Teacher, Revised

by ALISTAIR BOMPHRAY

Note: This is part three of a three part essay. To read the rest: Part One / Part Two. 

The way I saw it, I had two options. Deal with it quietly. Remove the offending trashcan without anyone noticing and return to the math lesson with my dignity intact. Or get pissed off. Take down names. Let those little sons of bitches know this was NOT okay.

Of course, that would mean having to say something that no teacher ever wants to say. There is simply no way to utter these words and still feel okay about your place in the world: “Alright, class—who pooped in the trashcan?”

So I went with the former. I tied up the bag, ducked into the bathroom, and returned before the rest of the class had a chance to notice that I was gone. I looked to the two girls, held one finger to my lips, and continued with the important work of teaching three fourth graders how to carry over a remainder.

I don’t know if the Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist saw any of this happen, if he felt embarrassment or a perverse pleasure in watching me dispose of his waste. I never brought it up with him afterwards; I wasn’t prepared to go there with him, to sift through the emotional baggage that is surely attached to such behavior. For his part, he didn’t act like he had just taken a fugitive dump ten feet from a working bathroom. His cartooning continued unabated. He still cheerfully refused to do any work.

In the end, I was just happy to escape with a tenuous grip on my sanity, though I did leave my own note for the regular classroom teacher that began with the ominous phrasing, “It is my great displeasure to inform you…”

On the way home that day, it occurred to me that maybe there was something beautiful about all of this. We are not accustomed to looking for beauty in dark places, nor do we like beautiful things to show their darkness. But maybe there could be something taken from this experience, something beautiful and true even. Weren’t these just kids anyway? Kids who liked to scream and jump and play tag and shit in strange places? Like kids anywhere, I suppose, minus the shitting. And maybe, just maybe, there was even something beautiful about that?

The weekend before I had taken a hike around a reservoir in the North Bay. An egret had been standing in a field not far from the path. Just as I got it focused in my binoculars, its head shot down into the grass like a mandate from God and returned into view with a rat dangling from its beak. A woman next to me said, “I can’t watch!” Another said, “How horrible!” My hands remained steady on the binoculars as I watched the egret swallow the rat whole down its beautiful S-shaped neck.

Perhaps this was the kind of stomach needed to see the beauty in a small boy’s Freudian missteps. Perhaps it was this ability to take the bad with the good that separated the real teachers, substitute or not, from the forgettables—and not merely to “take the bad,” but to somehow find love for it. There is a kind of alchemy in that, a shift inside toward something more expansive. Less substitute teacher, more human. When the whole of something is placed before you like a cadaver on a dissecting table, it requires a distinctively human mind to see it from all angles at once. 

Not that I would want to repeat this experience. My days of being a substitute teacher are over; my karmic debts have been paid. Now when I’m at a dinner party and the conversation turns to that substitute teacher, I have my own stories from the front line to share. Not only does this make me a more entertaining guest, but it makes me think of the evenings after those difficult days at the elementary school in East Oakland, evenings spent on the couch recounting the day’s struggles to my girlfriend, trying with little success to hide the tears in my eyes, tears of shame, tears of frustration.

These are fourth graders, I would think. You can’t handle fourth graders? You’re no better than Mr. Shit. And then in one of those incomprehensibly ironic acts of fate, when I literally became Mr. Shit: well, now you’ve arrived, you loser.

I hope that I will someday be able to view my own failures with the same magnanimity by which I was able to see beauty in an unsolicited stool sample. If beauty can be found there, then perhaps it can be found in the shortcomings of an out of step substitute.  And if beauty can be found in a substitute teacher, then surely that’s good news for the rest of us.