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17. NNWM Day 02
Oh my gaaaaahd this is so much harder than advertised. :( I have forsaken quality completely - no plot, no flow, no stable characterization. All you get from me is an increasing word count, okay? alksdghd. Today has sucked, but at least I am approximately on track for daily averages.
Clarence moved his things into Ben Frank on a Tuesday. He carried a small box into the classroom that had been assigned him on the second floor of the school and set it down on his desk as he looked around. The room was average-sized, windows all along one side and two white boards in the front. Thirty or so desks faced the boards, lined up haphazardly in a semblance of rows. A large world map hung in the back of the room, where a shelf of American History books stood. There was a projector mounted to the ceiling and next to his desk by the window was a podium with an integrated computer that, he was told, controlled the lights, the blinds, the projector, the screen, and possibly also made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich if he asked it nicely.
It was closer to the lecture halls he'd sat in during university than the typical middle school classroom he was used to, but Ben Frank wasn't just a typical middle school, of course. It was the best middle school in the district, feeding directly into the best high school of the district (Thomas Jefferson High, which graduated many students into, to Clarence's amusement, George Washington University). It had the money to show for it, too.
Clarence was unpacking a random assortment of things - a few notebooks, a plant, a photo frame - and thinking about his teaching syllabus when a knock sounded on the doorframe. He looked up to see a man standing in the doorway, also fairly young-looking. He had brown hair cut short and he was smiling so brightly it hurt Clarence to look at him directly - but what really caught his attention was how tall the other man was. He was taller than Clarence, and Clarence was pretty tall at six feet.
"Hi! I'm Matthew Zeller, I teach music here. Call me Matt! You the new addition to the faculty?"
He also spoke incredibly fast and enthusiastically. Clarence set down the book in his hands. "Yes," he replied. "I'm Clarence Fisher. I'll be teaching seventh grade U.S. History."
It was a marker of his long legs how quickly he crossed the room and ended up before Clarence. "Great! Nice to meet you." He grasped Clarence's hand and shook enthusiastically. "You'll love it here. Ben Frank is full of remarkable kids."
"I've no doubt," Clarence replied with an automatic smile. He didn't know how to take this man, who was practically bubbling with good cheer. He was one of those annoyingly cheerful morning people, Clarence suspected. I bet he doesn't even need coffee to be this awake. People like that... He shuddered internally. They were an affront to his very existence.
"Have you settled in?" Matt asked. "If you have some time, I can show you around. You can get to know the place a little better before all our hellions show up."
His grin was infectious. Clarence really hated people like that - he had so little resistance to them. "If you don't mind," he said with a wry little smile. "Mrs. Pine introduced me to her office and this room, and I'm lucky if I can remember how to get here from where I parked. He had been herded right along by the elderly principal - she was the epitome of the matronly, strict, gray-haired teacher with her horn-rimmed glasses and painfully neat and ironed clothes. It was too easy to imagine her striking misbehaving students across the knuckles with a ruler - she had taught for thirty years before moving into school administration, and she carried those years of experience like a mantle, wielded them with clout.
"Ah, Mrs, Pine," Matt said with a laugh as Clarence followed him out of the room. "She's a character. She's only been principal here for four years but she's kind of adopted Ben Frank as her baby. She's willing to go out and fight for it - against the school board, the media, whatever." He grinned. "Don't be misled by her appearance - she's really very sweet."
"I'll take your word for it," Clarence murmured under his breath. It wouldn't do to be too sarcastic in a new setting, not until he had established a place for himself and had figured out which people were less likely to be appalled by his unique sense of humor. Not everyone took well to his deprecating remarks, but he'd had the option of avoiding those people in university. Less so now, when he planned on working in this environment for the foreseeable future. No need to alienate people so early on. His experience as a TA to Margaret Hillings had taught him to be more judicial with his words - the pinches Margaret, old enough to be his mother and very willing to play the role, distributed freely onto his person whenever he said something out of line.
