All in a Day’s Work: Teacher Edition

Fiction

It was going to be one of those days. One of the students knocked my coffee off my desk and it had only gone downhill from there. I just had fifteen minutes left to give a spelling lesson and then I could drop the students off at lunch. Twenty minutes of peace!

“Sorry,” the teacher’s aide hopped out my way. She was new and was still getting used to things.

“No worries,” I replied for the one hundredth time that morning.

I began the lesson but was quickly interrupted by a figure in scrubs popping in the door. The school nurse mouthed, “Lice checks,” and pulled out two long chopstick-like sticks.

I was about to proceed with the lesson when I noticed that Alex still had nothing written on his paper. “Alex, please put your name and class number on your paper.”

“Oh, right.” Eager to please, he flashed a smile and scrunched his shoulder up to his ears. I waited.

Still no name. “Alex, your name?”

“Oh, yes.”

A hoarse whisper in my ear, “What was the word? James missed it.” I jumped and startled the aide who’d startled me.

“It was ‘run’.” I returned to the front, “The next word is ‘ran’. The dog ran.”

As the students sounded it out, the special needs aide slipped in through the door and took her place by Alex. She usually came in the afternoon, not the morning…but no time to wonder about that.

As I walked around checking papers, Adelyn’s was blank. She head was on the desk, hair poofed out like a mane. Little sniffing noises came from the poof. “Adelyn,” I whispered, “let me help you put your hair back. The nurse is done.” She held up the hair band without looking up.

I was still fighting with the thick, curly hair when the door opened again, and a two-man camera crew walked in. “Hi,” they whispered, “keep doing whatever you’re doing. We’re just picking up a little footage in each classroom to use for a promotional.”

The aide jumped nervously again and began finger combing her hair. “I didn’t know they were going to be filming today,” she muttered.

Neither did I. Back to the front, “The next word is ‘fan’. I use a fan when it is hot.” As I spoke, the nurse caught my eye and pointed down at the little curly haired boy she had just checked. She began whispering in his ear and grabbing a few things from his desk.

Alex turned around to watch the packing up process. His aide gently touched his arm and pointed to his paper.

The camera crew was all set up now and gave me a thumbs up. I wondered what angle they would shoot from or what filter they could possibly use to make this classroom not look like a zoo.

“The next word is ‘walk’. Please walk in the halls.”

“Hey,” the cameraman whispered. “Can you ask this kid a question?” He pointed to Alex.

“This one?” Alex was staring at something across the room.

“Yeah.”

Silence in the classroom. My mind raced. I never asked any questions during spelling practice. Should I ask him how to spell the word aloud? No, we were teaching it phonetically so that wouldn’t be good. Would he be able to tell me a spelling rule?

After an uncomfortable pause, the cameraman added, “We’re going to voice it over, so it doesn’t matter what the question is.”

“Alex,” He looked up at me and smiled. “Are you ready for lunch?”

“Yes.”

“Good, me too.”

Photo by CDC on Unsplash