Читать книгу Deadly Lessons - David Russell W. - Страница 5

He was snoring. If he had just been asleep, I might have been inclined to leave him where he was, but make no mistake about it: the kid was snoring. And everyone had taken notice. At least he hadn’t passed out. The forms required to deal with that were endless.

This was not the life I had been anticipating. This was Communications class at Sir John A. Macdonald Secondary School. For the lingo-impaired, “Communications” is a euphemism the education system uses to identify an English class where we often put those students who are, shall we say, challenged when it comes to an understanding of literature and language. They’re also often stoned.

At the moment, I was attempting to teach a lesson on how best to prepare a resumé for the work force. Now, I’d be the first to admit my lessons aren’t always stimulating, cutting-edge brilliant, but when a student falls into a deep enough sleep that he’s actually snoring—and waking other students who are sleeping quietly—one has to take action. My action? Chalk. It always works.

This particular piece of chalk bounced off Justin’s head and had no immediate impact. The upside was that the class laughed loudly enough that Justin was, in fact, awakened from his midday slumber.

“What the fuck . . . ?” were the first words his limited vocabulary could muster.

“You were snoring,” I informed him.

“Maybe that’s because your class is boring.” What Justin lacked in written ability, he more than amply made up for with his spunk. The fact I was his teacher in no way limited his willingness to hurl insults at me. It was part of the reason I liked him.

“I see you’re practicing your sleeping skills. That should come in handy when you’re living under the Granville Street bridge because you can’t get a job.” Justin, I had learned, also appreciated a well-timed insult tossed in his direction.

“Yeah, well, at least society will know which teacher to blame.”

That’s really why I got into the teaching business: the respect I get from students.

Justin duly wakened, I returned to the task at hand, attempting to convince my students that while they may never come to appreciate great literature, the least they could do was exit my class with the ability to fill out a job application, write simple business letters and not get screwed over by “record of the month club” agreements. They weren’t really all that interested, but fear of chalk missiles kept the rest of the students from dozing off for the remainder of the period. I was beginning to understand how Gabe Kotter must have felt.

Anyone who doesn’t think teachers earn their money on a daily basis should stand in front of twenty-four seventeen year olds—with fifty per cent of them high at any given moment—and try to instill some kind of appreciation for language. In November. In Vancouver. In the rain. Better people than I have been driven to the brink of insanity in more favourable circumstances.

Like an audible gift from God, the bell finally rang, dismissing my class from their stupor and me from the interminable dog and pony show I used to keep them in some kind of holding pattern until the end of the period. I liked them, but they tired the hell out of me. Students might think it’s weird, but I looked forward to lunch time probably more than they did. I’d been teaching for two months.

I had just finished sliding some papers into my bag—yes, there’s an evening work component to this job—when Carl Turbot stepped into my room. “Hey, Winston,” he said.

“Hey, how’s it going?” I replied.

“Got a minute?” he asked, his tone more serious than I was accustomed to hearing. Carl Turbot was a biology teacher who was the same age as me, which was thirty-five. He was popular: rumour had it that female students in particular were drawn to biology in this school in greater numbers than any other high school in Vancouver. Carl was largely considered the primary reason, for his fine teaching as well as the numerous other characteristics students find appealing.

Despite my pressing need for lunch and a trip to the staff washroom, I stayed because Carl had been a mentor of sorts since my arrival at John A. Macdonald. Many of my private sector friends had tried to convince me of the relative ease of the profession I had newly entered. When we compared the perils of our jobs, it always came to one comparison. I would ask my friends: for example, as a financial advisor, are you able to go to the bathroom whenever you want? The answer being “yes,” I was always able to claim undue hardship in the teaching profession. When you have a room full of teenagers, especially some of the winners I worked with, you just couldn’t leave them unattended long enough to go to the staff washroom two floors down and half a block away. Nonetheless, I figured I could hold my coffee byproduct for a couple of minutes more to talk to Carl.

“Sure,” I told him. “What’s up?” Carl stood in the doorway of my classroom. He looked the least sure of himself I’d seen him. “Carl. You can come in.”

“Yeah. Okay.” The student desks in my classroom were organized in a loose horseshoe shape. It wasn’t always the most productive for students, but it was easier to catch the sleepers like Justin. Carl slid his six-foot-frame into the end of the horseshoe and looked away from me like a student caught cheating. “These desks really aren’t very comfortable, are they?”

“Nope.” A long, palpable silence filled the dusty classroom. I could feel my bladder expanding while I waited for Carl to speak.

“Listen, can I talk to you off the record?” he finally asked.

“I wasn’t aware we were supposed to keep notes of conversations between colleagues.”

“I just mean . . . I just need this conversation to be confidential. Okay?”

“Sure.” Another pause followed.

“I’ve got a problem, and I’d like your advice.”

“I’ll do what I can. Is this a teaching problem?”

“Well, yes and no.”

“If it is, you know how new I am to this business. You might be better off talking to another teacher, or maybe the principal if you’re . . .”

“No!” he suddenly blurted. “We can’t talk to the principal or anyone else. Please. You’re the only one I can trust with this right now.”

“Okay, it’s all right,” I tried to reassure him. “I’m here. You can talk to me.” There was another, agonizing wait while he gathered the nerve to continue the conversation.

“I need to speak to you not as a teacher, but . . . I need your advice in your . . . your other capacity.”

“Oh.” It was the worst guarded secret at Sir John A. Macdonald Secondary that the reason I had come to teaching at the relatively late age of thirty-five was that I had given up the practice of law to pursue what I had always assumed would be a less demanding, much less conflict-oriented profession. Of course, the first class I was assigned to was “Law 12”, a Social Studies elective course for budding teenage lawyers. Fortunately, there weren’t enough of them to make up my entire teaching load; unfortunately, what was left over for me to teach included my Communications class. “Carl, are you in some kind of trouble?”

“I think so.”

“Okay. Look. Before we go any further, you should know that while I’m still a member of the bar, I really don’t practice law any more. And ‘educational law,’ if there even is such a thing, is certainly not my area of expertise. I was defence counsel for legal aid.”

“Criminal law might be what I’m looking for advice about.”

“I see.” I didn’t, of course. Two months into my new career, I didn’t want to get involved in a teacher’s legal problems. But Carl had become a friend.

“There’s a student in my biology class. Her name is . . .”

“Better that you don’t tell me her name right now,” I interrupted.

“Okay. This girl. She threatened me this morning.”

“She threatened you how? Like she was going to hurt you?”

“Not physically. I don’t think she’s gonna pull a Columbine on us or anything. It’s me she’s after. She threatened to . . . she threatened to go to the principal, to Dan, to tell him that . . .”

“Hold it, Carl. Stop.” Under British Columbia law, as a teacher, I was obligated to report any sexual misconduct between a student and a teacher. As a lawyer, anything he told me was confidential, but that wasn’t the way I was paying my rent any more. “You know I can’t really hear this without putting you in jeopardy.”

“Shit, Winston, hear me out. I don’t know what else to do.”

He truly looked pathetic. I had only known Carl for two months, but I had a hard time believing he could actually be guilty of anything that would harm his students. He was the consummate professional. If anything, students would have held him up as someone unapproachable because of his high standards.

“Carl. Give me a dollar.”

“What?”

“A dollar. A loonie. Have you got one?”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of coins. Reaching out, he placed one in my outstretched hand.

“Okay. You’ve just retained me. What is this student going to tell the principal about you?”

Carl took a deep breath. “She threatened to tell the principal we’ve been sleeping together.”