Forty-three percent of all the teachers who left voluntarily and before their scheduled retirement said they did so because the stresses and disappointments of teaching weren’t worth it—nearly twice as many as those who said the pay wasn’t sufficient. And among the teachers who left primarily because of the pandemic, 64 percent said they weren’t paid enough to merit the risks or stress of teaching. –Education Week, 2021
Because you had a student who wouldn’t come to your class or any class, and you found him in the library. He carried straight Ds senior year. When you asked him why he didn’t go to classes, he said, “What for?” In the library he can read all day. He handed you a paper titled Minimalist Sandcastles, each sentence like the title, washing away with the tide as you read. Your student who didn’t come to class liked it when you visited him in the library to discuss how words can be spilled on a page like a Pollock.
A student obsessed with dance kept trying to do splits while sitting at his desk, all class, every day, his foot creeping and climbing up a wall.
A student loved her grandmother’s Louisiana cooking and said, “What’s kickin’, chicken?” reminding you of a student who used to stick his Timberland wool-capped head in the door in the middle of class to say, “Hey Miller! Chicken for a buck! Buckaw!”
Students released thousands of live crickets into the hallways for a senior prank and you heard crickets in the school when you stayed late, chirping for years, back when you taught Sandburg’s “Splinter.”
A student arrived to class and announced, “I’m immortal!” every day and distributed candy from a giant bag slung over his shoulder like Santa’s. He also launched a speech from Glengarry Glen Ross: “A-B-C, Miller! A-always, B-be, C-Closing. Always be closing. Always be closing. A-I-D-A. Attention, interest, decision, action. Attention; do I have your attention? Interest: are you interested? I know you are because it’s fuck or walk.” The class applauded. When you saw him in the hallway (you held your Mason jar of water), he said, “Hey Miller, coffee is for closers!” Another day he went on a riff about his grandfather, who lived for years in the desert. His grandfather was a hafiz. Your student taught you the meaning of hafiz.
A student sat quietly sobbing in your room on 9/11.
A student who hated high school joined the U.S. Marines and sent an email “Hey Miller!” from the steps of one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces, he had to put civilian body parts in bags, and his mom said he couldn’t keep a job when he got home, he drank too much.
A student looked up your home number in a phone booth and called you from a train station at midnight because he had no parents, no ride. He called you Milldog, he went from being in a gang to helping kids move out of gangs, he threw a football with you, high towering passes (you can see the spiraling ball like a dot in the sky), in an empty city street littered with tireless burned out cars, crack vials, swirls and patches of shattered glass. He met you in the school’s parking lot before you moved away to say Good-bye. They put him in slow classes throughout elementary school because they didn’t test for dyslexia. He explicated faster and more accurately than anyone you ever taught the daily quotation you used to write in chalk that dusted your wingtips, like the African Proverb, “Knowledge is like a garden: if it is not cultivated, it cannot be harvested,” Einstein, “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” Malcolm X, “History is a people’s memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.”
Because you remember your teachers, one with wild eyes who wore a cross over his tie, who made algebraic equations turn and spin in your head, who gave you a graduation gift of Genesis in Space and Time where the author compares the Greek concept of truth to a well-balanced metaphysical system “rather like a mobile”; one who made you memorize every part of the inner-ear; one, the librarian who played the soprano saxophone kept in a black velvet case, who taught you to stop lying; one who taught you to stop fighting and clean your nails; one who taught you the violin; one who gave you the first book you ever read (A Quiet Place); one who had you watch The Red Balloon; one who read aloud Great Expectations with almost a British accent for weeks and weeks; one who taught you the word prestidigitator; one who said, “Have you ever thought about being a writer?”; one who was as gentle and loving and strict with kids bussed into a suburban elementary school from the city in 1972 as he was with the kids like you who rode your 3-speed bike with a banana seat to school, and forty years later you’ll learn he was in WWII and was blown up in an explosion that sent him from the signal bridge to the forecastle of a destroyer in the Pacific for which he received a Presidential Unit Citation; he was the one who told your third grade class of a student’s death from leukemia— you remember the boy who died—you went to his last birthday party when he was home from the hospital and you got him the gift of a boomerang, and he promptly went out on the deck of your friend’s house where the party was held, and with all his might he threw it towards the towering trees in the backyard and it sailed away (we couldn’t find it) to God knows where.
Adam Patric Miller is the author of A Greater Monster (2014), a collection of essays selected by Phillip Lopate to win the Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize. Miller has won a Pushcart Prize and a Notable Essay Selection in The Best American Essay Series. His work has appeared in River Styx, The Blue Earth Review, Agni Magazine, The Florida Review, Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, and Diagram (forthcoming). Miller writes and teaches in St. Louis, Missouri. You can find him on Twitter @patric_adam and Instagram @adampatricmillerwriter.
Photo by Dids