Chapter 26
In the second year of university, Marcus completed his first school-based practicum placement four weeks at a secondary school in Birmingham's inner city, observing and beginning to teach under the supervision of an experienced teacher named Mr. Edwards.
Mr. Edwards was a broad-shouldered Jamaican man in his fifties who had been teaching English in Birmingham for twenty-five years and who had the particular combination of genuine warmth and zero tolerance for nonsense that Marcus recognized as the hallmark of truly good teachers. He ran his classroom with complete calm and complete authority not because he demanded respect but because he had earned it so thoroughly that demanding it was unnecessary.
Marcus watched everything. He watched how Mr. Edwards modulated his voice and his pace, how he moved around the room, how he distributed attention so that every student felt seen. He watched how Mr. Edwards handled the difficult moment the student who was testing the boundary, the one who was checked out, the one who was hiding something painful behind bad behaviour.
'You're going to be good at this,' Mr. Edwards said on the second week, sitting with Marcus in the staffroom over coffee.
'Why do you say that?'
'Because you watch,' Mr. Edwards said. 'Most student teachers are so busy thinking about what they're going to say next that they don't watch. You watch. The watching is everything.'
Marcus thought of Leroy telling him, at seven years old: You too quiet. A quiet man can't protect himself.
'Someone important to me once thought my watching was a weakness,' Marcus said.
Mr. Edwards shook his head. 'In life maybe. In a classroom, never. The students will tell you everything you need to know if you're paying enough attention.'
Marcus taught his first class alone in the third week Year 9, a class of twenty-seven thirteen and fourteen-year-olds who had the collective energy of a weather system. He had prepared for three days. He had written and rewritten his lesson plan. He had rehearsed his openings.
When he walked into the classroom and stood at the front and the room settled to a kind of attentive waiting, he felt something that he had not expected: completeness. As though this was the room he had been moving toward for eighteen years without knowing it.
The lesson went well. Not perfectly he went too fast in one section, lost the thread of one student's question, misjudged the timing of an exercise. But the students were with him. He could feel it, the specific electricity of a room that is engaged. At the end, when he dismissed them, two students lingered.
'Sir,' said a girl at the back. 'That was good.'
He thanked her and waited for her to leave before he sat down at Mr. Edwards's desk and let out the breath he had been holding for forty-five minutes.
Mr. Edwards appeared in the doorway. 'Well?'
'I want to do that forever,' Marcus said.
Mr. Edwards smiled. 'I know,' he said. 'I could see it.'
That evening Marcus called his mother and told her about the lesson. He described the girl who had lingered to say it was good. He described the feeling of the room engaged.
'That is what I worked for,' his mother said.
'Mama'
'No, listen to me. That is exactly what I worked for. Not the grade or the certificate. That room. That girl. That is why.'
He held the phone and let her words settle into him.
'I know,' he said. 'I understand now.'
'Good,' she said. 'Now eat something.'