He trailed after the other teacher through the school, through hallway after hallway that looked the same, with Matt pointing out which classrooms belonged to which teachers and which subjects. "Sixth grade's on the first floor, seventh's on the second, and eighth is on the third. The gym, cafeteria, auditorium, and music rooms are all on the first floor too, in the East wing." He gestured broadly as he talked. "The faculty lounge is on the second floor, which is nice because you'll be close to it. We try hard to keep it well-stocked - no one knows better how much we teachers suffer." He winked and put a hand Clarence's elbow, guiding him around a corner to a flight of stairs.
Clarence blinked and looked down at the casual touch. He couldn't say he hated being touched because it would be a lie - he had grown up in a very physically affectionate family - but it was something he was unused to from people he had barely met. Matt didn't seem to think twice about it.
"The elevator's here," he said helpfully, "for when you're pushing around carts of books or something. And our handicapped kids. Byron, he's a good kid. He might be in your class."
Matt chattered on as they went through the school. Clarence managed to break into the monologue long enough to ask Matt how long he'd been teaching at Benjamin Franklin and what he enjoyed best. "Three years," he was told, "and the kids, of course. Those crazy, crazy kids. I could tell you stories." His grin was nearly as sunny as the light pouring in through the windows. That was another thing about the school, Clarence noticed, it was bright. There were glass panes everywhere they could get away with, and clean white linoleum floors, gleaming silver structure holding everything together. The campus was equally gorgeous, from what he'd seen on his early trek from the parking lot to Mrs. Pine's office - tree-lined and paved paths, grassy green quad with tables scattered about for the nicer days, and flowers lining the main path to the front doors.
Money at work, Clarence had thought, and seeing the rest of the school only reaffirmed that perception. A display case in the front lobby proudly showed off a number of trophies for various sports as well as for community service, regional Mathlete competitions, and a Quiz Bowl team that had gone national.
"It's a great school," he told Matt as they concluded their tour in the faculty lounge down the hall from Clarence's classroom. "The school obviously cares a lot about putting the money towards the kids." It was a sincere statement, but it was also calculated to win the other teacher over. He was friendly and seemed like a good person to have on Clarence's side, even if his sunshine attitude would surely start grating soon.
Clarence was a pretty good judge of people - it was a skill he honed from people-watching. He liked to study them as the world went by, unlike Janet, who had instinctive people skills and made her judgments from interacting with them. Two different approaches, but they were both usually fairly accurate.
Matt smiled widely in response to Clarence's observation, clearly delighted. "Absolutely," he said, "and this is why I love this place. They're not going to get rid of me for a long time coming." He clapped a friendly hand on Clarence's shoulder and squeezed lightly. "I hope you stick around for a while too. You're going to fall in love with this place, the kids, everything."
Clarence's smile was smaller, a tiny curve at the corners of his lips. He helped himself to the coffee from the pot on the counter. "Thanks."
--
There were roughly ten days before school officially started and the students would all come pouring into the school. Clarence had had his tentative syllabus approved by Mrs. Pine and the rest of the school board, as it stuck more or less closely to state-dictated curriculum. He had also been given the go ahead to deviate slightly and utilize his own teaching methods as long as covered the requisite material and didn't, in brief, break the law.
"It's okay, I have a friend who's a lawyer," he told Mrs. Pine with that white flash of teeth. "She'll keep me in line."
She missed the subtle sarcasm underlying his words, but she was the type that would. It was of littlle consequence to Clarence that Janet was still in law school; it wasn't that far off from being an actually practicing attorney, save the passage of the bar. She was, as he knew from personal experience, well versed in all that legal mumbo jumbo. And the cold-heartedness, she was good at that too.
At home that night, Clarence thought about the beautiful grounds of Ben Frank, thought about the clean and up-to-date facilities. Wielding his favorite blue ballpoint pen, he marked on the printed version of the syllabus: reenact Paul Revere's midnight ride through the hallways.
The pen tapped against the sheet for moment, thoughtful.
Then, smirking to himself, he added next: Schedule the Battle of Gettysburg on the quad on a sunny day. He made a note to himself under that to check the weather report when he got to that section.
"If you don't learn history," he murmured to himself, putting a period at the end of his newly revised list with a short and decisive movement, "you are doomed to repeat it."
