When I first started teaching, I wanted to be the tough, cool teacher, liked because of his youth and energy, respected because of his intensity and integrity. I felt I had fostered this in my first year. When I was given the 2Honors class my second year, I thought I would push it even further. My class would be hard, but my students would have unprecedented access to me... I gave the class my phone number.
Many made good use of it. The weekends before Book Report Essay due dates, I would spend at least a half dozen hours on the phone, going over important concepts of novels with students, listening to theses, critiquing conclusions. It was a valuable experience for them and me.
Beginning in late November, however, I was beginning to receive crank phone calls. Usually late at night, these calls would be silent. I would answer the phone, say hello, then listen to dead air.
I couldn’t believe that my Honors crew was doing this to me, so I looked for other possible culprits. I had ended a relationship quite messily some six months earlier. I thought this might be connected; it scared the heck out of the current girlfriend (soon to be wife-then-ex number 1), this being the autumn of Fatal Attraction and all. It wasn’t.
The calls intensified during December (plagiarism-time) and the winter break that followed. By the beginning of break, I had called both the police and the phone company to put a trace on the phone (this being before the advent of instant call-back). By late January, we had our culprit.
Two Honors. One of the plagiarizers, a close (and a politically incorrect noticing of appearances would say TOO close... not that there’s anything wrong with that) buddy of the pasty-faced slug-boy who dropped the class after the copying incident. The police made contact first. I made contact second... the next morning.
He entered sheepishly as I jokingly teased the class about upcoming essays. I never looked at him for longer than a fleeting instant. Never gave him a clue that I knew. As the class worked on group projects, I called out one student to discuss a Book Report Essay assignment, briefly going over a teacher-edit of her work. This set the stage for non-confrontational removals from class. Sly, I can be. Then I called out the offender. Let’s call him Scott (now, am I the kind of guy who’d use real names?). I basically (though quietly) ripped him a new orifice.
"The phone calls, Scott," I began, "are going to stop. Aren’t they?"
A lame, no-eye-contact, nod.
"You don’t like me, do you?"
No response.
"Well? Do you?"
A slight shake of the head.
"You got a twitch or are you shakin’ your head?"
His head snapped up to look at me.
"Good. Make some eye contact."
He looked down again.
"So you don’t like me, huh?"
"I guess not." Barely audible.
"How come?"
"I don’t know."
"Bullshit."
Another glance up. Fear. Then down again.
"How come?"
"‘Cause of what you did to Mike." The plagiarizer.
"But not to you?"
"I didn’t drop out of the class."
"No. You just made crank calls." I could see his white little ears turning pink, then red. "You’re a sophomore in high school. You’re in an Honors class. I assume you want to go on to college." I let that hang in the air. "Right?"
A slight nod.
"So you make crank calls. You don’t confront the situation. You don’t come up to me and make statements to my face. No. You take the wuss’ way out." Again his head snapped up. "Yeah. You write childish little sentences on vocabulary, subtly disrespectful. And you take advantage of my own good will in giving this class my home phone number. I can’t ever do that again now. Do you understand how much that hurts me? I want to be able to trust my students, but I can’t. Not when I know that some little twerp’s going to take advantage of it like you did..." I wait.
After what must be a minute, he began to turn back to the door. "Can I go now?" No eye contact.
"And you don’t even god damn apologize."
Eye contact. Pink eyes. Like a pig’s.
"But you will. In Dean Feinstein’s office this afternoon. At three. When you’ll call your parents and promise them and me it will never happen again."
Full flush.
"You want to go? Great. Get the hell out of my sight." He reached for the door. "But don’t be late this afternoon."
And we went through the ritual that afternoon. The phone call. The apology. Within three weeks, his mother and step-father shipped him off to his father in Arizona. By his senior year, he was back at PeeVee, where I never gave out my number again.
The whole incident killed off part of my idealism, part of my trust of the student. In my second year.
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