorrow. 

On Wednesday evening, then, I go into the study to correct papers. If I listen for it, I can hear the Hawaiian guitar on the loudspeaker below and if the weather's good, also a splash, laughter, a cry for more beer. I listen only for a moment, if at all, and get to work. 

Many teachers dislike grading papers; hence the institution of the reader, a teacher's hired hand who performs the dirty work. I never have used a reader and never intend to get one because in grading papers I experience some of the few gloomless moments of my profession. In fact, the only time I feel sincere warmth for a student is when I'm going over an assignment he or she has done exceptionally well. Somehow this warmth passes during the night; when I return papers the next day, I hand out A's and F's with equal nonchalance. However different their papers, indeed their abilities, by the first bell my students become one and the same, a single animal. 

If I have any special virtue as a teacher, it is that I return corrected papers the day after I collect them. On Wednesday night I am likely to work past twelve grading papers, by which time I'm exhausted, mentally if not physically, and barely make it through washing dishes before turning in, soon to fall asleep with the portable television set glowing at my bedside. It is always on when I drop away, yet off in the morning when I awake, so I assume that I groggily switch it off sometime during the night. 

Thus far I may have given you little indication of the gloom to which I lay claim. In my defense I must say that I am giving you the habits of my life as an explanation, or a body of information from which an explanation can be constructed, alternative to the theories of Finley. My gloom is not periodic, triggered as a response to a determined stimulus; rather it is continuous and slippery, as hard to get at as a wave particle in physics, but just as sure to be known to exist. Putting it another way, my gloom is like a spider web:_I find it only when I walk into it, after which it is too late to be spared from its misery. I tell you I am gloomy, and which of you would doubt the one who should know? But as a teacher, I claim more right to gloom than your menial clerks with their absurd little lives. 

Having worked late Wednesday to grade papers, I begin my Thursday nine o'clock class somewhat listlessly. I return the papers first because I know my students want them and if I don't return them, they will worry all period and listen not at all. So I pass out the papers, there follows as much as five minutes of response, during which the students moan and cheer and gesture across the room to friends, and then I begin what many of you would call "the day's lesson." 

Despite my listless disposition, the hour passes very quickly. This is another of those facts I do not apprehend, like my entrenchment in a tropical abode, but indeed the ten-to-ten bell rings before I know it and in noisy haste my students disappear into the hallway. Since I have no other class until eleven, I dash for a cup of coffee in the faculty lounge with as much energy as I can muster and am always surprised when I discover that a student is walking beside me. Evidently the student has been with me for some time. 

"There's something about this Ockham's razor I don't understand," he may ask, or if the student is a girl, something more quizzical, such as, "Mr. Bowles? Ockham's razor?" 

Invariably, whatever the student's question, I reply that scientific concepts take time to sink in, that if he would restudy the textbook's explanation of the problem and think about it seriously and often, then understanding would arrive. If not, come around during my office hours. 

Still the student hangs around me, sometimes accompanying me as far as the lounge before darting away, and I sense the student stays because my remark about the difficulty of understanding scientific concepts has flattered him, or at least given him hope. Students, after all, take their teacher at his word and if Mr. Bowles says understanding will arrive in time, then by God understanding will arrive! In the rush for coffee, however, my thoughts never reach this point of retrospect but instead anticipate the morning's conversation with Finley, who is waiting for me at the coffee pot. 

"Ray, you look awful!" Finley laughs. "Didn't you get enough sleep last night?" An elbow. "She anyone I know?" A wink. "Say, you know that Sweeney girl, the good-looking blonde? How's she doing in your class? I'd hate to be the one to lower her grade point average." 

Alice Sweeney is in my eleven o'clock. She sits in the front row, as did Peggy Nelson last year and Audrey somebody the year before, who also were homecoming queens, student body officers, and faculty sweethearts (the latter distinction revealed in conversation in the lounge). Ned Cox also sits in the front row but for reasons different from Alice's. Ned is brilliant, the best student I've had in years. Too bright, in fact, to be in my class, or in any high school class for that matter. He belongs across town, at Cal. Tech. I'd be disappointed if he didn't wind up there. 

Alice Sweeney is the first to greet me, "Good morning, Mr. Bowles!" She is wearing a red sweater, loose enough to be proper, tight enough to show off her wares. (I wonder if she thinks of it this way. I don't know.) Her skirt is hiked above the knees but not far enough to show any slip, presuming she wears one. AIice smiles all through class. She asks enough questions to let me know she's listening and visits me during office hours more than any other student. Finley reports the same statistics. Alice is a busy girl. 

Again I begin class by passing out papers. The night before I probably had felt very close to Ned Cox; he can solve the most difficult trajectory problem with elegance. This morning I pass him his paper without a glance. 

