My feet kissed the hot blacktop as I crossed the parking lot toward the stadium. It’s Friday night: my first home football game as a new teacher. I pass the school and approach a black chain link fence lining the field. From the other side, I am greeted before I recognize a single familiar face.
“Mr. Tew! Mr. Tew!”
It’s D – the young man to whom I had given a detention this morning.
“You just missed me. I was in the mascot!” The Purcell Marian Cavalier mascot, he meant.
Pleased he wasn’t holding a grudge toward me from the morning, I shot back: “The mascot? Oh darn, I’m sorry I missed you. Why aren’t you still in it?”
“Too hot, too hot,” he says. “K (a classmate) is in it now.”
“I see,” I say, walking to the fence, reaching over it to clasp his hand and lock eyes. A greeting of affection after a testy day at school. “That’s cool. Maybe next time I’ll catch you.”
D smiles and ambles on, the light-hearted and sociable boy I know him to be.
After this morning, you wouldn’t have expected us to be on such good terms, so soon. What happened?
A heat wave hit Cincinnati this week. Temperatures scorched into the mid 90s. My class – a class for Sophomores on the Old Testament – is on the 3rd floor of Purcell Marian High School. Founded in 1928 and named for the city’s 2nd Bishop, today Purcell serves a largely African American and Hispanic population in Cincinnati. We have no AC on the third floor. It’s a sauna come afternoon and, in the mornings, a sauna warming up. So when temperatures rise, the school moves 3rd floor classes to open rooms in the lower floors that have AC.
I hate this moving around. I’m still finding my groove as a teacher. This fall, I changed careers back into teaching, having last taught in 2004. I’m still building systems in my regular classroom. Getting used to disciplinary approaches with the kids, establishing my teaching methods and learning all the new teacher tech. When we change rooms, I sometimes don’t have time to get the tech to work in the new room. And I can’t carry copies of Bibles for the kids from class to class and floor to floor in the three minutes we have between bells. And then there’s the reaction of the kids – they come to a different room and they initially think “Freedom! Holiday!” It’s like having them for the first day of the school all over again. You have to reset behavioral patterns, classroom etiquette. Maybe that’s because they know I’m new and they are always trying to test me. But it happens.
So Friday morning rolls around. Come 9am, it’s hot as a summer day. I am assigned a different room. So I gather my stuff and amble down to my replacement room, the lecture room of our library. The library’s projection system is not at all like mine and I hit a technical glitch – can’t get it to work. Time between bells runs out. I have to abandon hopes of projecting my class notes. On to the back-up plan. I go to the front of the room, black dry erase marker in hand. Kids start filing in, heading first to the comfy chairs and sofas way in the back of the room, against the wall. “Come forward I say, to the desk chairs. There are plenty of seats.” Grumbling fills the room like the rumbling of heavy trucks over railroad tracks. Not a great start.
I start writing some notes on the Board.
“Isn’t it nice to be in an air-conditioned room?” I say. It’s a softball question. I lob it to the class and keep writing. I’m on the second word of a quote of Balaam’s magnicent prophecy from Numbers 24:17: “I see him, though not now; I observe him, though not near . . .”
“Can we turn down the temperature? It’s too hot,” shouts D, a rambunctious young man who is also in my homeroom. I know him well and like him – but he’s the type to test all testable boundaries.
“No.”
My response is curt. Sometimes the best responses are short and sweet. Especially in a class like this one where there are several characters who like to test the limits.
But short and sweet does not work today.
“Wait – why?” D pleads. “What’s the point of moving to an air-conditioned room if we can’t turn the temperature down?”
Now this is not my room. It’s part of the library. I assume they have some temperature control system and that faculty aren’t supposed to manually adjust it from class to class. Also, right before our class, there was a class of juniors in this room; the temp was fine for them; and it felt perfectly fine to me. I was smelling a scheme for distraction. I wasn’t gonna bite.
“D, we are not changing the temperature. This is not my classroom.”