--
Blog post: 20xx/08/15
Those of you who have never met sunshine personified, I personally extend an invitation for you to visit the first floor of Benjamin Franklin Middle School, in the East wing where the music rooms are tucked far away from all the classrooms where teaching is being attempted. (It's a smart move - students are less likely to pay attention to a lecture on the themes in Romeo and Juliet if they can hear someone wailing the Beatles off-key. This remains true through high school, university, and beyond, I feel. There is just something particularly distracting about the Beatles being wailed off-key.) In this music room is the music teacher, one Mr. Zeller.
Even when he doesn't smile, you get the feeling he's never quite stopped. It's in the way he does it with his eyes and you walk away feeling like you've been drenched in sunshine and butterflies. It's disconcerting. It's disturbing. It's particularly both of those things when this is a man, you're facing, rather than a sweet six-year-old girl with a cherub's face and princess blonde curls. One would think a man might have grown out of his sunshine-and-daisies phase (if he would ever even admit to such a phase) by the time he was, oh, say, six years old. Then it's rough and tumble love for dinosaurs and bugs and machines that destroy things and everything muddy that makes your mother scream in horror when she sees the footprints you've tracked through her kitchen.
It's the way of the Male, the basic instinctive urges to go "RAWR BASH DESTROY" and make all the females of the world wonder what they see in us. (After time, they learn to lower their standards and we learn to dress a little better, and things tend to work out.)
Mr. Zeller, however, dresses sharp and talks smart and smiles at you like he's personally responsible for bringing some sunshine into your life. Looks like this is one the girls will be falling all over for, redeeming of the whole Male gender as a whole.
I should extend my thanks, I suppose. And fervently disencourage my future students from following his examples. No need to increase competition for the rest of us ordinary rain-cloud males, after all.
{comment posted by JubiLee} You sound like you have a crush, Clare. How cute!
{comment posted by kingfisher} Your comment's cute, like your moot court argument. How's that coming along?
{comment posted by JubiLee} The next time I see you, I will hit you so hard with my Corporations textbook. It will knock your skinny ass out, guaranteed.
{comment posted by kingfisher} Isn't that assault or something?
{comment posted by JubiLee} Battery, actually, and oh god I am not having this conversation. Coffee Friday?
Clarence moved his things into Ben Frank on a Tuesday. He carried a small box into the classroom that had been assigned him on the second floor of the school and set it down on his desk as he looked around. The room was average-sized, windows all along one side and two white boards in the front. Thirty or so desks faced the boards, lined up haphazardly in a semblance of rows. A large world map hung in the back of the room, where a shelf of American History books stood. There was a projector mounted to the ceiling and next to his desk by the window was a podium with an integrated computer that, he was told, controlled the lights, the blinds, the projector, the screen, and possibly also made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich if he asked it nicely.
It was closer to the lecture halls he'd sat in during university than the typical middle school classroom he was used to, but Ben Frank wasn't just a typical middle school, of course. It was the best middle school in the district, feeding directly into the best high school of the district (Thomas Jefferson High, which graduated many students into, to Clarence's amusement, George Washington University). It had the money to show for it, too.
Clarence was unpacking a random assortment of things - a few notebooks, a plant, a photo frame - and thinking about his teaching syllabus when a knock sounded on the doorframe. He looked up to see a man standing in the doorway, also fairly young-looking. He had brown hair cut short and he was smiling so brightly it hurt Clarence to look at him directly - but what really caught his attention was how tall the other man was. He was taller than Clarence, and Clarence was pretty tall at six feet.
"Hi! I'm Matthew Zeller, I teach music here. Call me Matt! You the new addition to the faculty?"
He also spoke incredibly fast and enthusiastically. Clarence set down the book in his hands. "Yes," he replied. "I'm Clarence Fisher. I'll be teaching seventh grade U.S. History."
It was a marker of his long legs how quickly he crossed the room and ended up before Clarence. "Great! Nice to meet you." He grasped Clarence's hand and shook enthusiastically. "You'll love it here. Ben Frank is full of remarkable kids."
