<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n“Shamus, you have straight D’s this year,” the teacher says sternly. Unlike when I was little, my sixth grade teacher has the courtesy to meet with me alone during recess, rather than humiliate me in front of the other students when he needs to chastise me. I really appreciate this.<\/p>\n
I nod. We’re just about halfway through the year. I knew this conversation was coming. I’m in sixth grade now, and my last two teachers had this same talk with me at the same point.<\/p>\n
He looks down at the ledger he uses to to track grades and homework. The grid is speckled with little penciled X’s where kids have missed assignments. At the bottom of the page, next to the name “Young, Shamus”, is a long row of unbroken X’s, marching across through the weeks and months of schooling. It looks like the scorecard of a man who just bowled 50 strikes in a row. I know better than to show it, but I get a bit of perverse pleasure when I see this. I think about all the vast hours of homework I didn’t<\/em> do, and am relieved.<\/p>\n I still hate school and refuse to bring any of it home with me. When I think of school I think of the bullying and the teasing and the rejection, and I’m anxious to put those things out of my mind when I escape at the end of the day.<\/p>\n “Here is what I’m going to do,” the teacher says. “I’ll erase aaaaall of these missed assignments if you promise to apply yourself and do your work from now on.”<\/p>\n I like this guy. Kind of. He’s not mean, or unjust. He assigns me homework, and I have a bit of a grudge about that, but I understand it’s his job. He works hard to get me to do homework, and I work hard to avoid doing it. It’s nothing personal. It’s like the Ralph the Wolf and Sam the Sheepdog<\/a> passing each other at the time-clock on the way to work in the morning. I also knew I’d get this deal, because I was offered the same deal the past two years. My record will be cleared in exchange for a promise to buckle down and start working. Deep down, I want<\/em> to do the work. Or rather, want to have the desire<\/em> to do the work, which is the key ingredient I’m missing here. I accept the deal with a little guilt, knowing that I’m probably not going to hold up my end of the bargain. Then again, surely he<\/em> knows how this deal is going to turn out? I can’t imagine these three teachers could all offer me precisely the same deal without discussing it.<\/p>\n I also sense that this whole grades system is probably a sham. The odds of me reliably getting straight D’s in all subjects, year after year, without managing to fail any of them, is shockingly low. I couldn’t orchestrate such an outcome if I wanted, and I strongly doubt it happened by chance. I didn’t know what to make of it before, but now I’m suspecting that these people have decided to pass me, regardless of whether or not I do any work.<\/p>\n Other kids have failed. Every once in a while there are whispers that so-and-so’s older brother was held back a year. I kind of suspect that they were held back because they weren’t learning. I do acceptably on tests, and demonstrate that I’m absorbing some of these lessons in spite of the daydreaming. So the teachers seem to be allowing me to slide by, while doing their best to wring work out of me when they can.<\/p>\n The big change in my schooling is that I have Mr. Markle for Special Ed. He is the finest teacher I’ve ever encountered, or ever will. He wins the kids over with jokes and an earnest interest in our well-being. Once my guard is down, he uses this friendship to trick me into taking a more active role in my own education. I do more work for Mr. Markle than for any other teacher, and I hate letting him down.<\/p>\n As in the past, I leave the regular classroom and visit Mr. Markle for specific subjects during the day. Other kids in grades four through six have the same arrangement. Since the various rooms all keep their own schedule, this results in kids coming and going at regular intervals. Sometimes there are as many as six students in the room at once, which is a lot for a Special Ed class. Mr. Markle has to work with each of us independently, and with a lesson crafted for that specific student. Someday I’ll be married to a schoolteacher myself, and I’ll come to appreciate just how much work this is.<\/p>\n Sometimes he deliberately challenges me with something hard, which I adore<\/em>. Sometimes he drills me to make sure I retain the basics, which I loathe. He’s often adamant that I need to do my homework – especially my homework from my other subjects, which I routinely neglect. This is often a sticking point between us. He can’t find a way to motivate me to work, and I can’t find a way to avoid making him mad when I refuse to do it.<\/p>\n Heather mentioned me, and he remembered me. “I always knew he was a smart kid,” he said. It made my day when those words made it back to me. It was half my lifetime later, and I still valued his approval.<\/p>\n Alas that he retired in 2009. Still, I hope he’s enjoying the retired life to its fullest, and I hope he gets a double helping of years in which to do so.\n<\/p><\/div>\n This is actually my third year with Mr. Markle, but the past two have been such a smear of stress and misery that I wasn’t really learning so much as enduring. It’s not until this year that I really appreciate just how much I like this guy and just how much I look forward to his lessons.<\/p>\n
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