With that in mind, Neil set about preparing. It didn’t take much physical effort. He cleaned up his room the day of the open house, wrote the bell schedule and a summary of the school rules on the blackboard, and put two name tags, one for each section, on each desk. He set extra copies of his textbooks out on the counter, and stapled some of the better student papers to the bulletin board.
The mental preparation was another story. Back to school night was scheduled for the eleventh of October. By that time he would have been teaching his students a little over four weeks. He had sixty-four students all together. How well did he know them? Could he even connect faces with names without error?
He ran his finger down his class list as he sat alone in his apartment that evening and tried to bring each face into focus. Some were easy. Tony and Jesse, his troublemakers, were engraved in his brain. So were Sean and Duarte, Rosa Alvarez and Rita Morales, Stephanie, Tasmeen and Rabindranath, Brandy, Oscar, little Randi Nguyen, and a dozen others. But the other forty were still hazy. He could put a face to most names, but for a few of them he still was not sure that he was putting the right face with the right name.
He spent the evening with his class list, as if he were cramming for an examination — and, in fact, he was.
When the night came, all his worries proved unfounded. The parents who came were unfailingly polite, and none of them were expecting miracles. He only had to jog his memory twice to bring up quiet, anonymous student faces. All the rest who came were parents of students who had made themselves known to him within the first week of class.
There was a message in that, but which way did the arrow point? Were these parents present because their children excelled and they were proud of them? Or were the children driven to make themselves known because the parents were always there expecting it of them?
This entry was posted in Serial and tagged literature, memoir, teaching, writing on November 15, 2017 by sydlogsdon.