Unexpected

When I was in high school, I used to visit my father at the Pontiac dealership where he was a salesman. He had a little glass-walled cubicle on the showroom floor, but you couldn't see into or out of it because the walls were covered with so many Salesman of the Month awards.

I thought it was tacky -- a way of showing off. I was too young to realize that the awards were not there to impress customers. They were for my Dad to look at on the bad days that every salesman has.

Teachers have a lot of bad days, especially new teachers. I remember a conversation I had my first year with Will Steele, another rookie. It was at the end of a particularly bad day for both of us. He asked me how many good days I had in an average week. I considered it, then said, "One." He said it was the same for him. We looked at each other and contemplated why anyone would want such a job.

My ratio has improved considerably since then -- in fact, it has probably reversed. Now I have four good days in most weeks, and occasionally five. But now, ironically, one bad day now can spoil a whole week.

Take last week -- please. It was the final one for two of my classes, Creative Writing and Mythology. I had started Myth by giving a pretest -- 22 simple questions, such as "What is the significance of Mount Olympus?" -- so I gave the class the same test again, and compared the results.

You know how it is with statistics. You can spin them any way you wish.

Spun positively, the test showed that the average score had almost doubled. But the average score was 13 out of 22 -- 59 percent. One student got eight right -- both times. When I told her I was disappointed in her, she told me the course wasn't challenging enough.

That¹s the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night. I go to work each day charged up, determined to pour myself into my classes. I leap around like a madman, babbling poetry, making bad jokes, trying to show 90 adolescents what an adult with a passion for language and literature looks and sounds like. I end most days exhausted but feeling like some of that passion must have rubbed off on my students. Then I do my homework. I read their essays and grade their tests and go to bed wondering if I am wasting their time and my life.

What brings me back are little unexpected moments of grace. Luckily I also had one of those last week. I asked my Creative Writing students to write a letter to the students in my next class, offering them advice about taking this course. Most of them were positive. Two complained that I had ruined their style or substituted my own for it -- a charge I've heard before, when I was an editor at Yankee Magazine.

The most memorable one took a third path. "The most important things you'll learn won't be from Mr. Clark," she wrote. "They'll be from the crazy kid sitting next to you. This person will be the one you'll soon confide in. He'll be the one who walks you step by step through anything. He'll be the one to tell it like it is, and for the next nine weeks or so, he'll be your teacher. So I hope you come to this class not knowing anyone, so you don't just sit with old friends. The unexpected doesn't come from the expected."

I'm going to put that letter up on the wall of my cubicle to look at on bad days.