Chapter 31
The staffroom at Pemberton Secondary was its own ecosystem, and Marcus learned its geography in the first month: who sat where, who spoke to whom, who the institutional memory was, who brought the best food on shared days, who was tired and who was still running on purpose.
The English department was four teachers: Marcus, a senior teacher named Miss Chen who had been at the school for eighteen years and was the kind of colleague whose institutional knowledge was invaluable and whose loyalty to the school was total; a young teacher named David who had graduated the year before Marcus and who was navigating his first year with the simultaneous energy and terror that Marcus recognized from his own practicum; and a veteran named Mr. Phillips who had three years until retirement and who was either deeply wise or deeply checked out, and some days appeared to be both.
Marcus got on best with Miss Chen. She was efficient and warm and had seen enough cycles of young teachers arrive with theories to know which ones would last not because they were the most academically brilliant but because they genuinely liked the students.
'You're going to be one of the ones who stays,' she told him in the second month.
'You can tell that already?'
'I can tell on the second day,' she said. 'It's in how you look at them when they walk in. The ones who think of the students as an obstacle to the teaching you can see it. The ones who think of the teaching as a service to the students you can see that too. You're the second kind.'
He thought about what she said for days. He wrote it in his journal and wrote underneath it: 'I am the second kind. I want to always be the second kind.'
David struggled in the first term not from lack of ability but from the gap between theory and practice that ambushed almost all first-year teachers: the lesson plan that worked perfectly in your head unravelling against the reality of twenty-eight individual human beings with their own agendas, energy levels, and degrees of willingness on any given Tuesday afternoon.
Marcus remembered his own experience with Mr. Edwards and took the time to sit with David in the free period they shared on Thursdays, talking through what had worked and what hadn't, not as a supervisor but as a colleague who was a year further along the same road.
'How do you make them care?' David asked one Thursday, genuinely baffled.
'You show them you care first,' Marcus said. 'And you make the work about something real. Something they recognize.'
'Their lives.'
'Their world,' Marcus said. 'Not just their immediate lives their world. Where they come from. What shapes them. The history they're standing in. All of it is material. All of it is worth examining.'
David nodded slowly. Then: 'Did someone teach you that?'
'Mr. Okafor,' Marcus said. 'My English teacher. He told me not to be polite.'
David frowned. 'What does that mean?'
'It means: say what you actually mean. In the work, in the classroom, in the life. Don't manage yourself down to fit.'
David sat with that.
'Not being polite,' he said.
'Exactly,' Marcus said. 'That's the whole thing.