Between Instructional Periods

Because, there's a bell.
It actually rings,
Bright and deep and metallic,
Painful in the ear--
You don't want to be standing by it,
Out in the hall,
When the darn thing goes off.

And there's a time:
They walk into the classroom,
They sit at these desks,
They expect you to know something about Public Speaking,
They expect you to know something about Working in Groups,
They expect you to know something about Non-Verbal Communicaiton.

Help me, God!
I woke up in Hell!
Or at least Purgatory!
Is this where sinners go to get reformed:
A public high school,
As a teacher?!

Then the bell goes off again,
Like at the Kentucky Derby,
And they are all talking to each other,
Except for the ones who don't talk at all,
Just sitting there in their seats,

With their arms crossed,
Wearing long pants in August,
Or a knit scull cap,
And they don't look up.
And they NEVER raise their hands.

What do we talk about for 80 minutes?
How many times are we going to write
ABCD on a paper,
Or at least fill in the oval,
Or the tiny little white or green space between the square brackets.

Let's see . . . attendance . . . . where is Johnny?
Who? they ask. Johnny Appleseed?
He's getting homeschooled,
They say,
High school wasn't right for them,
Teachers are going to hell,
Or something.

Listen, I didn't make up the rules,
I just have this mortgage,
And I wanted to do the right thing,
So I went to college--
I got a Master's Degree,
In that thing I teach.
(I don't remember seeing any of you in my classes).

But the thing is this: It wasn't hard.
We just had three things to do:
1. Read the book.
2. Come to class and talk about it.
3. Sometimes write a paper.

And the professor would always write on the essay:
Good thoughts!
Develop this
_____________________ !
???
Very insightful.

And at the end . . .

You have done a good job of showing how this character has these traits, but I mostly think something else might be true (you should think about this, because I'm smarter than you). But I will still give you a grade that is this: B.

And I have no idea what B is.
But I got that grade a lot,
In college.
On papers I had written,
That I knew I had put off too long,
And then didn't write as well as I thought I could have written
Them.

What is B, though?
B=Better than Average!
Right?
80%
Or at least 82.47.
Who's gonna give that guy with that 82.47 a B-?
Really?
You gonna do that high school math teacher?
How do you get the .07 part of that percent,
There at the end of the number,
Where you arbitrarily started to stop paying attention,
At the .0nth place,
But mentally,
You understood how a guy would want to round up that 4 to a five,
Then that 2 to a 3,
And that minus to that place
Between the minus and the plus?

And there you are,
In the middle of that instructional period,
When the bell rings again,
And you forgot to tell them about Plato,
That he had a name,
And that he lived in a specific time,
And was REALLY alive,
Not, like, maybe, or probably,
And then you remember how there are people
Who actually think,
That maybe Shakespeare didn't really exist,
At least not as we know him,
Not an individual guy,
And probably not even really that one guy,
With the bald head and the funny collar,
There's some doubt about whether or not that guy
From Stratford-upon-Avon,
Ever wrote a line of poetry,
Or if he really did, he was probably gay,
And wrote all those sonnets to a male lover.
We know that Walt Whitman did that.
There are pictures of the man in places
Where men went to meet boys,
Back in the 1800s,
A time,
Just like the time that Plato was alive,
Who wrote those things down that Socrates said,
Like John did for Jesus,
When he wrote,
In the beginning was the Word.
John was maybe gay, too,
And nobody knows if Jesus really existed.
One guy says he was a metaphor for mushrooms,
But I think that is kind of crazy,
But who's gonna dispute with him?
He's dead.

And then the bell goes off again,
Just like that last scene in the Sopranos,
And another group comes in,
And you try to do it again,
But in a different way,
Again,
With another bell.