#TeacherLife

“Raise your hand if you know what a bribe is.”

It’s the most engaged her students have been all day. They raise their heads because, at the tender age of eleven, they can smell payoffs a mile away.

“Mia, what is a bribe?”

“A bribe is when you get money in order to keep your mouth shut. Like, someone pays you to keep a secret.”

“That is a great example. Here is the dictionary definition,” she moves on to the next slide. Even though this is off the books, there’s no reason she can’t include some practice word work while she’s at it, “Bribe (noun): something valuable (such as money) that is given in order to get someone to do something. For example, I will give you a bribe to do your best work on the state assessment that will take over our lives in a month and a half.”

She joined the students in their groaning. They were already tired of the state tests and it would only be their third year taking it. She didn’t have the heart to remind them they had seven more years before they would be free of its shackles.

This was her least favorite time of the year. It was T-minus six weeks until they took their standardized assessments. This included one week of spring break, two days of professional development, and a field trip approved before the test schedule had been released. The trip had already been indirectly called out twice at staff meetings when her principal spoke about timing. It was an unspoken rule that students weren’t allowed to have fun before they proved how smart they were.

Mentally calculating the actual number of days until Day 1 of testing led her to one, inescapable conclusion: her time was running out.

“What are you going to give us, miss?” Jerome asked calculatingly. She always made sure to be on his good side as she was sure he would one day be president of a fortune 500 company that decided if she deserved her retirement.

“Excellent question. As you all know, I am a teacher, which means…?”

“You have no money!”

“You have a second job!”

“You beg strangers for free stuff!”

She had taught her children well, “Yes to all of those things. As shown by the high number of you turning in homework, I am excellent at convincing people to do things they don’t want to do. I am also an excellent planner, which means I have already done the aforementioned begging. Ready to see what you can get?”

The kids looked unconvinced and she didn’t blame them. She too only cared about these tests because someone made her. According to the state, a three-day testing block using a platform students were only exposed to once a year with questions so oddly phrased that the authors of the work they analyzed disagreed with the “correct” response was the best way to determine if she was a good teacher, the school was a good school, and the students were good students. She had dreamed on more than one occasion of inciting a coup by handing out the opt out forms to the entire class.

Alas, the crush of a mortgage and groceries stayed her hand. Swallowing her monologue about “The Man”, she went through all of the amazing prizes students could earn by just showing up. Her kids were good kids and they deserved everything for putting up with this. She began with how to earn a sundae for the ice cream party.

Three weeks later, she stood at the front of the class, throwing out questions like water on a fire. She became increasingly disheveled as the students slowed down, more a reflection of the lack of air conditioning on an eighty-five degree day than her teaching. She’d already flung off her sweater, rolled up her sleeves, and taken off her shoes, much to the chagrin of her students. It was a well-known fact that her feet smelled more than her students after Field Day. Sensing an opportunity, she told them she’d put her shoes back on after they got a certain number of questions correct.

Her hair was a mess, adding evidence to the theory that its level of poufiness directly correlated with the amount of stress her students caused her. She had wrangled it into a messy bun using no less than three pencils and a paper clip, but several curls had escaped in retaliation to the students’ waning answers.

“Saide, was is ¾ plus 5/8?”

“Zoey, what is the different between main idea and theme?”

“Jesus, read the entire story is less than two minutes and tell me how it is a metaphor for life.”

Blowing another curl out of her face, she paused to take a look at her students. If someone had peaked in the window, they would have congratulated her on how well behaved they were. A closer look showed a quarter of them had their eyes closed. A few were using the passage they were studying as fan while others treated it as an art canvas. One student gave her absolute attention, but she knew it was because they had a sensitive nose and were sitting in the first row.

“Raise your hand if your teacher is being crazy.”

Even the sleepers woke up to vote.

“Fair. In exchange for keeping comments about my feet and hair to passing notes, I will grant us a break. Who wants to watch cat videos in the air-conditioned library?”

One week before the test, students were working on dioramas detailing what would happen if their favorite food starred in the music video of their favorite singer.

“Miss, aren’t we supposed to be reviewing for the test?”

“What is a test, Josue? I mean, in the grand context of things, what does a test actually mean?”

She smiled serenely while giving a group of students black paint to create soy sauce. They had spent the better part of the morning debating if a condiment counted as food. Josue shook his head, unconvinced of the scholastic value of the assignment.

The first day of testing arrived. Every student was present, sitting in their assigned seat without complaint and ready to get started. It was exactly as she had imagined, except-

“Here is a message your teacher wanted me to read for you before you begin: Dear Class, please do your best even though I’m not there. Apparently, they quarantine you when you contract strep throat, COVID, and shingles at the same time. Don’t worry, based on my powers of persuasion, I anticipate being be back tomorrow. How else am I going to thank Patient Zero in person for coughing into my open mouth three days before the assessment? I’m talking to you, Lily! Anyway, good luck and remember, do it for the ice cream.”