"I've no doubt," Clarence replied with an automatic smile. He didn't know how to take this man, who was practically bubbling with good cheer. He was one of those annoyingly cheerful morning people, Clarence suspected. I bet he doesn't even need coffee to be this awake. People like that... He shuddered internally. They were an affront to his very existence.
"Have you settled in?" Matt asked. "If you have some time, I can show you around. You can get to know the place a little better before all our hellions show up."
His grin was infectious. Clarence really hated people like that - he had so little resistance to them. "If you don't mind," he said with a wry little smile. "Mrs. Pine introduced me to her office and this room, and I'm lucky if I can remember how to get here from where I parked. He had been herded right along by the elderly principal - she was the epitome of the matronly, strict, gray-haired teacher with her horn-rimmed glasses and painfully neat and ironed clothes. It was too easy to imagine her striking misbehaving students across the knuckles with a ruler - she had taught for thirty years before moving into school administration, and she carried those years of experience like a mantle, wielded them with clout.
"Ah, Mrs, Pine," Matt said with a laugh as Clarence followed him out of the room. "She's a character. She's only been principal here for four years but she's kind of adopted Ben Frank as her baby. She's willing to go out and fight for it - against the school board, the media, whatever." He grinned. "Don't be misled by her appearance - she's really very sweet."
"I'll take your word for it," Clarence murmured under his breath. It wouldn't do to be too sarcastic in a new setting, not until he had established a place for himself and had figured out which people were less likely to be appalled by his unique sense of humor. Not everyone took well to his deprecating remarks, but he'd had the option of avoiding those people in university. Less so now, when he planned on working in this environment for the foreseeable future. No need to alienate people so early on. His experience as a TA to Margaret Hillings had taught him to be more judicial with his words - the pinches Margaret, old enough to be his mother and very willing to play the role, distributed freely onto his person whenever he said something out of line.
He trailed after the other teacher through the school, through hallway after hallway that looked the same, with Matt pointing out which classrooms belonged to which teachers and which subjects. "Sixth grade's on the first floor, seventh's on the second, and eighth is on the third. The gym, cafeteria, auditorium, and music rooms are all on the first floor too, in the East wing." He gestured broadly as he talked. "The faculty lounge is on the second floor, which is nice because you'll be close to it. We try hard to keep it well-stocked - no one knows better how much we teachers suffer." He winked and put a hand Clarence's elbow, guiding him around a corner to a flight of stairs.
Clarence blinked and looked down at the casual touch. He couldn't say he hated being touched because it would be a lie - he had grown up in a very physically affectionate family - but it was something he was unused to from people he had barely met. Matt didn't seem to think twice about it.
"The elevator's here," he said helpfully, "for when you're pushing around carts of books or something. And our handicapped kids. Byron, he's a good kid. He might be in your class."
Matt chattered on as they went through the school. Clarence managed to break into the monologue long enough to ask Matt how long he'd been teaching at Benjamin Franklin and what he enjoyed best. "Three years," he was told, "and the kids, of course. Those crazy, crazy kids. I could tell you stories." His grin was nearly as sunny as the light pouring in through the windows. That was another thing about the school, Clarence noticed, it was bright. There were glass panes everywhere they could get away with, and clean white linoleum floors, gleaming silver structure holding everything together. The campus was equally gorgeous, from what he'd seen on his early trek from the parking lot to Mrs. Pine's office - tree-lined and paved paths, grassy green quad with tables scattered about for the nicer days, and flowers lining the main path to the front doors.
Money at work, Clarence had thought, and seeing the rest of the school only reaffirmed that perception. A display case in the front lobby proudly showed off a number of trophies for various sports as well as for community service, regional Mathlete competitions, and a Quiz Bowl team that had gone national.
"It's a great school," he told Matt as they concluded their tour in the faculty lounge down the hall from Clarence's classroom. "The school obviously cares a lot about putting the money towards the kids." It was a sincere statement, but it was also calculated to win the other teacher over. He was friendly and seemed like a good person to have on Clarence's side, even if his sunshine attitude would surely start grating soon.
Clarence was a pretty good judge of people - it was a skill he honed from people-watching. He liked to study them as the world went by, unlike Janet, who had instinctive people skills and made her judgments from interacting with them. Two different approaches, but they were both usually fairly accurate.
