Tuesday, March 7, 1995
I’m in the middle of my introduction to Hamlet for the 4/4H’s (after a dismal pre-quiz; it seems no one in the class has read the play twice as I warned/urged/asked them to do). We’re going over Act One, Scene One, on the battlements, and I’ve just told them to forget everything they know or think they know about the play (but it seems they’ve already done that before the quiz). We’re looking over the statements of Barnardo and the actions of Marcellus; we’re dissecting them to find out what Denmark is really like...we don’t know who the king is, only that he’s dead (and with a title that includes "Prince of Denmark" this is important), we see military preparedness to the point of paranoia, and yet the military discipline seems pretty lax. I’m in the midst of all this, when I notice a young woman pausing by my open door.
If it were two weeks from now, I’d figure that she is a member of the WASC visitation team, ready to observe me. But since tonight is Open House, and yesterday I sent grade/progress reports home with the English Nines (including a checklist of all missing assignments and an invitation to Open House), I’m thinking this attractive young lady is a mother. Yes, she’s young. But, I’m the same age as the mother of one of my English 4’s, and only two years younger than the stepmother of one of the 4H’s. I don’t look all that old (I was still carded last Christmas), so I figure this might be a parent. I stop my presentation, mid-point.
"Hi. Come on in," I call out.
She smiles sweetly. Almost shyly. She seems reticent to talk. So I chime in.
"May I help you?"
She smiles wider. "You probably don’t remember me..." And she lets that hang in the air.
A student. Obviously a student. My mind races. I haven’t a clue. My brain is flipping names and faces--none connecting--like a roladex. The face looks like a student I had here at Chumash, but the hair is all wrong, wrong color, wrong cut. The hair...ah, now the smile. It hits me. A student I had in my last year at Pleasant Valley. She was a volleyball player. An English Ten. But into poetry. Lord Byron. Yes. And her name is... "Erin?"
The smile breaks into a full grin. I’ve hit it. "Kiffany."
Oh, shit. Blew it. I feel like an ass. A mass chuckle rolls through the class. I was right originally, it is my former student from Drama, my first year here. "Oh, my god. How are you?" I recover.
"Great. I just wanted to drop by. Say hello. They told me you had a break..."
I look at the clock. I hold up my hand, fingers extended. "Five minutes?"
"Sure."
"Have a seat."
She does and I launch back into my discussion of the state of Denmark. But my mind is working overtime, trying to piece together Kiffany.
If I remember correctly, she was a member of my Drama class in Fall 1991. Wait, didn’t she baby-sit kids at Lisa and my wedding reception? Yeah, I think so. We had rented an extra room at the hotel, where Kiffany took care of the kids of party guests. Big success. She was having trouble in school. Thinking of dropping out. And then she did. I never saw her after the winter break that surrounded our December nuptials.
The period ends, and students leave on their desks their research papers, packeted in manila envelopes. The last students leave for fourth period--no lunch today, since we’re on a minimum day schedule for tonight’s Open House (the union says if we have to be here tonight, we don’t have to be on campus this afternoon...though I will be for Academic Detention for the Nines). And Kiffany rises. Now I look at her and remember. She used to be blonde, longer hair, not the strawberry almost-pageboy she now wears.
Before saying a word, she surprises me with a hug. When she releases, her first words are "Thank You."
I must look confused.
"For helping me. I’m a junior now at Cal State Northridge."
My mind does some mathematical mental gymnastics. Three years ago, she was a junior starting to drop out. Now she’s a junior at a university. But she was bright, that I remember. I smile.
And she begins her story as we sit down, I on a back section desk, she on the desk in front of me, turned around to face me. She tells me that she is here to thank me and Mindy Rose, her counselor and the former head counselor (and I really need to get around to getting that story down on paper). Without our help she says, she would have never made it.
I search my memory. I really don’t remember helping her much. I listened to her when she would bemoan how bad school was, how she couldn’t stand it, how she wanted out. Maybe I said some words of encouragement...I don’t remember. I remember giving her that wedding-night baby-sitter job. We gave her a hundred bucks for the entire night, but... I just don’t remember being that helpful. Mindy, I understand.
She goes on. She says she learned more study skills in Drama than in any of her other classes...Good God, Drama prepared her for college. This must explain why, by the time I stopped teaching Drama, so few kids were taking it... Chumash’s just not a college prep kind of school. Anyway, she goes on to tell me that she ended up going through Adult Education to get her diploma, then to Ventura College for her associate’s degree, and now on to Northridge to major in psychology.
Her story is wonderful. She and her parents reconciled (and suddenly so many memories of her tales of arguments and desperation flow back); she’s living with them now as she takes classes at the Ventura extension branch of the university. She is married; her husband is in the army, an MP in Korea. She wants to go into professorial teaching or family counseling; her husband wants to go to college on the GI bill and then join the FBI. My god, a young couple with a plan. And she is only nineteen (only a year older than some of the students who had just left the room).
She glows as she tells me her plans. Finish this year at CSUN. The summer off to Korea to stay with her husband until the fall, when he’s due to transfer up to Washington State, where she’ll resume her studies. They’ve timed it so that by the time he’s ready to "early out," she’ll be looking for psychological residency. She had told me then I would be proud. And I am. I’m stunned. It’s been such a lousy two weeks that this is most welcome news.
She smiles when she says that she must have been a nightmare to have in class, which is why she’ll teach at the college level if she teaches. High school must be awful, she says, and I can only smile and laugh. She doesn’t know. It is awful, but in moments like this, it is also the best. This is why we teach. For moments like this, the successes.
We compare wedding days...as it turned out we both had our weddings at the same chapel. She is stunned when I tell her Lisa and I are now parents, and she fawns appropriately over Kyle’s pictures on the wall, all the while saying how she and her husband are going to wait (jokingly) ten years. I give her my address, and tell her to keep in touch, that I have loved hearing from her, this wonderful news.
Hugs later, she is gone and I sit alone in the classroom, stacks of papers to grade, Academic Detention impending, and Open House tonight (with its inevitable dismal turnout). With those three facing me, I should feel down. But I don’t. And I won’t for days, at least. Kiffany has brightened my day.
And once again I feel like I do make a difference. I think of my former students. A full dozen that I know of have majored in and graduated with degrees in either English or Drama. Five are teaching or planning to. I have made an impact. And this is why we teach.
I just hope it isn’t just "glory days" talking.
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