Forever Isn't Over Yet - May 24th, 2008

Now is that long inward breath before the hurricane that always hits in the middle of June. Once again I'll be sitting on a film festival jury. Once again I'll be teaching at a private summer school for Asian students. Once again I'll spend several weeks feeling as though I have hardly a minute to call my own, with papers to grade, films to watch, jury forms to fill out, not to mention Bloomsday at the library, AND Bastille Day in July... I'm really looking forward to it.

And no, that's not meant to be sarcastic.

At the summer school, I am the "scary story" teacher. This was, I swear, completely inadvertent on my part. The first year I taught there, (I think it was 2004) I wasn't clear on how the summer semesters worked. I knew there were two, broken in the middle of July, and I asked one of the administrators if I was going to be having the same students the second semester -- was there a complete turnover, or would a lot of students come back? I was given to understand that it would be all new faces.

So, on the last day of the first semester, I decided to give the kids in my morning class a break and spend the last quarter of the class telling them a spooky story. It was a tongue-in-cheek children's story about a mysterious house in the woods, a disappearing family, and it closed with a comic finish unlikely to cause any sleepless nights or irate parental phone calls. I did this, I repeat, on the assumption that most of these children would be spending the rest of the summer doing summer things with their family instead of sitting in a little cinderblock classroom being drilled by me on irregular verbs.

It really is astounding how fast word can spread in a school in a matter of minutes. My next class, who was slightly older, demanded from the moment class started that I tell them the story their younger brothers and sisters had mentioned. I had to insist on at least reviewing a little of what we'd gone over before, and even then I kept being interrupted by students who, every ten minutes, would raise their hand and, instead of answering the question I'd thrown out, ask me "Now are you going to tell the scary story?" My last class were high school students whom I expected to be more blase about it. They weren't. They had to hear it too.

And, I discovered when I returned the next year, not only did the same students return the following semesters. The same students returned the following summer. And they remembered me. Part of my research in the weeks before classes now consists of learning new scary stories for them because these kids are damned retentive, and if I repeat a story they instantly let me know, and if I deviate one whit from a story their older sister or brother was told the year previously, they let me know about that too. It's a very demanding audience.

They no longer ask me to tell them a scary story every ten minutes, but I am expected to come up with one for the last five minutes of my classes. Sometimes, if I plead hard enough, they'll settle for a funny story, but if I thought they were demanding about the scary stories, that's nothing to the humiliation of a funny story falling flat. And then they demand a scary story as a consolation prize. I've learned the meaning of the term "flop sweat."

It's all very discouraging and gratifying at the same time. Which I guess means it's fulfilling.