Motto: “Teachers are more essential than anything else, men who can give the young the ability to judge and distinguish, who serve them as examples of the honoring of truth, obedience to the things of the spirit, respect and language.”
(Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi – The Glass Bead Game)
“Come in,” replied the Manager.
I opened the glass door to his little office. He showed me a chair in front of his desk. Without saying anything I sat down and waited for him to finish whatever he was doing. At that point I couldn’t care less. When he started talking, with his usual pompous vocabulary, I heard nothing. I just stared at his fat neck and thin yellow teeth, kept together by braces, so much in fashion among the so-called hi so of Bangkok.
And then I saw it again. The most beautiful thing in the whole school. I remembered that at my interview, almost a year ago, I tried to concentrate on what he was saying, but couldn’t take my eyes off of the tree. Maybe it was that tree that made me take the teaching position offered at his bilingual school. I was glad that on my last day I would see it again. Funny enough, I had forgotten all about the tree during my stay there. It seemed that only from his office window one could enjoy the moves of the branches, struggling in the strong winds of March. And he probably didn’t even know about it.
The previous night I had woken up again, sweat dripping down my naked body, ashamed by the same dream. It had been haunting me for many weeks, but I was working on it. It was the reason for my second visit to the Manager’s office. For four years, during my junior and senior high school back home in Romania, I had failed to do my physics homework at home. Now, many years later, thousands of miles away from home, I was rushing every night in my dreams, minutes before the class started, to copy it down from one of my classmates. When the lesson started, the physics teacher, with his kind voice and old-fashioned brown suit, would call the roll. Once finished, with the same calmness, he would turn the pages of the attendance book backwards, stop on the page where my name was written right at the top, look up from the book, and then down at the students’ desks.
My eyes were cast down at the notebook because I knew what would happen next. I desperately tried to remember the formulas and the steps for solving the problems, but it was as if my mind could perceive only one thing: my teacher’s stare, his big lips curved in a smile, and then his voice calling out all three of my names. There was no need to show him the homework. He never asked for it. He just wanted me to solve the problems that he had given as homework, on the blackboard.
I dragged my feet to the front of the class, stepped on the podium, took ages to find a piece of white chalk of the right size, and waited for the teacher to read the first problem. As he read, I would jot down the relevant information, the given data, and mark with a question mark the things that the problem wanted me to find out. When he finished reading the problem, he closed the textbook and placed it back into the corner of the teacher’s desk. It was always the same corner.
After a few minutes of just standing there, motionless, with the tip of the chalk touching the blackboard, it was obvious that the time spent in memorizing the answers of the problems was not enough. And even if, somehow I remembered how fast the train was going, or how many meters were between object A and B, I still needed the steps that would bring me to those answers. I couldn’t remember anything!
Without a word of reproach, my physics teacher would take me through the whole process of finding the correct answer, sometimes even re-teaching important points from the previous lesson, when I was probably having my sandwich or chatting with my vegetarian desk mate at the back of the class. Slowly, step by step, the problem would reveal itself in front of me, and by the time I wrote the final digit on the blackboard, I even understood why it was so. By now I forgot completely that I knew nothing at the beginning, that I hadn’t opened my books at home to read the lesson, and had shamelessly copied the homework twenty minutes ago in the corridor, while waiting for the class to start. I stepped down, walked back to my chair, found in my schoolbag the grades booklet and gave it to the teacher.
When the lesson was over I went to the teacher’s desk to retrieve my grades booklet.
“I’m glad you understood the problem.”
I said nothing, but just snatched the booklet from his hand, said good-bye, and raced out of the classroom. I stopped in the corridor by the window, opened the grades booklet, flipped through the pages to the last entry, and at the sight of my grade sank down my shoulders and almost started crying in shame.
It was the same story all the time. He always gave me better grades than what I actually deserved, just for the fact that I “understood the problem.” Then I would feel the moisture of my sweat on the pillow, and wake up in the early hours of the morning.
“Do you have anything to tell me?” asked the Manager.
“Like what?”
“I received a phone call last night from a very good friend of mine, whose son is in your class.”
“What’s his name?”
“It doesn’t matter. The problem is that you gave him homework to do for today!”
“I gave all my students homework,” I replied somewhat annoyed, knowing what will come next.
“Yes, but he is in your tutoring class. That means that you have to teach the students who are in that class the homework for the next day.”
“Yes, but I thought…”
“No, you don’t think! You just do your job!” the Manager interrupted me.
“I thought that my job was…”
“Your job is to do what I pay you to do. After classes, during tutoring, you help the pupils do their homework.”
“I tried to help them, but they just want me to write the answers on the whiteboard, so they can copy them into their books. That’s wrong!”
“I don’t understand what happened to you. That’s what you’ve been doing for almost two semesters.”
“But they even refuse to come to the whiteboard and at least try, with my help, to solve the Maths problems.”
“Their parents pay the school, and I pay you, to send the pupils home with their homework done.”
“They don’t do their homework, they copy it!”
“Whatever. If the parents pay, we deliver.”
“In this case they don’t learn anything.”
“But it makes the parents happy,” the Manager smiled, putting down the Mont Blanc he had been pointing at me all the time.
“But again, they have to try, for Christ’s sake!”
“Not here. This is a business first, and only then a school.” He looked at me for a while, and then concluded, “That’s all. I hope you know what you have to do!”
“Yes, indeed, I think I do now.”
At the end of the tutoring class, I left again, just one problem unsolved. I asked the pupils to solve it alone at home, and I wrote a reminder to the parents in the homework books to make sure they check if their offsprings had done their homework.
The next morning I woke up at peace with myself, my conscience, and my physics teacher. I stayed longer than usual in bed, and went to take a shower only when the physiological needs brought me to the bathroom. The March wind blew through the open window and the balcony door. As I was getting out of the shower and reached for the towel hanging in the balcony on the clothes dryer, I felt the coolness of the wind on my wet body. It felt good. Another gust of wind made me delay my intension of wrapping myself in the towel. From the bathroom door, I looked at the only piece of paper from my working table. All of a sudden it was taken by the wind out onto the balcony. I quickly dropped the towel and went outside after it. But it was too late. The wind had already taken it. From my fourteenth floor I could see the paper struggling in the wind to get down onto the ground. When it finally reached it, I decided against going down and trying to find it. It was nothing important. Just a memo from the school informing me that due to failure of fulfilling my duties, I had been fired.
Initially published in “Short Sips – Coffee House Flash Fiction,”
edited by Jessica A. Weiss, Wicked East Press, 2012
