Chapter 69
Mrs. Baptiste retired when Marcus was forty-two. He attended the retirement gathering and gave a speech that made her laugh twice and look moved once, which was the right proportion.
The school's board advertised the principal position. Several people told Marcus he should apply. He sat with it for two months.
He talked to Nia.
'Do you want it?' she asked.
'Part of me does,' he said. 'The part that wants to shape the whole institution, not just the department. There are things that would be possible from that position that aren't possible from where I am.'
'What does the other part say?'
'That I'd lose the classroom. I'd stop teaching. And I'm not sure who I am without the classroom.'
'You'd be someone who shaped the conditions for thousands of classrooms,' she said. 'Rather than one.'
He thought about that.
He applied for the deputy principal position not the top role, which went to Miss Osei, who was the right choice and whom Marcus was glad to support. The deputy role kept him teaching two classes. He negotiated this.
'Non-negotiable,' he told the board. 'I will do the administrative work fully and properly. But I teach two classes. That's what I am.'
The board agreed.
He was forty-three when he became deputy principal of Pemberton Secondary. Miss Chen had retired the year before. David was now head of English. The school had grown and changed over twenty years and had also, in some essential way, remained what it had been when Marcus walked in on that first Monday in the good shirt: a place that took its students seriously.
He ran the department reviews with the same standards Mr. Okafor had applied to him: honest, specific, high-expectation, never unkind. He mentored new teachers the way he had mentored David in those Thursday free periods years ago.
He kept his two classes. He was careful with them. He knew every student's name by the end of the first week, every year, without exception.