Matt smiled widely in response to Clarence's observation, clearly delighted. "Absolutely," he said, "and this is why I love this place. They're not going to get rid of me for a long time coming." He clapped a friendly hand on Clarence's shoulder and squeezed lightly. "I hope you stick around for a while too. You're going to fall in love with this place, the kids, everything."
Clarence's smile was smaller, a tiny curve at the corners of his lips. He helped himself to the coffee from the pot on the counter. "Thanks."
--
There were roughly ten days before school officially started and the students would all come pouring into the school. Clarence had had his tentative syllabus approved by Mrs. Pine and the rest of the school board, as it stuck more or less closely to state-dictated curriculum. He had also been given the go ahead to deviate slightly and utilize his own teaching methods as long as covered the requisite material and didn't, in brief, break the law.
"It's okay, I have a friend who's a lawyer," he told Mrs. Pine with that white flash of teeth. "She'll keep me in line."
She missed the subtle sarcasm underlying his words, but she was the type that would. It was of littlle consequence to Clarence that Janet was still in law school; it wasn't that far off from being an actually practicing attorney, save the passage of the bar. She was, as he knew from personal experience, well versed in all that legal mumbo jumbo. And the cold-heartedness, she was good at that too.
At home that night, Clarence thought about the beautiful grounds of Ben Frank, thought about the clean and up-to-date facilities. Wielding his favorite blue ballpoint pen, he marked on the printed version of the syllabus: reenact Paul Revere's midnight ride through the hallways.
The pen tapped against the sheet for moment, thoughtful.
Then, smirking to himself, he added next: Schedule the Battle of Gettysburg on the quad on a sunny day. He made a note to himself under that to check the weather report when he got to that section.
"If you don't learn history," he murmured to himself, putting a period at the end of his newly revised list with a short and decisive movement, "you are doomed to repeat it."
--
Blog post: 20xx/08/15
Those of you who have never met sunshine personified, I personally extend an invitation for you to visit the first floor of Benjamin Franklin Middle School, in the East wing where the music rooms are tucked far away from all the classrooms where teaching is being attempted. (It's a smart move - students are less likely to pay attention to a lecture on the themes in Romeo and Juliet if they can hear someone wailing the Beatles off-key. This remains true through high school, university, and beyond, I feel. There is just something particularly distracting about the Beatles being wailed off-key.) In this music room is the music teacher, one Mr. Zeller.
Even when he doesn't smile, you get the feeling he's never quite stopped. It's in the way he does it with his eyes and you walk away feeling like you've been drenched in sunshine and butterflies. It's disconcerting. It's disturbing. It's particularly both of those things when this is a man, you're facing, rather than a sweet six-year-old girl with a cherub's face and princess blonde curls. One would think a man might have grown out of his sunshine-and-daisies phase (if he would ever even admit to such a phase) by the time he was, oh, say, six years old. Then it's rough and tumble love for dinosaurs and bugs and machines that destroy things and everything muddy that makes your mother scream in horror when she sees the footprints you've tracked through her kitchen.
It's the way of the Male, the basic instinctive urges to go "RAWR BASH DESTROY" and make all the females of the world wonder what they see in us. (After time, they learn to lower their standards and we learn to dress a little better, and things tend to work out.)
Mr. Zeller, however, dresses sharp and talks smart and smiles at you like he's personally responsible for bringing some sunshine into your life. Looks like this is one the girls will be falling all over for, redeeming of the whole Male gender as a whole.
I should extend my thanks, I suppose. And fervently disencourage my future students from following his examples. No need to increase competition for the rest of us ordinary rain-cloud males, after all.
{comment posted by JubiLee} You sound like you have a crush, Clare. How cute!
{comment posted by kingfisher} Your comment's cute, like your moot court argument. How's that coming along?
{comment posted by JubiLee} The next time I see you, I will hit you so hard with my Corporations textbook. It will knock your skinny ass out, guaranteed.
{comment posted by kingfisher} Isn't that assault or something?
{comment posted by JubiLee} Battery, actually, and oh god I am not having this conversation. Coffee Friday?