Then I am at the front of the room, waiting. Hands relay grades across the room; some papers are exchanged, faces made, groans stifled. Eventually the students begin to settle down. (Ned Cox has been calm throughout, silently calm. I wonder, does he have no friend to relay his grade to?). Soon the students are waiting for me, looking up with expectant expressions that never fail to surprise and, yes, to frighten me. They continue to look at me and collectively become the class, my class, awaiting the words of their teacher, my own words, which they will proceed to scribble down as swiftly as they can go with the pens now poised in their young hands. My students, my class, wait for me. They wait. But not for something as lofty as ... wisdom. No, they simply await me, just as earlier, after passing out papers, I was waiting for them. 

The fifty-minute period stretches longer this second time around. I catch myself glancing at my watch (the classroom has no clock) at twenty minutes before the hour. I have classes back to back now, which gives me only ten minutes to run into the students' restroom down the hall. This is not something I make a habit of doing but at this hour I don't have time to use the distant faculty facility. After class I enter the restroom, locking myself into a booth. 

I dread that I may hear myself talked about. I did once, years ago. 

"What'd Bowles give you?" 

"A B-plus." 

"Me, too." 

"No complaints." 

"Hey, you know, I found out he's a bachelor." 

"Oh, yeah?" 

"I bet he's a real swinger." 

"Prob'ly." 

"He's a good guy actually." 

"I want to get him for Chemistry-I next year." 

"Good luck. There's a long waiting list already." 

I waited, of course, until the boys had exited before I removed myself from the booth and hurried along my way. I was embarrassed to learn that I was so popular, though naturally I suspected it--you get clear signs. Yet to hear with my own ears that students were signing up to get into my class was--and still is--physically jolting. What claim do I have to popularity? Show me the student who was in my class ten years ago and today could determine the velocity of a falling object as it hits the ground, dropped from a height of fifty feet. Show me the student who, even if only a year or two out of school, today could convert degrees Fahrenheit to degrees Centigrade. And to degrees Kelvin. What have I done to be popular? 

And there will be other signs of my popularity during this lengthening day, Thursday. I may catch Alice Sweeney's eye in the hallway, her lips forming a smile of devastating innocence. There will be many smiles, many nods of recognition. Or I may overhear another girl telling her girl friend, "Mr. Bowles is cute," or a boy saying, "Mr. Bowles is cool;" Or Jerry Wilder, one of our counselors, may stop me to ask, "What do you do in class, tell jokes? More students than I can fit in want into your classes." In all humility I say--no, I report, I merely report--that when one reads the evidence, I prove to be a popular teacher. Mr. Bowles has been with us for almost twenty years and he's still one of our most popular teachers. And the teacher becomes an alcoholic's wife. 

Finally it is two-thirty, time to begin the last class of the day. A girl in the front row sings, "Good afternoon, Mr. Bowles!" I look at her knees: a husband awaits them. "Are you returning the papers, Mr. Bowles?" someone asks. It takes such a question to bring me back so late in the day; I have been off day-dreaming. Quickly I pass back the papers, here Peterson, here Brown, here Zink. I take my place at the blackboard, lift a piece of chalk and wait for the buzzing to cease. One by one the gazes come my way, the buzzing reduces voice by voice and in a minute the class will be mine. 

Is gloom a consequence of power, the power I have at the precise moment I hold their collective attention? Their faces are more alert than mine for the weary hour. Even where the class's countenance is fatigued, it is expectant enough to reveal the waiting, the waiting for me to begin. And what, in God's name, do they expect me to say? 

There is an irony in this question--one of your cherished absurdities--that brings a smile to my lips. Immediately the class breathes more easily. In my hesitation to begin, they had read an unannounced quiz and now they know they are safe. I glance outside through the window, to the lawn crossed with lengthening shadows. With what acceleration does that shadow creep across the lawn? A problem to put away for later, I note. Nothing so serious now. The mood of the hour, born in the class's visible sigh of relief, no quiz, is too relaxed to violate with talk of physical phenomena. I must work them into it. And so I ask, "Who's going to win the game this week?" to which the reply is unanimous, "We are" Then for as long as I am able, I ride with them, letting them carry me through the seconds of this closing hour even as they approach their own destinies, which will take them so far from where they sit today. I tell a joke and they laugh, laugh heartily, and their gaiety soothes me. There will be time later to talk about physics. We'll need to soon enough, for I'll have walked into the spider web again, that web of gloom, and while in it I will ask myself what it is that I am doing there, standing up before their young minds and young bodies; what is it that I am expected to do? 

The inquiry will be brief. With a shrug I'll step to the blackboard, draw a trajectory, begin an equation and hear behind me the scratching sound of pens on paper. At which time, in the words you prefer, the lesson begins. 

 

/end