“But but but . . . .” and he springs into stammering objection upon objection. At this point, I walk over to my Classroom Participation Grid. 4 columns, each with one more strike than the previous. One strike (for disrupting the class) means a warning, 2 strikes is a meaningful reduction from your classroom participation grade, 3 strikes is a further reduction, 4 strikes is a teacher detention with me. And beyond that, it’s a conduct form and the child is sent down to Ms. Johnson, our Dean of Students.
Now D is either facing a major climate injustice – the temperature is just too unbearable! – or he is piqued and not about to lose a battle with a new teacher in front of his classmates. So he keeps pushing – full of passion, like he’s Greta Thunberg fighting for a better climate. Keeps refusing my entreaties to quiet down and accept the current climate situation and allow me to start the class. I warn him, he ignores the warning, I give him another strike, he ignores that and on down the line we go.
“All right D, that’s a detention,” I say, after the 4th strike. I have run out of columns in which to write his name. “See me after school.”
“Nah, nah, I’m gonna go see Ms. Johnson. What’s the point of being in another room when we can’t lower the temperature?” He hops up to leave.
“Sit down,” I reply. I will write you up a conduct form to Ms. Johnson myself. I had remembered to bring conduct forms with me from my classrom, thinking this sort of thing might happen today. Our Sophomore Class has a bit of a reputation. Popcorn and vinegar I have called it elsewhere. Some ebullient and rambunctious spirits, testers of boundaries, over-steppers of proper norms. I know from other new teachers of Sophomores that the kids craft organized revolts in the classroom, just to see if they can get a rise out of the new teachers. I was ready.
I also knew Ms. Johnson would back me as she had already urged me to show a sterner face to the kids (I was too lenient in the first week). So I write up D, give the class an assignment, and walk D down to her office myself. I was determined to show the class that I would not back down. I leave D in her hands, then hustle back to class, get it in order within a few minutes and make the best of the time remaining. We would learn that day, among other things, about the great patience of God, announcing, through Balaam, the coming of Christ 1300 years before it happened. Demonstrating, through the centuries still to come, that every little detail of every human life must therefore have an eternal weight and dignity.
That’s all prelude. Those were the dark skies before the dawn. At the end of the day, grace strikes like gentle lightning. In the last bell of the day, I find an opportunity to see D in another classroom. I pull him aside. I have us sit down in student desks facing one another. I had not scripted this moment. It could have resulted in a disaster. What if contempt for me had been born in his soul?
“What did you learn today?” I say.
“I got in trouble” he replies.
We talk about what happened. I replay the events for him. I can’t remember the full exchange, but it was something like: look, we moved to an air-conditioned room as an effort by the faculty to make learning more comfortable for you all; the library isn’t my room; it’s not my place to mess with the temperature settings; I have a clear system of warnings and consequences; you ignored them all and disrupted the class. Something like that.
Then this moment happens, clear as a bell from the tallest Church in a mountain village:
D looks at me, eye to eye; not a wandering eye; not a downcast eye; not a subjugated eye; but eyes that look into mine, in sincerity; eyes that dip like a bucket into the well of his heart and show me something of his full self:
“I’m sorry.”
I am taken aback. I feel like I am in the presence of something holy. And yet my words do not fail me.
“Well, I forgive you completely,” I say. “But let’s not let that happen again.”
Boom, the briefest of moments with the weightiest of impact. We hop up from our desks, he returns to his classroom and I find myself wondering at the way light passes through clouds of the teaching life – through the temperature challenges, the faulty tech, the spirited kids and a rusty teacher still trying to find his way. Yes, through it all, light passes, grace passes – in her brief and quiet radiance – to bathe in momentary glory two fragile, growing souls.
Was this really an enduring moment or do I exaggerate? Well, the hands clasped later that night, across a chain link fence, the eyes that locked, smiling as they did: these things tell me that on this day, in this heat, a new layer of the teacher student bond was formed between D and me. Making the whole day, and all the struggle, worth it.
