Good evening! I’m Margaret Carnahan, and I teach math at Hamptonville High School.
There are sounds we use to guide us through our days. The alarm clock says it’s time to get up. A car horn tells us to pay attention. A baby laughing says maybe there IS some hope for this world.
We have sounds like that school, too. Monday morning hellos. A baseball player comes back to school after breaking his collarbone sliding into third and everyone gathers ‘round to see the sling. A boy with wet sneakers gets maximum squeakage as he scoots down the hallway.
But there are silences, too, and they are just as helpful. There’s a silence that means they’re up to something – watch out. There’s a sudden silence in the hallway just before a fight breaks out. There’s that embarrassed silence that means the hip new slang term you just tried in front of a bunch of adolescents DOESN’T mean what you thought it means.
A teacher’s gotta know all of these, the sounds and the silences. Gotta be on your toes.
Like last week. We were short a substitute teacher on Tuesday, and the office asked me to cover a class during my prep time. All I had to do was walk them to the library media center, and they would take it from there. I said, sure, I could do that.
I got to the middle school part of the building just as the tardy bell rang. Two girls scooted in right behind me and sat down. I introduced myself and took attendance, and announced that we were going to the library media center. Most of the kids were happy about this. It meant they could pretend to look for books in the stacks while they were really talking about shoes and hairstyles and boys. Or girls.
And then I noticed Justin. Justin’s one of those kids – he’s OK, but he has to test every single limit. When he grows up, he’ll be the one who says, “Here, hold my beer” just before he does something that goes viral on the website “Rednecks at Play.” Justin wasn’t smiling at my announcement. He was thinking, and he was quiet.
So I wasn’t surprised that he was the last one out of the room. The rest of the class turned right and headed for the library media center. Justin turned left. “I’ll be right there,” he said. “I have to go to my locker.”
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’ve got an overdue library book.”
There’s only one way to deal with the Justins of this world. I smiled sweetly and said, “I’ll go with you.”
We walked all the way down to the very end of the hall until he stopped at a locker and turned the knob a few times. Of course it wouldn’t open. He said, “I can never remember the combination.”
So we walked back down the hall. He stopped at a drinking fountain, got a nice, long drink. And then he noticed the men’s room. “I gotta go,” he said.
“Justin, we just had passing period. You don’t need to go,” I said.
He thought quickly: “I need to comb my hair.”
I said that it looked fine, but he was determined.
We were the only ones in the hall. And the silence in the restroom told me that it was empty, too. There was only thing to do. I thought to myself, “Hold my beer.”
He stepped in the doorway to the men’s room. So did I. He took a second step. So did I. He looked over his shoulder at me and took a third step. I was right there.
“Uh … it’s OK,” he said. He turned around and walked back out. We went straight to the library media center, where the rest of the class was “looking for books.”
The hinge squeaked when we opened the library door, and the class got quiet. When a teacher walks in with one student, someone’s usually in trouble. I turned Justin over to the library assistant. As I walked out the door, I heard him say the words that bring joy to a teacher’s heart: “I hope I never get HER for a teacher! She’s CRAZY!”